Reading work with Claire-Louise Bennett and Doireann Ní Ghríofa

ABSTRACT

Varied acts of reading play formative roles across a diverse range of contemporary Irish women’s writing. In this article I ask perhaps a strange question: is reading work? Or rather, when is reading work? In order to explore this, I look at representations of reading in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020). By considering how represented reading has an impact on form in these hybrid texts of autofiction and memoir, I engage with and query recent attempts within postcritique to reconceptualise critical reading. In this article I first establish the centrality of reading in both Checkout and Ghost, before detailing how these texts use form to show what reading can do. From here, I examine the ways in which Checkout and Ghost engage with the relationships between reading and temporality. This leads me to focus on notions of “lay” and “professional” reading. Bennett and Ní Ghríofa, I argue, expose the fragility of divisions between “lay/professional” or “uncritical/critical” reading and readers – in part through their representations of the figure of the woman reader. Finally, this article addresses our own academic reading work (and, very briefly, its relationship to financial remuneration).

KEYWORDS:

• Claire-Louise Bennett
• reading
• postcritique
• the woman reader
• autofiction
• Doireann Ní Ghríofa

In Niamh Campbell’s (2022) novel We Were Young, the initial protagonist Cormac mentions a book to a dancer, Caroline: The Bicameral Mind.

Yeah, that one about schizophrenia.

You know it? He is surprised.

It came into my hands weirdly. Ritual studies. It says ballet originated with dancing in temples to pagan gods.

Yes! He looks at her. I’ve never met anyone else who’s read it, he says.

Oh, I don’t know if I’d say read exactly.¹

I don’t think I’d be the only reader wondering if part of Cormac’s surprise relates to Caroline’s gender. Nor would I be the only reader who relates to Caroline’s self-effacing retreat: not “read exactly,” while in apparently full awareness of the book’s central topic and a key argument. Caroline’s denial of having “read” makes the verb uncertain: has she or hasn’t she? And it raises a larger question: what counts as reading? Varied acts of reading play formative roles across a diverse range of contemporary Irish women’s writing, especially in relation to communication and self-understanding. In Sally Rooney’s (2017) novel Conversations with Friends, the central character Frances downloads a massive tranche of instant messages sent between herself and her best friend/ex-girlfriend Bobbi. In a recent chapter on feminism and contemporary Irish women’s writing, Claire Bracken argues that the way “Frances navigates the mass of digital material through search terms such as ‘love’ and ‘feelings’” suggests “the embodied structures of desire as networked and corrective forces.”² What Frances is also doing is a form of reading, specific to the contemporary in its material and its use of a search-bar, yet not unrelated to the long practice of using concordances to “navigate the mass” of important texts by locating significant words. She’s trying to read Bobbi through a networked text they have created. It’s one of a few instances in Rooney’s work of reading being really shown to us – though a great deal of reading is implied elsewhere in her novels. Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times (2020) similarly encourages us to presume a high level of certain kinds of literary and political reading – the protagonist Ava is educated, intelligent, aware of the contradictions between her behaviour and her principles – but the novel shows little to no such reading. Read texts are specific elsewhere, and deliver specific types of reassurance. I love, for example, Rachel’s eight reread books in Marian Keyes’ 1997 novel Rachel’s Holiday: including The Bell Jar, The Trial, and “not one but two Dostoyevsky books.” These named texts, which provide Rachel with immense and necessary comfort, further give us an understanding of Rachel.³ Nuala O’Faolain lists books and authors too in her 1996 memoir Are You Somebody, confessing that “If there were nothing else, reading would – obviously – be worth living for.” One of these texts appears later, when O’Faolain (without explanation or detail) gains much needed bravery from reading Jane Eyre.⁴

In Campbell’s This Happy (2020), reading is being neglected: reading for work, that is. “Yes I work in a university now,” says Alannah (who is undoubtedly employed via a fictional version of the same postdoctoral funding as I am). “I said, its mostly reading, even though I had not opened a book, really, for weeks.”⁵ She’s not doing her work, we understand. In Rita Felski’s study Literature after Feminism (2003), Felski describes ignoring a weekend’s worth of academic papers at a conference to instead read Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: “impatiently turning the pages under the desk while pretending to listen to the papers being delivered on the podium.”⁶ In Campbell and Felski, a fictional confession and a critical anecdote, a troubled link between reading and work is sketched. Sometimes reading is work, and sometimes reading happens instead of, or in the spaces of time between periods of work. Nicole Shukin shows how both can be true. Writing about “The Hidden Labour of Reading Pleasure” in 2007, Shukin picks apart a myth of literary studies: that it is “a disinterested discipline which labours in the service of cultural knowledges distinct from economic ends.” She pinpoints why – “To recognize reading as work, then, is to institutionally recognize that our discipline is now immanent to a market economy and, more specifically, to a knowledge or information economy” – and how – “an aestheticized image of reading as subversive pleasure continues to obscure its recognition as labour.”⁷ Most effectively (and affectingly) she makes her own confession of not or almost reading:

my own dawning yet belated labour-consciousness this past year, as, in the first term of a tenure-track job, I flopped exhausted into bed each night only to face a stack of to-read books on the bedside table pressuring me for attention; or, found myself trying to read snatches of a critical essay while I did the dishes; or, anxiously scanned the catalogues of university presses for cutting-edge books in my field that I knew I probably should know, while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store; etc.⁸

Shukin is aware of her privilege in securing this kind of academic contract, and of “the far more grueling forms of material labour upon which our profession is contingent,” but struggles with the reading required of her. Reading, and the supposed pleasure of it, makes work a constant: “stretched across every hour of waking life.”⁹

