Reading Behind-the-Scenes: Finding Pattern (Part 2)
Reading Time: 8 Minutes
Pattern Overwhelm and Filtering Out: Reading
If you’re anything like me or most readers, already the number of Significances and Patterns can seem overwhelming. Which do I pay attention to? Which are important enough to talk about? How do I know if I’ve latched on to the “right” Pattern? No wonder I hated my English professor! Who could guess what he was thinking?
My advice here is pretty straightforward and comes from our first step, Notice: Trust your reading. Trust that what you’ve Noticed is important, because you noticed it. Trust that your list of ideas for Significance (their possible meanings) are good because you have started with several. Now trust that if you spot something which might be a Pattern (or likely, many Patterns), they are worth investigating because you saw them.
All along this path, though, we also may have seen that some ideas get set aside. I may have Noticed four interesting features of a poem I read, but for one of them, I couldn’t think of any possible meanings or significance it might have. So we set it aside moving on. I may have a list of four possible significant meanings for one image, but I only see a Pattern forming from two of those meaning, so I set the other two aside. Now I am starting to see several Patterns emerging, and guess what? As I move forward, I may set some of these aside, too.
This seems complicated, but it’s what we do every day, isn’t it?
Early Day Everyday
When I’m young I walk to school or to the school bus stop. The first few times I walk it alone, there is too much to see: the sewer at the roadside has lots of mysteries floating in it, the two apartment buildings I pass are filled with windows where people may be, the street I cross has all kinds of cars, the wind blows in unexpected gusts, various strangers pass and nearly every one is larger than me, three dogs terrorize me along the way. Each of these is probably safe enough (our parents let us walk alone, after all), but one of the Significant meanings we are always nervous about is “danger.”
But as we do this walk each day over the year, we begin to see the Patterns and form new conclusions about them. The sewer is mostly boring except during rainstorms. Of the two hundred apartment windows, only two are still interesting, perhaps because of their changing decorations. The cars are cars making their own ways to workplaces, and they mostly follow the laws of yielding to pedestrians. Weather is weather, and many of the passers by are recognized as neighbors. Only one of the three dogs is at all dangerous, and only if you act like you’re scared of him. We’ve understood the Patterns of the walk and their relative insignificance. Our ability to read our surroundings has grown.
But then something stands out. We Notice, perhaps, a new construction area which makes the walk more difficult or compels us to detour. We are alerted to it and we wonder what it means. We make all kinds of guesses: a new street sewer? A new enhanced crosswalk? A new building? If a building, what would fit the space they’re using? We start looking for clues and ideas that might become a Pattern for us, a way to understand this change in our regular travels.
Yes, the street is being excavated, but yes also, a new driveway is allowing construction vehicles onto a vacant lot. The lot is small, so it probably isn’t a new apartment building. No one builds single family homes on this block now, so that possibility is eliminated. One day we get a closer look and see a small brick building forming on the lot. We speculate with our friends: what could it be? We speculate about a gas station, another drive-through coffee shop, or maybe a small convenience store or ice cream place.
Reading and interpreting is little different, no matter the text we attach our thinking to. We know the language we encounter, we Notice when the regular patterns are disrupted, we guess about the Significances, and we look for Patterns to get answers. Always we are adding more possibilities and setting aside others. Always we are a bit uncertain, always we are re-figuring what we previously considered.
Pattern Overwhelm & Ellison’s Invisible Man
We used a passage from Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man to discuss Noticing and Significance:
“One night, I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled.”
–Invisible Man, Prologue
We have already made some guesses on the Significance: highlighting the implied race attack here, the white man who is not named “white,” the white man who may suggest Aryan blood or even white supremacy, and the direction of the violence: an insulting (probably racist) name leading to an attack by the (also unlabeled) black narrator, the heavy physical detail and the absence of explanation.
Even inside this short passage, we see Patterns of association, of juxtaposition, of race relations connected to violence, of physicality replacing thoughtful reflection, of the roles of accident and intention, of moral uncertainty. What do they all mean? What is Ellison saying?
We can’t know for certain, and not from this single passage. What are we to do? Trace every image and all of its significances into the thousands of patterns which may emerge across the book’s 600 pages?
