BEYOND COMPREHENSION:
WHY “HARD READING” IS TOO EASY

Deanne Bogdan
James Cunningham
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Keith Raitz objects to “the myth of easy reading,” which he views as embodying the erroneous notion that comprehension is a purpose of reading and that this purpose can be achieved through the simple recognition (decoding) of orthographic/phonetic symbols. At the heart of Raitz’ criticism of this myth is his assertion that its proponents have mistaken comprehension for the purpose of reading when actually it is the very success condition of the reading act; that is, one who has not comprehended simply has not read. Further, Raitz holds that Bogdan and Straw err in the same manner as do the proponents of the myth of easy reading when they imply that communication can be a purpose of reading.¹ Raitz argues that communication in reading, which he identifies with the reception of authorial meaning, is entailed by comprehension. Thus communication, or the reception of authorial meaning, can no more be a purpose of reading than can be comprehension.

For Raitz, the myth of easy reading has its basis in the conduit theory of communication, which advances the notion that reified ideas are carried within messages defined as constructions of verbal signals. Raitz feels that this theory is commonly taken to imply that, while hard work is required of authors in the construction of messages bearing their intent, successfully constructed messages require only the easy work of decoding signals on the part of readers in order for them to comprehend that intent. The idea that one reads for comprehension leads to dependency upon the assumption that competent reading is primarily a question of writers being skilled at building their constructions. This, in turn, presumes an ethos of reading in which writing is deemed to impart something that is received passively by readers.

As an alternative to this misleading conduit theory of communication, Raitz offers Michael Reddy’s “reconstructionist” theory of “hard reading” as presenting a more accurate portrait of the reading act.² In accordance with this theory, meaning is not contained in messages but rather is reconstructed by readers in the act of reading messages. For messages are properly understood as sets of instructions to which readers apply the interpretive skills or repertoires they have learned. This makes comprehension possible. Because authors often wish to relay complex meanings to readers, they will employ complex sets of instructions through such literary devices as metaphor, ambiguity, and irony. Therefore reading conceived as meaning making that readers do when they bring their interpretive repertoires to bear in the reconstruction of authorial meaning can be hard work demanding interpretive skills equal to the complexity of the language employed by the author. Hard reading is what is required if students are to become truly literate.

While we share Raitz’ concern for improving students’ literacy, we think he is wrong in his apparent assumption that, wherever communication is described (even by implication) as a purpose of reading, the myth of easy reading and the conduit metaphor are afoot. Raitz’ assumption is apparent in his criticism of Straw and Bogdan in their Introduction to Beyond Communication. But when they imply that communication is a purpose of reading, this does not mean that Straw and Bogdan subscribe to the conduit theory of communication nor that they have succumbed to the myth of easy reading. Rather, they call for the abandonment of the communication contract because they adhere to a model of reading which advocates a constructionist rather than a reconstructionist conception of the reading act. In our response we will use the distinction between these two conceptions of reading to make three main points about some assumptions underlying the myth of easy reading, with particular attention to Raitz’ deployment of Bogdan and Straw in making his case.

The first point we wish to make is that Raitz appears to conflate the position of Bogdan and Straw with those who succumb to the conduit metaphor through the myth of easy reading when he writes that “both early school reading programs and the editors of Beyond Communication misrepresent the terms of the [communication] contract. Reading is comprehending the author’s text, but it is not as easy as contracting for a load of lumber and then being on hand to receive it.”³ This statement is odd in light of the fact that Raitz appears to take some care to explain just what Straw and Bogdan mean by going beyond communication. In this explanation, however, he stops short of including those elements of their introduction that most clearly indicate that Bogdan and Straw are both breaking the communication contract and rejecting the conduit metaphor. Raitz would have them, along with him, reject the conduit metaphor not by abrogating the communication contract but by expanding it, that is by replacing transmission of meaning with reconstruction, as Reddy does. That Raitz appears not to understand why Bogdan and Straw go beyond communication is perplexing, especially as later in their introduction they outline what they deem to be a historical progression from reading as transmission to translation to interaction to transaction to actualization.⁴ Thus they explicitly flesh out the communication contract so as to locate their own position outside it. Moreover, they make a special point of noting the “continuing disagreement among scholars about whether meaning is wholly constructed by the reader — a somewhat radical position — or whether it is reconstructed by the reader — a somewhat conservative position.”⁵ Reconstructionists believe in Raitz’ brand of “hard reading,” that is, one that rejects the “easy reading” of the conduit metaphor, opting instead for a model of reading which through “continuous effort and…large amounts of verbal interaction” must “counteract partial miscommunication” in order to reconstruct the author’s thoughts. This view of reading, which regards communication as axiomatic to reading comprehension, is predicated on the possibility of commensurability between author and reader. Constructionists, on the other hand, hold that meaning may well undermine the author’s thoughts. This would also be an undermining of the communication contract⁶ in favor of partial perspective, what Donna Haraway calls “situated knowledge”;⁷ situated knowledge is not something to be counteracted or supplemented, but privileged, in reading acts.