It’s an odd question: is reading work? Or rather, when is reading work? This quandary has been explored through critical attempts to distinguish between “professional” and “lay” reading – and resultant attempts to confuse or refuse such distinctions. If reading is work when it is “professional,” or “critical” – then what constitutes a critical reading? In many ways, as Tobias Skiveren has recently suggested, “lay reading” and the figure of the “lay reader” are crucial to the several debates gathered under the label of “postcritique” – which seek precisely to refigure critical reading.¹⁰ Postcritique, briefly, attempts to move away from “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” from the habits of critique which aim always to “expose hidden ideology.”¹¹ One way in which proponents of postcritique have challenged how we understand “critical reading” is by invoking the worth of reading modes more usually seen as “uncritical.” Aspects of what we might consider “reading for pleasure” – like absorption, identifying with characters, or emotional attachment – have thus been proposed as significant, useful, valuable attributes of “reading for work.” These divisions of reading – lay/professional, uncritical/critical, pleasure/work – begin to seem incredibly fragile, with porous boundaries particularly susceptible to the needs of critics. This fungibility is also, however, at play in written texts outside of the academy.

In order to explore this taut relationship between reading and work I will closely examine Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020) and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021). Both texts revolve around acts of reading. More specifically, each presents a contemporary woman reading, whose reading activity has a complex connection to different notions of what counts as work or non-work: intellectual or literary work, the work of childcare, education, creative practice, rest, escape, denial. While readers appear across twenty-first-century Irish women’s writing (as I’ve described above), women’s reading has an exceptional, heightened impact on the formal and thematic weave of both Ghost and Checkout. Both texts have been labelled autofiction, a term (now liberally applied in discussions of contemporary literature) that generally signals a self-conscious use of autobiography within works of fiction (Bennett’s has even been hailed as “Autofiction for People Who Think They’re Sick of It”).¹² This term, however, conceals the true hybridity of each text. Ghost does merge “autofiction and essay,” as Rhian Sasseen writes for The Paris Review, yet also combines translated text, experimental memoir, and historical research.¹³ The “auto” of the “fiction” in Checkout, meanwhile, is lesser than that of Ghost – the author’s life is at a greater distance, due to the marrying of something like autobiography with fantasy and metafiction. It is to mark this difference that I have chosen to refer to the narrative “I” (or, occasionally, “we” and “you” in Bennett) as “the narrator” in Checkout, and as “Ní Ghríofa” in Ghost.

Both Ghost and Checkout show the disruptive and appeasing properties of reading, and suggest that delineations between reading as work or rest are muddy, fraught, and awkward. The discussions of this article will thus hop back and forth between conflating and separating reading and work, in order to tease out the procedures of such usefully blurred and contradictory divisions in Bennett and Ní Ghríofa. Each text is concerned with writing – creative prose in Checkout, poetry and translation in Ghost – yet acts of reading, related and unrelated to acts of writing, occupy a central role in both. It is thus useful to parcel out a specific focus on reading, and I will begin by establishing reading’s centrality in Ghost and Checkout. In tribute to a recurring formal arrangement in Checkout, I will catalogue reading in each text – before considering how these texts use form to show what reading can do. From here, I will explore how both texts engage with the relationship between reading and temporality, and how this engagement suggests specific attributes of reading. These attributes bring me back to the question of the lay/professional resting/working reader divide. Ghost and Checkout both summon and question this division of reading, in part by presenting a further reading figure: the woman reader. Finally, I want to ask a little about our own academic reading work.

“I begin, of course, with a list”¹⁴

In A Ghost in the Throat, reading is done “by fingertip” (115). Reading is a means to find and inhabit the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. Reading can simply “make a ten-minute dent in a library book” or wildly “invit[e] the voice of another woman to haunt my throat a while.” It passes the time while pumping breast milk, and it results in margin notes showing “a changeable record of thought” (9–10). Reading is “schoolwork” resulting in “a schoolgirl crush” (11), reading garners “homework” that is too creative and harshly graded (12). Reading becomes something to squeeze in around domestic “drudge-work” (yet such “drudge” includes reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to one’s children (5–6)). Reading requires shuffling those children around libraries to find translations, it needs favours from friends making “stealth-copies” of texts at university libraries (25). Reading is yoked to breast pumping, “the twin forces of milk and text,” it is “dark sustenance” and “as close as I get to a rest:” “reading balances” (25, 27). Reading here is not work: it is what happens before one “set[s] to work again” and returns to household and childcare labour (28).

Reading fills a “folder of notes,” and others see such reading proof and presume work: “a night course” perhaps, as an answer to “‘So what’s all this for, then?’” (68–9). Translation work is “a deliberation, a decelerated reading” (40). Reading in archives is to “find […] fossils of her voice” (82), reading takes Ghost to Kilcrea, to Derrynane. Reading and research do eventually form “labour” that is hoped to “prove worthwhile,” a labour “inextricable” from milk (119). Reading is scrolling and tapping a phone late at night, it is deciphering “[t]he human effort to articulate a want and a love” (125), it is empathy, it is affect; reading leads to a poem, within a book, that wins a prize, which becomes a down-payment on a house (203). Ní Ghríofa reads graveyard inscriptions, “yellowed parchments of archive pages and old newspapers” (230), clergy and baptismal records in church ledgers, microfilm, letters, lists of student registrations, depositions, examinations, a transcribed family history written into a Bible. She depicts reading with metaphors of nourishment and references to inexpertise; as a jumble of productive work and an escape from labour; and by contextualising it within her own life as a dual act of love and self-denial.

In Checkout 19, reading opens the text. Reading is, first and foremost, something that “we” do, and books are something that “we often had” with us. First lots, then just one at a time: “That’s it, one at a time.”¹⁵ Reading involves looking at the left hand page and then the right hand, and it often involves eagerly speeding up towards a page’s turning. Reading comprises “distinct operations that words bring into effect” (4), and pages are turned “[w]ith one’s entire life” (6). Reading might require finding hidden, grown-up books in a cupboard as a child, or taking books from the shelves of a borrowed flat as an adult. Reading might happen while lying on a sun lounger, or while spending the day in bed. Reading is idleness, and yet: “When we turn the page we are born again. Living and dying and living and dying and living and dying” (6).

