Challenging how we are Hardwired to Digest Literature

This book resides in the Cardinal Hayes Library in their Fales Collection. This collection is the gift of Mr. Decoursey Fales, who gave his own personal collection of books that he acquired over several years, most of these books being printed in the early 20th century and several books being printed in the 19th century. After finding the text This Year: Next Year, I found something much more valuable than a colorful children's book: A lens which tells how texts looked and sounded like in history. With this idea sprouts an important question: how did people see this text and how did they read this book? How do people, in general, read texts and literature alike? 

Take a look at this page, for example. We can see how the text cascades with the text and how the image illustrated by Harold Jones is intertwined with the text. Readers read from left to right, seeing the image as they read. Just as people read from left to right, people view images from left to right in this example. There is a set path that the author and illustrator made for readers to consume this piece of art. If this children's book explains how people are supposed to consume this piece of art, does this translate to other texts? Are we trained on how to consume art? What if we are blinded by assuming the intent of the author, which prevents us from truly understanding the piece in front of us?

The text, or rather series of texts, known as Float by Anne Carson, challenges this idea. When someone purchases Float, they buy a plastic case where inside this case is a series of smaller chapbooks. The "point" of the text is that there is no real order of these books, even though they come in a particular order. This idea is really challenging the more you read each chapbook, as each installment seems barely relevant to the other, meaning that the reader themselves have to choose whether the order that the printer created is the best order or not. Carson asks a very important question, asking if reading, or art in general, should be in "freefall." Reading should be challenged and questioned. Too often we are met with texts and we simply agree with the order we are given, or we are confronted with art and we choose to accept the meaning we see or are told to see or even what we are trained to see. Maybe it is time that we look at something, say what we see, then challenge why we say that we see said object in the said way. If you click on the video, you can all of the volumes within the case. Do they seem to have an order? Is the order given to us correct? Begin the journey of questioning our pre-programmed perception of interpretation. What if we are wrong in how we interpret/read texts? What if there is more than what the eye sees? What if we were to see a tattoo and we said that it looks like one thing, but it really is many other things and representative of so much more than we thought.

Look at this tattoo, for instance. A dear friend of mine, George Kacharava, decided to tattoo this image on his chest to ask this seemingly easy question: what do you see? Many people who don't know the meaning behind the image would immediately say that it looks like a hat of some kind. Why do people say that? It looks like a hat because the image conforms to the idea we have in our minds of what hats really are. Those who do know the meaning behind the image will say that this drawing comes from The Little Prince, where the image really is a snake who swallowed an elephant. Sometimes we accept what we see because they conform to what we have been trained to know. But maybe it would be beneficial if we tried to confront our ideals set in front of us. Maybe it would be better if we challenged what we are told and initially see in order to possibly create a better, more creative version of what we see, like a snake who swallowed an elephant rather than a simple hat.