Why does Raitz accuse Bogdan and Straw of misrepresenting the terms of the communication contract as though they have not made the distinction between the conduit and reconstruction metaphors (the latter termed “the tool maker’s paradigm”⁸ by Reddy) when they have gone to some lengths to elaborate on them in coming to their actualization model of reading? And, given Raitz’ agreement with them about the conduit metaphor, why does he not take them on where they really disagree, that is, over the difference between reading as reconstruction and construction? Why, instead of accusing them of sins they might really be guilty of (sins they would readily confess to) such as assuming “a model of literary reading for nonliterary reading,”⁹ does he co-opt them, conflate their use of “communication” with his of “comprehension,”¹⁰ only then to consign them to the great unwashed who also fall prey to the myth of easy reading because they, too, unwittingly confound purpose and process? Why has Raitz misread Bogdan and Straw? Is it that he has not followed their instructions very well when they emphatically state that the communication contract is what they are rejecting? Or can it be that, instead of reconstructing their thoughts, Raitz is actualizing himself as a reader? If the latter, he has had to make his reading easier by “massaging the facts a little to make a point.”¹¹ He may even be using them as a “whipping boy”¹² in order to critique the conduit metaphor by means of the reconstructionist one, a critique already implicit in the Introduction to Beyond Communication, and explicitly dealt with by at least one author in that volume, who draws on the same Reddy article as does Raitz.¹³ It may be that incommensurability as a norm for reading is too far out on the edge of the abyss for Raitz; he would rather not go beyond communication. Straw and Bogdan would willingly grant him this position, as they certainly allow in their introduction that not all reading theorists agree with them.¹⁴ But why does he not allow them, or indeed, anyone, to go beyond communication? And, what does this resistance to going beyond communication, and beyond comprehension, mask?

This brings us to our second point. Our reading of Raitz points to the possibility that underlying the reconstructionist metaphor of “hard reading” is his rejection of precisely what Bogdan and Straw espouse: a literary model of reading as paradigmatic for all reading. Raitz’ bottom line response to the myth of easy reading is that there is no reading without comprehension, no comprehension without communication between author and reader, and no act of communication without the reconstruction by the reader of the author’s meaning. Here Raitz’ identification of the reconstruction of authorial meaning with the success condition of both communication and comprehension is what constitutes the basis of his conflating his view of comprehension with Bogdan and Straw’s of communication. But the editors of Beyond Communication also go beyond authorial meaning as the norm for reading, and they do so without subscribing to a conduit theory of communication. Even in Reddy’s parlance, authors often construct structures of signals from which more meaning than their meaning can be constructed, in turn, by readers. It is this excess of meaning that is especially proper to the literary work of art, a position expressed by twentieth century critical theorists, such as Adorno, Derrida, Northrop Frye, and others, namely that, once it is completed, a work of art is independent of the author and takes on an expressive life of its own. Thus, even if we grant, in accordance with the reconstruction model, that writing does not carry meaning, that it is composed of signal groupings to which readers apply interpretive skills in the making of meaning, we need not concede that reading has been achieved only when readers have reconstructed the author’s meaning. As Adorno disparagingly remarks, an art work that conveys only the author’s intentions “is little more than precisely that; a sign of what he [sic] wanted to say or an impoverished allegory.”¹⁵ Of course Raitz is right in his concern that the author’s intended meaning must be understood as something that readers might reconstruct from a text and that this work of reconstruction must be recognized as hard work. But reading does not require that the intended meaning of the author should be the only thing that is constructed. Thus, authorial meaning is not inherent in reading after all; it is something that is read for, but it is also something that need not be read for.

Reading as reconstruction may be equivalent to comprehending authorial meaning, but it is not sufficient to a description of the reading act. An actualization model of reading would legitimate interpretive repertoires derived from motivational and volitional factors, the social embeddedness of readers, and meaningful constructions, all of which would subordinate authorial meaning to the ends of actualization. For Raitz, however, reading processes go one way only, and a reading process which requires that the reader should make meaning that is independent of or even subversive of authorial meaning would not be countenanced as reading. Insofar as literary structure and texture (qualities such as irony, ambiguity, and the like) are part of the process of reading, they are, for Raitz, simply aids to readers as they work hard to reconstruct intended complex meanings. Unable to imagine a model of literature as the ground bespeaking infinite possibilities for the making of meaning, Raitz insists that everyone must read his way lest they fail to read at all. Thus the ideological hegemony of authorial meaning is preserved under the guise of “the way reading is.”