Books are sometimes schoolwork, and can be both unread and hoarded: “Little shits. Little buggers. Give the bloody books back!” (16). Reading could be ordained by university curriculum: “getting educated” (82). Books can garner “relief,” can “make you feel you are made of much more than just yourself” (122). There are too many books in Checkout to list here: at one point books and authors are catalogued for nearly fifty pages (73–121) as “had read” or “hadn’t yet read,” organised into these two categories at a particular point in the narrator’s life. At other times, a teacher reads stories written in the back of the narrator’s exercise book, her mother presumably reads hidden copies of Roald Dahl and Allen Sillitoe, and her boyfriends read boring biographies of boring men. In the story of Tarquin Superbus that is told in chunks throughout Checkout, meanwhile, reading is scanning the blank pages of a Borgesian multitude of books in search of just one, never-found sentence.

Reading is connective, associative, and constitutive in Checkout. A book travels from Tangier to Ireland to an undeserving man, another is mysteriously gifted in a supermarket; further books remain forever in boxes in other people’s houses, while others are burnt in huge, real and fictional fires. Reading takes us to Innsbruck, Paris, London, Florence. Reading can help when you feel lost and “want to get right back to the beginning” of yourself (108), reading can be a way “to find out about men” (114), reading is something to lie about, reading Plath and Sexton could have “a bad influence” (117). Reading is a reason to be glad to be living, reading can settle and soothe. A single sentence in a book can be “part of something that has been part of you since the beginning, whenever that might rightly be” (122). Reading is analysing form in Ann Quin, and tracing Lucy’s steps from A Room with a View, and an activity undertaken not “to become more clever” but rather “to come to life” (200). Reading in Ghost and Checkout also results in hybrid textual forms. Subsumed, as I’ve noted, under the label autofiction, these texts variously fuse memoir, fiction, criticism, translation, quotation. Such hybridity grows significantly, I suggest, from the central role occupied by acts of reading in both texts. Furthermore, in each text reading results in structural and stylistic play; their experiments with form and narrative communicate what we might call a “force-field” effect of reading, drawing on Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank:

We (those of us for whom reading was or is a crucial form of interaction with the world) know the force-field creating power of this attitude, the kind of skin that sheer textual attention can weave around a reading body: a noisy bus station or airplane can be excluded from consciousness, an impossible ongoing scene refused, a dull classroom monologue ignored. And none of these is wholly encompassed by a certain pernicious understanding of reading as escape. Escape from what? The “real world,” ostensibly, the “responsibility” of “acting” or “performing” in that world.¹⁶

In Sedgwick and Frank’s description, the “power” of a familiar absorbed reading cannot be contained within ideas of “escape.” There’s much more going on: “The additional skin shimmering as if shrink-wrapped around a body-and-book, or body-and-playing/working environment, sharply and sheerly delineates the conjunction or composition, making figural not escape or detachment but attention, interest.”¹⁷ Through both form and content, Ghost and Checkout engage these ideas of reading as “interaction with the world,” “reading as escape” or “attention, interest,” and the carefully collocated “playing/working.” Like Sedgwick and Frank’s brittle forward slash, the relationships and distinctions between reading as play or rest, and reading as work or labour, are uncertain in Ghost and Checkout.

Ní Ghríofa’s text circles around Eibhlín Dubh’s poem Caoineadh and its translation – included at the end in full but also quoted throughout. We read many texts with Ní Ghríofa: parts of the Caoineadh, but also domestic lists, instructions for making paper dolls, and even, at one point, reproduced images of nineteenth-century handwriting. The text of Ghost is often fragmented, and its form varies from chapter to chapter. The seventh chapter, “cold lips to cold lips” is particularly fractured. Ní Ghríofa imagines the writing and reading of a letter:

First, the urge, the pulse, the need. Then the smile, the mischief, the little desire in its little flickering. Next, the paper, the quill’s pause, the hover, the liquid drop: blot blot. […] The scratch of nib to paper, the liquid birth and loop of the letters, each connected to the next, word following word, and all the small spaces that exist between them. The paper sealed and sent on its way. The strange silence between a letter’s departure but before its delivery, the curious time after words have been imagined and imprinted on paper, but before they are read (125).

She lists a rhythmic sequence of composition, staccato blot blotting quickly then lingering over liquid looping letters. “Small spaces” and “strange silences” and “curious time” are then recreated on the following two pages, where prose splinters further and white space opens up between isolated lines describing Art Ó Laoghaire reaching Eibhlín Dubh’s home at Derrynane. Ní Ghríofa describes being read as “one’s own words moving quietly over another’s lips” (126). Reading in Ghost is fundamentally personal and its hybrid memoir form reflects this.

There is no one central text in Bennett’s Checkout, but a story lives somewhere deep within its narrative: the tale of Tarquin Superbus, written by a younger version of our narrator (and destroyed by an ex-boyfriend). This fantastical fiction, retold and edited before us, describes a horribly inverted activity of reading. Tarquin procures a vast quantity of books, with no intention of reading any. He discovers too late that he has bought a fabled collection, a library of books that are empty but for one sentence hidden within one volume. While elsewhere the narrator of Checkout describes how essential a single sentence can be to one’s reading and sense of self, with Tarquin this idea becomes grotesque: an extreme act of not reading that involves searching countless blank pages for one vital sentence. As Tarquin’s friend, the Doctor, explains:

And this sentence contains everything. Everything. […] The words, how can I put it, are alive and distinct, they are like organisms, yes, exactly like organisms – and they are supremely potent. When at last they come into contact with a pair of eyes they vibrate immediately and imperceptibly, they come to life and emit intensely powerful and advanced waves which the eyes accept, and in this way, through the eyes, these extraordinary vibrations stimulate and ease open pathways deep in the consciousness of the perceiver. (72)

The sentence is never found, but elements of what is almost an account of an ideal reading experience can be seen across Checkout: potent words, texts as alive, reading that opens pathways. In fact, reading that can “open pathways deep in the consciousness” is an apt description of the structure of the narrative, which follows thoughts through to whichever pathway opens up next; which makes room for whatever reading releases. Where Ghost is often fragmented, Checkout is dense, playing less with form visually on the page and more with the formal representation of a mind’s darting activity.

