The Simple Act of Noticing
Dump the Google Searches
We ask Google. We ask ChatGPT. We check Shmoop and Sparknotes. Because we just want to know what Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” means. And, after all, literature is mysterious, anyway: I mean, who can guess what was in the author’s mind? Or in the teacher’s?
In the end, we get our “answer,” but it never quite satisfies, does it? We might be surprised by it, we might dutifully write it down for an assigned essay, we might even “get it” once we read or hear someone else’s explanation, but we aren’t satisfied: because the answer also reminds us that we ourselves couldn’t find it. That literature is mysterious.
So how do we understand it? What does the poem mean?
Writers aren’t hiding anything secret in their writing. It’s all right there for us. Literature isn’t all that mysterious, and it isn’t a puzzle to “solve.” It’s a space to explore and even discover.
The First Step
Surprisingly, maybe, digging deeply into poetry, finding its importance for us, isn’t as difficult as college professors make it out to be. Sure, there are a ton of tools and terms out there that M.A.s and PhDs have to make their readings sound impressive. But that doesn’t mean you need a degree to do it.
More importantly, you don’t need a degree to find more in reading, whether it’s novels, poems, plays, or even songs and films. I’m going to start us off with a very basic approach to reading critically—thoughtfully—that can get us started with everything.
This first step is the easiest and most important: What do you notice?
Knowing and Not Knowing
Two important things about this question right away:
- More often than not, how we answer will lead us to some important understanding that we would not have found in our research.
- Asking the question reminds us that this is always about our own understanding and not the unimaginative AI or common Shmoop writer pretending authority.
More, this question—What do you notice?—powers a reading process of four steps that I will review. More important still, this process relies upon our not knowing, not some expertise or secret sauce of literary understanding. Who’s an expert of not knowing? Um, all of us.
What is “Noticing”?
Let me offer a suggestion: I trust your ability to read well more than you might trust yourself. We’ve used language for most all of our lives; we know enough about how it works now. Sure. we might not have all the names or techniques down, but the language itself? We read and speak and even write all the time. We communicate.
And so do writers. They’re not hiding anything secret in their writing, usually. It’s all right there for us. Literature isn’t all that mysterious, and it isn’t a puzzle to “solve.” It’s a space to explore and even discover.
So when I ask, “What do you notice?” I mean it quite literally. Noticing is about deliberately observing. That’s it. When you read a sentence from a book or a line from a poem, what do you see? What stands out? What strikes you? Describe it.
In discussions, you can express observations using “notice statements,” such as, “I noticed this in line 13,” or “I noticed that the speaker seems uncertain at the beginning of the poem”.
Now I get that even here, that may be hard. Here are a few things that you might look for if you need a list of ideas. Don’t use it as a checklist, but just as a place to get started:
- Are there any unusual or unexpected words or descriptions?
- Is there any imagery here, like metaphors or sensory images, comparisons, etc.?
- Do characters act or not act in a way which stands out? Is unexpected?
- Is there anything that seems a contradiction or doesn’t seem to fit?
- What details are offered? What kinds of details are not offered?
- Do the sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem read smoothly or do they trip up the reading somehow?
- Are there words or descriptions which you respond to emotionally?
A Little Practice
Here’s a short passage from the opening of Ralph Ellison’s marvelous novel, Invisible Man. What do you notice?
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
What four or five things do you notice about the passage?
Stay with observations about what you notice. Don’t worry about why you noticed it or what you think it means. That will happen, too, but later. For now, just what stands out for you.
I have a few. They may not be the same as yours:
- The man is tall and blond.
- The violence is sudden and happens because of an insult.
- The word “insolent.” I’m not sure on this reading what it means.
- There is an insult and a curse, but we don’t know what they are.
- The narrator is violent and seems proud of it.
- There are some details, like of coat lapels, but I cannot visualize the action easily.
Hang onto these “notices” for the next part of this process. For now, we’ve accomplished exactly what we should: we’ve noticed some things about what we’ve read, and this is exactly what all of the most well-trained readers and professors and writers do.
Let’s do it one more time, but this time with a video. Here is 2018’s “This is America” by Childish Gambino. Hold back on interpretation: just observations. What do you notice?
Keenly, Observing
Like any detective who picks up clues, we rarely know what they mean at first or even third glance, but we note them, anyway.
Take some time to read different kinds of writing out there. Sure, literature like novels and poems always works well, but this process we are beginning here can work for anything that uses language: poems, news articles, real-world events, a conversation we have with a friend.
By slowing down just a bit to “notice,” we avoid skimming over readings to get “the basics.” The richer pleasure in literature is not about basics but the complexity in the language we see. But to find that, we must slow down to see it. Notice it.
Here is a simple table you could use to write down what you notice in different kinds of readings. Try each column of type of reading, even if you don’t notice anything important to you in each row. What do you notice?
After that, we begin to ask why.
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 “Notice” 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 “Notice” stage here aligns most closely with Wolfgang Iser’s “See It,” focusing on how individuals receive, interpret, and engage texts, how we must suspend our preconceptions (and our reliance on authorities to tell us meaning) to focus on how a text appears immediately to us.
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, too quick overviews of Iser appear 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 criticism, and I will address them as we move forward.
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