Adapted from Literacy’s Democratic Roots by Tom Newkirk.
Extractive reading is invaluable for daily life, and the internet has exponentially expanded our access—no fact seems unavailable. I would argue that extractive reading, mining texts for facts and quotes, contributes to confirmation bias. We fit this information into preexisting frames and beliefs, leading to the dogmatism and fragmentation we see so much of today. To really change our thinking, we need sustained contact with something novel or foreign or uncomfortable. We need to undergo something. Sustained reading—following a train of thought, dwelling with a character, feeling a relationship with a writer or teller or narrator—brings the potential for change that the mere retrieval of fact does not. Sustained reading can open us to complexity and depth, to characters as intricate and interesting as Austen’s Emma, Morrison’s Pecola, Baldwin’s Baldwin.
But what sustains us as readers? What keeps us moving? How do writers build a sense of continuity? I contend that writers who want to sustain the attention of readers must learn to use narrative tools. To begin with, they must narrate. We struggle with texts that don’t seem authored, when no one is home.
The Need for Narrators
In The Sense of Style (2014), Steven Pinker describes the role of the narrator as a kind of guide: “The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself” (28–29). The writer is not superior to the reader, just familiar with something the reader doesn’t know about. The focus is on the specific—“people (or other animate beings) who move around in the world and interact with objects” (29). Even if the subject matter is abstract, the writer works to “show the events making up the subject matter transparently, by narrating an unfolding plot with real characters doing things, rather than by naming an abstract concept that encapsulates those events in a single word” (48–49). A characteristic of this style is cognitive energy, a palpable fascination with the material. And these narrators are solicitous—if the material is complex, they find a metaphor to help us out. If a concept is abstract, they find an example to pin it down for us. If things get too serious, they throw in some humor. We are cared for.
The presence of a narrator builds continuity, a sustaining presence. It’s similar to teaching. I recall a conversation with a beginning teacher who felt his lessons were not well organized; one thing did not lead logically to another. His advisor reminded him that he himself—his personality, humor, manner of interacting, even appearance—helped create continuity and stability. The same could be said for a narrator; there is a sensibility, voice, attitude that a reader comes to expect and hopefully appreciate.
Peter Elbow (2012) reminds us that reading is a temporal act—we are moving through time as we read, and the challenge for any writer is to “bind time,” to hold the attention of the reader through what Elbow calls “imbued energy.” It is misleading, he argues, to think of structure as spatial forms—an outline, an inverted pyramid—that say nothing about why we voluntarily move forward. Organization is not a static form; we experience organization as an invitation to continue reading. He brilliantly describes how this happens:
So where do writers find the energy that binds written words together so as to pull readers along from one part to the next and make them experience the text as a coherent whole? . . . Successful writers lead us on a journey to satisfaction by way of expectations, frustrations, half satisfactions and temporary satisfactions: a well-planned sequence of yearnings and reliefs, itches and scratches. (303)
The conventional forms we teach students fail to create any sense of a journey. Elbow calls the five-paragraph theme, as it is usually taught, an “anti-perplexity machine” (309). It focuses on a thesis and support with virtually no attention as to the problem the thesis is responding to. What is the need for this argument? What question is it resolving? What we call the introduction has more serious work to do than introducing—it creates a need to read on. It convinces us that there is a question or issue or situation or prior text worth examining. Absent that orientation, the essay is, in Elbow’s terms, all scratch but no itch. Students avoid bringing in alternative positions or problems with their thesis for fear of weakening the argument, when in fact, this complication can create a tension (not to mention a credibility) that might engage the reader. David Bartholomae has called this “the tyranny of the thesis” (1983, 311).
Although he does not use the term narrative, Elbow seems to be describing a narrative or story structure, a form of plotting with tension, complication, resolution. Cognitive researchers over the past thirty years have firmly established that stories are “psychologically privileged” (Willingham 2004), uniquely capable of holding our attention and facilitating comprehension. Mark Turner, author of The Literary Mind, puts it this way: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, of explaining” (1996, 4–5).