Reading and time

A key way that Ghost and Checkout explore reading is by engaging with the complex relationships between reading and time. Reading time in both texts appears to suggest a firm division between reading and work, but what I explore here will bring me to question such a divide. Reading’s particular “involvement with temporality” marks it apart from other artforms, requiring “highly extended, durational and variable attention,” as Alice Bennett notes in her 2018 study Contemporary Fictions of Attention. She considers contemporary literature through a specific focus on the time of reading: exploring anxieties over a collective contemporary loss of ability to fix attention on reading and give it the sustained time the activity might require. Bennett prefers “to think of the book as a constantly interrupted object” we can pick up and put down, rather than something designed to hold our attention for extended periods.¹⁸ Felski, meanwhile, comments in her 2020 study Hooked: Art and Attachment on the significance of the space of time that occurs after an encounter (which she broadens to any form of art): “Delay, deferral, time lag are not uncommon: aesthetic experience is aslant of clock time and pursues its own rhythms.” She cites Virginia Woolf’s “waiting for ‘the dust of reading to settle […]’ Later the book will return, she remarks, but it will do so differently.”¹⁹ The temporality of reading – from the daily reality of minutes or hours spent looking at pages, to its immediate or delayed impact, to the psychic jumps through lives and histories that reading can enable – informs both local and overarching structural arrangements of Ghost and Checkout. In Checkout, for example, we find specific instances in which time spent reading in the past is recounted by the narrator (as a child, in her twenties, during travelling, at university) situated within a much broader narrative structure where both reading and time coil into recurrences, circling around particular texts and events.

In her essay “Repeat,” Christina Lupton asks “Does an affective encounter with a book hold steady with each new reading, or does the tenor and weight of the experience change with repetition?”²⁰ Specific acts of rereading in Ghost and Checkout connect and illuminate separate points in life. As Ní Ghríofa traces three encounters with Eibhlín Dubh, the Caoineadh links “previous versions of myself” (10): a bored eleven-year-old, a romantic teenager, and a frustrated adult. As the text finds a different Ní Ghríofa at each of these stages of life, so too does Ní Ghríofa find a different text. At eleven, she’s faced with a poem that is “sad” but “dull,” and categorically “schoolwork” (11). As a teenager she falls in love with the text, reencountering a caoineadh that provokes her imagination to elaborate the plot. And as an adult, exhausted by motherhood, angry at landlords, and suddenly half-remembering her “crush on that poem” (15), she finds the poem on her phone and felt “it was alive all around me, alive and fizzing with rain, and I felt alive in it” (16–17). She swipes back to read it again, slower. These layered encounters introduce the eighteenth-century poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire to the reader of Ghost – and introduce the heart and urge of Ní Ghríofa’s own text. No book in Checkout occupies a position that is equivalent to the Caoineadh’s in Ghost, just as the variety and breadth of reading catalogued by Bennett has no equivalent in Ní Ghríofa. But authors and texts are also revisited in Checkout, chiefly E. M. Forster’s 1908 novel A Room with a View. This novel again connects points of reading in a life, and the results of those acts of reading. The first is done “dutifully” at school (171); a later reading at seventeen, however, prompts a package holiday to Italy, following Forster’s protagonist to Florence (104). The trip forms another kind of reading, and one which solidifies a mistake: a misremembered plot detail, another elaborating, youthful textual response, only corrected twenty years later in a shattering rereading. Returning to Forster and Eibhlín Dubh as adults forces an encounter with earlier selves, with different times. Furthermore, Ní Ghríofa and Bennett’s literary representations of rereading answer Lupton’s query; “The tenor and weight” of their reading experiences significantly change as these experiences recur, as shifts in time, environment and selfhood also have a clear impact on the texts read.

It is a road-sign to Kilcrea that brings about Ní Ghríofa’s return to the Caoineadh. The timeframe frequently jumps and alternates in Ghost, from Ní Ghríofa’s account of repeated visits to the dissection room at University College Cork, to the back and forth of the “now, then” chapter, to the psychic leaps back to the lives of Eibhlín Dubh and her family. In the sections of Ghost that describe visits to Kilcrea and Derrynane, the text re-enacts the principal temporal movement that occurs in biographical readings of years-old literature: “She was here” (72). The time travelling opportunities of reading are all author-focused for Ní Ghríofa. While Kilcrea is present in the text of the Caoineadh, Ní Ghríofa has become more invested in the past presence of its author at the graveyard of Kilcrea. At Derrynane, again, Ní Ghríofa seeks “something that could deepen my sense of Eibhlín Dubh’s early days here” (86), she imagines her stood by her side, as she “wait[s] for this place to let something slip,” and she conjures an image of young “Nelly” and her sister (87–9). But a more complicated sequence of her own memories trips down the page instead, of ringforts and stories of “Others” and history textbooks and fear (87). Led by reading to Derrynane in an attempt to find something of Eibhlín Dubh that has been absent in the texts she has poured over, Ní Ghríofa’s narrative time slips back instead through her own childhood.

