Is Reading a Condition?

In Protocols of Reading (1989), Robert Scholes declares, “the condition of reading is the human condition.” It’s a grand rhetorical gesture, but Scholes is making a point that is by now relatively common: Life, like reading, consists of a series of interpretations, and since no perception is pure, we are left with “a reading of signs, rather than an apprehension of things” (69). ¹ Scholes is a belletristic stylist but a post-structuralist thinker. His point about reading is a central tenet of the post-structuralist ethos that has dominated literary criticism since the 1980s, to the dismay of many of Scholes’s more purely belletristic colleagues. To read literature, they argue, is to engage in the ethical, moral, and intellectual life of the real world. It does not mean merely playing games with signs. A clear understanding of the historical and generic relationship between the novel and the case history, I will argue, can help reconcile these two positions. In a novel, the relationship between signs and things is ephemeral, too indirect ever to reconstruct. In a case history, signs are used to explain real-life suffering with the ultimate aim of alleviating it. Whether or not perception can ever be pure, the stakes of interpretation vary. However, even though novels have often been dismissed as silly or even dangerous, many novelists—Richardson, Burney, Eliot, Dickens, James—present their texts as vital social documents, as cures for social ills; and while case histories are vital social documents by nature, many of them contain the attributes of novels that tend to attract derision: sensationalism and melodrama, parochialism, didacticism, and undisguised authorial ambition. In fact, in many cases the disparity between signs and things is even more apparent, and often more disturbing, in case histories than it is in novels.