What I recommend to my students is that they choose one image, one behavior, one structural oddity that they find first in the novel and just track Patterns of that one image alone. That is plenty to do for some books and poems which seem incredibly detailed and complicated. We won’t find everything in the book, at least not on the first or second reading, but we will find far more than if we did not look at all and read it only for the plotted story.
Ellison delivers, too. Having taught the book for over twenty years and to hundreds of students, I have had them choose nearly as many motifs to track across the book, discovering hundreds and hundreds of different meanings that all seem convincing. Each student could lay claim to a meaning they discovered that was almost uniquely their own discovery.
Author Design and Reader Role
Did Ellison really put hundreds and hundreds of deeper meanings in his book? That is a question a little different from what we are up to here. What we find as readers and what authors do are not always the same thing. But here I will answer that good writers are worth investigation and worth the benefit of the doubt. Writers are artists with a talent for layering language in new and memorable ways.
Identifying Patterns helps us understand the deliberate crafting by authors. We can begin to discover that many ideas in literature are not accidents, but the meaningful design of artists.
And so we might think of the work of literature–poem, short story, play, film, novel–as something similar to a sculpture, too. It changes for different readers who see it from different angles, who focus their attention on different parts. Each viewpoint is a different perception of the reading experience.
Can readers ever understand the complete meaning of a work? Can we know everything the author created? Or do readers create meanings that the author did not design? And what happens when one Pattern contradicts another? Or my idea of what I found is different from someone else’s?
These are all vital and important questions. And our final step in the Critical Reading Process, Coherence, will attempt to answer many of them.
“Can readers ever understand the complete meaning of a work? Can we know everything the author created?”
Your Tool for Patterns: Mapping Our Discoveries
There are hundreds of ways to form our ideas for Patterns, and I would never prescribe any one over another: different readers produce ideas in different ways. However, if you are new to this entire process and want something to help visualize what we’re doing, I’ve provided a “Map” template for use with shorter works or smaller groups of pattern-making to help.
The free download has more description on its use!
Want More Still? Literary Nomads
The Literary Nomads podcast helps listeners see connections that we all make in our readings, in our language, in our cultures. It’s more about reading itself, how we make meaning, how we discover it, and what uses we put it to.
Two episodes from Journey 5: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” talk at length about “Pattern” and its importance. Give them a listen here!
Deeper Reasons
For those interested in the more academic, researched basis for this approach, I lean quite a bit on the phenomenology of reading and reader-response criticism, which emphasize the active role of readers in creating and discovering meaning.
My “Patterns” stage here aligns most closely with Wolfgang Iser’s encouragement towards active meaning-making. Here, pattern-marking helps fill in gaps between textual qualities we Notice and begins the work of building internally consistent interpretations which will be elaborated upon in the last step. While not here pursuing more contentious ideas like the “implied reader,” we can still note that a text does provide structural guidance in shaping reader meaning: meaning does not appear from thin air or merely the reader’s imagination. Significantly, by focusing on this connection-building (Patterns), readers move beyond the one-dimensional insights and interpretations that casual reading creates. Finally, while Iser and others tend to reject practical limits on approaches to reading, I compromised here to categorize areas of Notice and Patterns which might be questioned and offered some more practical approaches in the interest of learning the process. Practiced readers will soon abandon these limited means for critical insight.
A lot of work has been done in the field after Iser’s works, The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading (1978), especially in cultural context, intersectionality, and digital humanities; more, a quick overview of Iser appears to expose criticisms of ignoring history, of the role of community, or relativism, and how actual real-world readers work differently than implied readers. These are valid criticisms, and I will address them as we move forward.
Related Posts
Building Fantasies
How does the map overwrite the physical territory it claims to represent? Today we look at literary simulations, from the bedroom of Victor Hugo to the Orlando welter of parks and rides. Guided by the semiotics of Umberto Eco, the simulation theory of...
Mapping Dreams
How do we navigate the space between the curated tourism experience and the raw concrete of the world beneath it? We investigate the "imaginative geographies" we project onto other lands, examining how Italo Calvino’s semiotic cities, Arthur Conan...
Author Footprints Pt. 2 – The Aracataca Paradox
What happens to a real, working community when a fictional landscape is physically constructed on top of it? We discover the socio-economic friction behind literary travel, contrasting the magical ideals of Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo with the...