While reading leads Ní Ghríofa thus to glimpses of her own past, in a key section of Checkout the narrator’s sustained account of her younger self leads everything back to and through reading. Complex temporal positioning results in a fifty-page section listing what “I had read” and “I hadn’t yet read.” In this act of gorgeous hindsight, a specific, earlier point in the narrator’s life is illustrated not only through which texts she has at that time already encountered, but also through those she has not – but, crucially, will. There is no feigned conceit of youthful naivety, but rather an acknowledgement that looking back at an earlier time is coloured by what has been read since.

I had not yet read The Go-Between or Wuthering Heights or “A Season in Hell” or Orlando. I had read Jacob’s Room and Nausea and The Fall and Tess of the D’Urbervilles and “The Hollow Men” and many Imagist poems, one of which had snow in it and a white leopard I think, or, more accurately, it was a leopard that had no outline – maybe it was penned by Ezra Pound, I don’t remember (74).²¹

In each list, each rhythmic movement from “had” to “hadn’t,” we move back and forth from a specified time in the narrator’s twenties to a much vaguer present. The lists digress, as one’s mind would, as particular texts read or not yet read prompt a little more thought: a story of never finishing Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady, or a reading of Wordsworth’s characters, or thoughts of Anaïs Nin and Clarice Lispector in Innsbruck. We bounce through a life via a register of books, even those poorly remembered or disliked or lied about or (in just one instance) “still haven’t” read (75). We read backwards and forwards in narrative time as a life is situated and detailed not only then but now and, presumably, at any time in relation to books and reading. Bennett’s catalogue suggests that in recounting any reading, a fixed temporal setting cannot be maintained.

In the catalogue’s combination of repeated phrases (had/hadn’t yet) and lengthy, variegated digressions, it mimics a rhythm of reading – as a repeated behaviour that leads us emotionally, cognitively, intellectually down deep “pathways.” The fifty pages of lists and musings thus function a little like a structural depiction of reading, and of exactly how reading can lead to the intense sense of personal textual interrelation that is communicated towards the catalogue’s close:

Certain written words are alive, active, living – they are entirely in the present, the same present as you. […] in any case, certain sentences do not feel in the least bit separate from you or from the moment in time when you are reading them. You feel like they wouldn’t exist without your seeing them. Like they wouldn’t exist without you. And isn’t the opposite true too – that the pages you read bring you to life? Turning the pages, turning the pages. Yes. That is how I have gone on living. Living and dying and living and dying, left page, right page, and on it goes (121–2).

Bennett’s structural play extends beyond the reading catalogue in Checkout. In her write-up for the London Review of Books, Clair Wills describes a “sequential rather than consequential logic” to the narrative ordering of Checkout, yet consequential logic does emerge where the narrative loops back on itself to revisit specific topics.²² There’s a precursor to this movement in Bennett’s short story collection Pond (2015), in which the reading of a novel in “Control Knobs” is revisited and corrected some pages later.²³ In Checkout, particular things recur: the narrator’s school teacher reading her first story, Dale and the issue of reading books by men, A Room with a View, Tarquin Superbus, her silver-skirt-buying trip to Brighton, the gift of a book she receives at her supermarket job, her thoughts on Ann Quin. Some confusion or even doubt in our own reading could be prompted when the narrative first begins to repeat, but as it continues and continues a comprehensible mode of linking does crystalise: a scarred moment in time. The story of being raped by Dale emerges from such circling and connects many of the repeated elements. The narrator tells the story of the rape again, immediately, in a slightly altered way, recalling an anxious sort of self-checking: “Was it really awful or was it unpleasant? Make up your mind now and stick to it – are you going to get into a state about this or not?” (184–5). The narrative circling seems then also to be a form of self-checking: she’s misremembered A Room with a View, could she have misremembered, misinterpreted this? The repetition confirms that she has not.

Time is also more prosaically divided in both Checkout and Ghost. These divisions tend not to demarcate reading as work in either text. Reading is done when Ní Ghríofa is not engaged in housework or domestic labour, just as reading is done when Checkout’s narrator is not on a newspaper round or working the nineteenth checkout at a supermarket. Divisions of time insist that reading is more often rest or idleness, and not related to the domestic “drudge-work” of Ghost (6), nor the listed work that keeps women “occupied” in Checkout, “chopping, mending, sweeping, wiping, folding, wringing, peeling, rinsing” (115). But reading is also, as both texts show, “aslant of clock time.” Time in Ghost and Checkout layers through reading – it leaps, circles, repeats, stutters, draws back, jumps forward. Is it unsurprising, then, that any suggested temporal boundaries might blur? By focusing on what we might call the temporal opportunities of reading in these texts, I’ve been able to draw out the following concerns. First, how “previous versions” of a reader can be connected through reading, and how encountered texts can metamorphose with time – can “return […] differently.” And second, how such insistent looping back through one’s own life and personal history can be caused by a deep identification with and attachment to those literary texts. Such individualised interrelations between text and reader might further separate reading from work in Ghost and Checkout, if we were happy to excise these personal networks of emotionally invested textual responses from our understandings of reading as labour – of “critical” or “professional” reading.