Our final point considers some implications of a literary model of reading as the paradigm for all reading, one which is afforded by a constructionist or actualization model of reading. Bogdan and Straw embrace the value of the dissonance between sign and meaning, which is the one taken-for-granted in literary meaning. Indeed, literary reading is the only form of reading that is “free from the fallacy of unmediated expression.”¹⁶ This assumption separates Bogdan and Straw from Raitz and his belief in the ultimate commensurability between author and reader and in language as a code that is crackable. Raitz has bleached out Reddy’s conception of “radical subjectivism”¹⁷ (which, as we might read it, could open the way for a constructionist view of reading) into a less rigid, but nonetheless conservative, version of the conduit metaphor. In doing so, Raitz teeters on the edge of his own pit, the very conduit metaphor he so abhors. We would argue that when it comes to reading, unless the easy distinction between purpose and process is deliberately dissolved, one remains hopelessly trapped in the “Message sent/message received” paradigm which informs Raitz’ analogy of the reader to the drinker. A more apt analogy for the reader as a real producer of meaning would be the drinker brewing the beer or the runner forging a path. Within Raitz’ formulation, Reddy’s “radical subjectivism,” which affords the gaps in the sign-chain that are constitutive of the creative production of meaning, collapses into reading as comprehending something — and nothing else Raitz can imagine. So long as reading is comprehending something, meaning, even literary meaning, which Raitz appears to value, can only ever be Frye’s “rhetorical analogue to…truth.”¹⁸ Within this context, literature can only either reinforce or countervail propositions put forward by the “hard” disciplines, those nonliterary subjects that really mean what they say, and which are capable of mastery by reading that is hard enough.

We think that kind of hard reading is just too easy. Reading is not identical with comprehension or communication. Unless volition, purpose, motivation, and social processes are construed as necessary and sufficient conditions of reading, reading just does not happen. If reading instruction is to reap real benefits, “all reader knowledge becomes critical to reading”(emphasis added).¹⁹ But so long as one cleaves to reconstructing the author’s thoughts as normative of reading, and denies that the conditions of reading are constitutive of reading, one is in the same breath necessarily devaluing what students might bring to the reading act as unworthy of what would count as reading, with the result that reading for empowerment becomes meaningless.

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¹ Stanley B. Straw and Deanne Bogdan, “Introduction,” in Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism, eds. Deanne Bogdan and Stanley B. Straw (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1990).

² Michael Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor — A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

³ Keith Raitz, “The Myth of Easy Reading,” in Philosophy of Education 1992, ed. H. Alexander (Champaign, Illinois: The Philosophy of Education Society, 1992).

⁴ Straw and Bogdan, 14-18.

⁵ Ibid., 17

⁶ Reddy, 289.

⁷ Straw and Bogdan, 2-5.

⁸ Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges; The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Feminist Studies 14, 3: 575-600.

⁹ Reddy, 292-297.

¹⁰ Sandra Stotsky, “Review of Beyond Communication: Reading Comprehension and Criticism,” in College Composition and Communication 43 (1992): 97.

¹¹ Raitz’ conflation of his use of “comprehension” with Straw and Bogdan’s use of “communication” is evident if we juxtapose their two texts. Raitz writes that Straw and Bogdan “seem to maintain that receiving an author’s message (comprehending) and that traditional conceptions of reading have led us to believe that it is the purpose. They grant that comprehension is one purpose a reader might have, but only one among many other possible purposes.” There is no evidence that Straw and Bogdan mean comprehension when they are speaking of communication: “many authors are no longer suggesting that the primary purposes of reading are for communication…. What they all have in common is a notion that the central purpose for reading is not communication, though one of its purposes may be communicative (i.e., a communication from author to reader)” (emphasis original, Straw and Bogdan, 3).

¹² Keith Raitz, “Response to ‘Literacy as Disempowerment,’” in Philosophy of Education 1990, ed. David P. Ericson (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1991), 88.

¹³ Keith Raitz, “Detached Technique and Expert Systems: Dead End for the Effective Teaching Movement?” in Philosophy of Education 1988, ed. James M. Giarelli (Normal, Illinois: Philosophy of Education Society, 1989), 50.

¹⁴ See Susan Hynds, “Reading as a Social Event: Comprehension and Response in the Text, Classroom, and World,” in Bogdan and Straw, 245ff.

¹⁵ Straw and Bogdan, 2.

¹⁶ T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. C. Lenhardt, eds. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 187.

¹⁷ Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 17.

¹⁸ Reddy, 295.

¹⁹ Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1973), 69.

²⁰ Straw and Bogdan, 17-18.