Don’t read like yourselves

In a discussion of reading as an ethical practice, John Guillory describes the constitutive qualities of “lay” vs “professional” reading. “Professional,” or academic, or critical reading is defined first as “a kind of work, a labor requiring large amounts of time and resources.” “Professional” reading has, he claims, three further core qualities: it is a “disciplinary activity,” it is “vigilant,” and it is a “communal practice.” “Lay” reading, meanwhile, occurs “outside the context of work:” for leisure. It has different conventions, its main motivation is pleasure, and it is solitary.²⁴ Guillory goes on question these divisions, but they provide a useful summary of how such attempts to categorise tend to function. With similar effect (if more humour), in his article “Uncritical Reading” Michael Warner sums up a prevailingly negative, corrective attitude in the pedagogy of critical, or professional, reading: “Don’t read like children, like vacation readers on the beach, like escapists, like fundamentalists, like nationalists, like antiquarians, like consumers, like idealogues, like sexists, like tourists, like yourselves.”²⁵ Such attitudes of reading – as work or not work – are engaged with or challenged across Ghost and Checkout. Ní Ghríofa returns again and again to an anxiety over her non-professional, amateur status: “I am no scholar” (259), she worries, describing herself as an “inept detective” and “a devoted servant” (153). Ghost makes plot points of failed or unproductive acts of reading, and Ní Ghríofa blames herself as much as she blames a lack of historical records focused on women: “my small skills, self-taught and slapdash, have faltered. I have gone as far as I can” (263). Yet, she also takes pride in her own approach, her strong attachment and the biographical impulse that drives her research into Eibhlín Dubh: she seeks to “conjure her presence” and feels she “will not regret taking on this work” (39). Her translation labour is similarly biographical, as she builds a “slow intimacy with the poet herself,” and “the particular swerve of her thoughts” (41). In his entertaining unravelling of how “critical reading” tries to define itself in opposition to notions of the “uncritical,” Warner lists “all the forms of uncritical reading – identification, self-forgetfulness, reverie, sentimentality, enthusiasm, literalism, aversion, distraction.”²⁶ Several of these are enacted in Ní Ghríofa’s reading practices throughout Ghost, most notably identification and enthusiasm. These forms have, however, been recently reconsidered under the rubric of postcritique as desirable attributes of a better kind of critical reading. Felski, building on Sedgwick’s work, advocates for both “attachment” and the worth of identification – “to be affected or moved and also to be linked or tied” – while Toril Moi advises that a critic should work on “the texts to which she responds most fully.”²⁷ As Warner, Alice Bennett, and Skiveren have pointed out, such manoeuvres of reassessment transform attributes of “uncritical reading” into traits of “critical reading,” for better or worse.²⁸

Ní Ghríofa folds her translation work into her reading of Eibhlín Dubh’s poetry and life, treating translation as an act of reading. She is, she believes, “unqualified” as a translator: “no doctorate, no professorship, no permission-slip at all – I am merely a woman who loves this poem” (38). That “merely” is disingenuous: Ghost as a whole argues for the value of translation, reading, and research driven by such emotional attachment.²⁹ For all her confessions of a lack of professionalism, the structural and thematic interlacing of Ní Ghríofa’s life with what she can find of Eibhlín Dubh’s suggests a firm belief that Ní Ghríofa’s love and identification is qualification enough. Ní Ghríofa wonders whether her activity is “useful,” asking “Who will gain from this labour? Not I” (a strange thing to read from a successful writer whose best-selling, prize-winning writing we hold in our hands) (139). Querying “use” further suggests an act of reading that is not only for one’s self, but that will perform a function for others – a reading with purpose. And Ní Ghríofa is in many ways carrying out a familiar mode of useful, valued feminist literary criticism by exposing the gaps in women’s history, reclaiming women’s writing, preserving the traces of literary women of the past. As Marie-Louise Coolahan (a scholar of early modern women’s writing) points out, Ní Ghríofa is “doing our outreach work for us, spreading the word that early modern women were always there, and always are.”³⁰ What Ní Ghríofa dubs her “oblique reading” and “an act of wilful erasure” – ignoring the men in a series of letters, “until only the lives of women remain” – is a model for the endeavour of Ghost as a whole: it is feminist work (76).³¹

As Felski often reminds us across her work, women readers who identify with literary characters have long prompted scorn from a certain kind of (misogynist) literary critic or theorist. This is gendered, as when a woman identifies with, say, Hedda Gabler, or Emma Bovary, then she can be accused of losing her self-awareness and being “swallowed up by her intense affiliation with an imaginary persona, an affiliation that involves a temporary relinquishing of reflective and analytical consciousness.”³² Felski counters this accusation principally through her exploration of “enchantment” as an aspect of reading, a “condition of aesthetic absorption” involving no loss of critical faculty, and she acknowledges the readiness of feminist critics to admit to and explore modes of criticism that worry less about distance and detachment.³³ The form of identification portrayed in Ghost is, however, not only a reader’s recognition of and identification with a literary character. Ní Ghríofa is emotionally invested in and attached to Eibhlín Dubh beyond the page as well, in terms of Eibhlín Dubh as an author. This attitude is most explicitly confirmed by Ní Ghríofa’s anger over established academic theories of the Caoineadh’s multiple, oral authorship. Once again acknowledging her perceived “lay” position, Ní Ghríofa nevertheless sets up a confusing false binary for the implications of a cumulative and combined authorship:

I have come across a line of argument in my reading, which posits that, due to the inherent fallibility of memory and the imperfect vessels that held it, the Caoineadh cannot be considered a work of single authorship. Rather, the theory goes, it must be considered collage, or, perhaps, a folky rewording of older keens. This, to me – in the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university – feels like a male assertion pressed upon a female text. After all, the etymology of the word “text” lies in the Latin verb “texere:” to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship (74).

Theories of oral composition and transmission speak, to my mind, of layered and communal creativity and preservation; of human feats of narrative adaptation, communication, and reception. As I have argued elsewhere, a suspicion of authorship does not preclude wonder and admiration, but rather the opposite: exploring the formal and thematic textual consequences of a multiple authorship that transitions from speech to text can be wondrous, as can that text’s literary reception.³⁴ The textual and historical Eibhlín Dubh is not under threat in the unsettling of single authorship that Ní Ghríofa has come across, as Eibhlín Dubh’s story has survived, and she has reached the page intact. Only Eibhlín Dubh the author, as a sole producer of the poem, is disturbed by questions of authorship.

This question of the Caoineadh’s composition and authorship is discarded in Ghost, it is never referred to again and has little impact on Ní Ghríofa’s ongoing historical research. Her reading work continues to seek the author, intensely: “I’m waiting for a response” (86). In such authorial desire, Ní Ghríofa has much in common with pervasive historically focused, author-centric, biographical approaches to literary criticism. Furthermore, at each point of stymied research, and with each unanswered question, Ní Ghríofa effectively and critically shows the limits of biography, as her desperate textual and spatial tracking to find a woman hidden in texts and archives finds absences, repeatedly. Ghost is not a translation accompanied by a straightforward history of its author. Rather, its marrying of memoir with what is inarguable scholarly work responds to these biographical lacunae. Weaving memoir through her reading in search of the author Eibhlín Dubh also emphasises Ní Ghríofa’s own authorship, as she becomes the knowable author that Eibhlín Dubh cannot be for her.

In Checkout, reading appears to be overwhelmingly “lay” and “escapist,” seeking (in Warner’s terms) “reverie,” “aversion,” “distraction.” The text evokes and complicates tropes historically associated with the culturally laden figure of “the woman reader,” as idle and secretive, “vulnerable” to being led astray by literature. Cultural attitudes towards “women as sentimental, undiscriminating readers” have grown and held fast since at least the eighteenth century, as critics including Kate Flint and Janet Badia have shown.³⁵ Through reading, Bennett’s narrator forges connections with other women, such as the authors she reads, the friends who lend her books, and the books she gives to others. Leaving books to be collected by a young woman learning English in Tangier, she imagines her reading the novels and wonders “what did they make her yearn for and set out to meet?” (91). In constructing a detailed picture of a reading woman, who “sits cross-legged on a big round cushion” surrounded by beautiful textiles and candles (90), Bennett invokes the rich image of “the woman reader” engaged in a secretive act of reading: who knows what she’s thinking, what she wants, what desires she is satisfying?³⁶ The image she conjures is pointedly different from the scenes of reading enacted by the narrator of Checkout – her days and nights spent reading in bed are marked more by the mould growing on cups of tea (57) or “small screwed-up paper balls” (121) or grubby library books (187) or a “bedside heap of pistachio shale” (80) – but there are key common traits which tap into ideas of both “the woman reader” and “lay reading.” The girl in Tangier and the narrator of Checkout, for example, are isolated, separate from others. Such “lone reading,” as Belinda Jack summarises, has been a core cause for the controversy garnered by women’s reading across centuries and cultures: “Lone reading is an inherently antisocial activity and the onus on women has been, and often remains, to be sociable and to facilitate easy human relations. Reading is intensely private and literally self-centred.”³⁷ Reading as a solitary activity is also one of the characteristics Guillory identifies as associated with “lay reading,” as is reading for pleasure, or leisure. Both girl and narrator are portrayed in solitary reverie, their pleasure secretive, even indolent. The idle reading in much of Checkout thus plays into and exposes the gendered components of notions of “lay reading.”

Checkout also complicates divisions of “critical” or “uncritical” reading through its explicit and oblique references to a particular reading “mistake,” namely that “we confused life with literature” (200). Unlike the “we” that narrates the open and close of Checkout (which is perhaps a multiple self, an older and younger narrator in combination), the “we” here refers to the narrator and Dale – a male figure who repeatedly appears throughout the text. It is Dale who rapes the narrator, and also Dale who believes poetry “breaks” women – that “[w]omen can’t withstand poetry,” that Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are dangerous (118). As Dale proves, men are the greater threat to women. Dale also betrays the survival of an eighteenth-century attitude to women’s reading, in which “the female intellect was viewed as, like the female body, soft and fragile, with female ego-boundaries dangerously permeable,” as Jacqueline Pearson writes, summarising the perceived dangers of women’s “vulnerab[ility] to excessively identificatory reading practices.”³⁸ And yet, identification with literary characters and authors, along with a blurring of the life/literature boundary, becomes in Ghost and Checkout a catalyst for readings that might be classed as critical, professional, work.

In Checkout’s readings of A Room with a View, the narrator’s youthful wish to be like Lucy Honeychurch (“me, somehow fused with her” (107)) becomes an older, more mature identification with Lucy’s chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett – leading in turn to an analysis of Charlotte’s quiet centrality to the plot development of A Room with a View (172–3). Elsewhere, an elegant reading of the style of Ann Quin develops, in stages. Being unaware of Quin, hearing of Quin, and reading and researching Quin for herself are points of return for the narrator, who reviews an earlier visit to Brighton through her later knowledge of Brighton-born Quin’s writing. As with Ní Ghríofa’s attachment to Eibhlín Dubh, this connection is focused on Quin as an author, a woman. In Ghost this ultimately informs a text of translation; in Checkout, this affective link develops into something that is also firmly text-based. The narrator performs a biographical reading informed by Quin’s textual obsession with the sea: “the sound of it, the smell of it, the waves, the weed, the rocks.” She quotes a description of intersecting waves in Quin’s Passages (1969), and (I use this word pointedly) argues that,

The waters of the shifting oceans give palpability to the ultimate ontological fantasy – that it is possible to be boundless and permeable while holding on to one’s essence, one’s “first shape.” Perhaps, according to how she saw and took part in the world, Ann Quin wasn’t so much killing herself when she went under the waves as luxuriating in her primary generative contours […]. On the other hand perhaps her own unique cosmology had fallen away (176).

Checkout’s narrator is prompted to consider Quin’s death in part by the authoritative accounts that label it “suicide” – and similarly, she responds to the labels “working-class” and “avant-garde” attached by scholars to Quin. Over a page and a half, the narrator reacts analytically to “the pitfalls of criticism written more or less exclusively by posh white blokes who have no grasp whatsoever of the lived experience of a working-class woman in the 1960s:”

When I read Quin I recognise her fidgeting forensic polyvocal style as a powerful and bona fide expression of an unbearably tense and disorienting paradox that underscores everyday life in a working-class environment – on the one hand it’s an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet, at the same time, much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving. One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time. […] If your immediate locale doesn’t offer you very much in terms of dependable boundaries it’s not entirely inconceivable is it that you’ll end up writing a kaleidoscopic sort of prose that is constantly shuffling the distinction between objects and beings, self and other, and conceives of the world in terms of form and geometry, texture and tone (178).

In a review for 4Columns, Brian Dillon makes rather dismissive reference to Bennett’s “forays into a kind of literary criticism” – but the readings in Checkout of A Room with a View, Quin, Nin, Lispector and so on offer more than something like criticism.³⁹ They exhibit and describe how critical readings of literary character, style, and context can develop from the “uncritical,” from “lay reading.”

Unlike Ní Ghríofa, Bennett’s narrator makes no reference to any anxiety over her qualification to engage in analytical reading. But both respond to the inadequacies of nameless male academics, and both carry out feminist readings invested with care for the context and biography of women writers. Through form, to differing extents and with differing effects, both texts intermingle each author’s own context and biography with acts of reading – and both display and describe how identification, attachment, and love can lead to deeply valuable, personal “interactions with the world,” as well as useful, critical, biographical, and translating readings. While the debates surrounding postcritique have provided this article with a productive disassembling of “lay” vs “professional” or “uncritical” vs “critical” readings, I’m hesitant here to follow the lead of recent articles that seek to show how contemporary writing exemplifies the concerns of postcritique.⁴⁰ Rather than argue that what Ghost and Checkout can do is show us ways of strengthening critical, work-related reading, I’d prefer to suggest that by exposing the fragility of categorising reading as work or not work, these texts show the worth and joy of any and all reading – idle, productive, both, neither – and do so without an all-subsuming, single critical purpose. As we are urged in Checkout: “Turning the pages. With one’s entire life” (6). Does this need a definable outcome?

Throughout this article, I’ve been skirting around a “definable outcome” of reading as work. In Ghost and Checkout, reading is presented as, to use Shukin’s phrase, “distinct from economic ends.” We know, however, that their reading work fed into creative practice, resulting in written work that has been financially remunerated. Ní Ghríofa alludes to this lightly in Ghost, when she buys a house with prize money from a collection of poems – but in both texts, the activity of reading is done without reference to or a drive towards money. Guillory’s first definition of “professional reading,” as I’ve noted, is as “a labor requiring large amounts of time and resources.” He goes on: “This labor is compensated, as such, by a salary.”⁴¹ Perhaps, when Guillory was writing twenty years ago, a higher proportion of people working in academia were being paid for “professional” reading. But as many of us in literary studies now (graduate students, independent scholars, early career researchers, the precariously employed) know, reading in the service of literary research and criticism – reading work – is not securely tied to monetary income. We should refer more often to the conditions of our reading work in our articles, conference papers, monographs.⁴² I scan job listings in between edits of this article, with one precious year of funding left. “Turning the pages. With one’s entire life.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Irish Research Council through a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

Notes

1. Campbell, We Were Young, 244.

2. Bracken, “The Feminist Contemporary,” 150.

3. Keyes, Rachel’s Holiday, 262–3.

4. O’Faolain, Are You Somebody?, 29 and 145.

5. Campbell, This Happy, 230.

6. Felski, Literature After Feminism, 44.

7. Shukin, “The Hidden Labour of Reading Pleasure,” 24.

8. Ibid., 26.

9. Ibid.

10. Skiveren, “Postcritique and the Problem of the Lay Reader,” 163 and passim.

11. Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 175–7.

12. Huffman, “Autofiction for People Who Think They’re Sick of It.”

13. Sasseen, “An Interview with Doireann Ní Ghríofa.”

14. Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat, 75. Further references will be given parenthetically.

15. Bennett, Checkout 19, 1. Further references will be given parenthetically.

16. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 114–5.

17. Ibid., 115.

18. Bennett, Contemporary Fictions of Attention, 156 and 13.

19. Felski, Hooked, 58–9.

20. Lupton, “Repeat,” 159.

21. This endnote exists solely to encourage you to listen to Bennett reading the audiobook of Checkout 19.

22. Wills, “I want it, but not yet.”

23. Bennett, “Control Knobs,” 83–88 and 96.

24. Guillory, “The Ethical Practice of Modernity,” 31–3.

25. Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 15.

26. Ibid.

27. Felski, Hooked, 1; Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, 191. See also Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading;” Ferguson, “Now it’s Personal;” Miller, Jane Austen.

28. Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 15; Bennett, Contemporary Fictions of Attention, 141; Skiveren, “Postcritique and the Problem of the Lay Reader,” 168.

29. Furthermore, Ní Ghríofa emphasised such enthusiasm in interviews and articles surrounding the publication of Ghost: her Irish Times piece, for example, was even titled “The woman who fell in love with a poem.”

30. Coolahan, “Loss and Longevity,” 30.

31. Though, with its insistent recurring emphasis on childbearing bodies linked to “female texts,” Ghost might not be my kind of feminism.

32. Felski, Uses of Literature, 34. See also Badia, Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers, 4.

33. Felski, Uses of Literature, 54 and 62.

34. Corser, “Imagined Authors.”

35. Felski, Literature After Feminism, 31–2. See also Flint, The Woman Reader; Badia, Sylvia Plath; Jack, The Woman Reader; Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain; Meaney, O’Dowd, and Whelan, eds., Reading the Irish Woman.

36. Flint opens her study of the “discrete topic” of “the woman reader” by beginning with its frequent depiction in visual art. The Woman Reader, 4.

37. Jack, The Woman Reader, 6.

38. Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 83.

39. Dillon, Checkout 19.

40. For example, Elizabeth S. Anker’s work on Ali Smith’s How to be Both. Anker, “Postcritical Reading.”

41. Guillory, “The Ethical Practice of Modernity” 31.

42. It’s happening: see for example Flynn, “On Being Precarious,” and the Post45 Contemporaries cluster on “Dark Academia.”