NOT SPEED READING: The slow pleasures of research

by JULIA PANKO

This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research?

Lately, I have been dreaming of archives. I have never visited the Harry Ransom Center in person, but I recently perused its finding aids and made a checklist for a future trip. Noting the items from the Virginia Woolf Collection that I want to study, I was reminded of Woolf’s essay “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia.” In it, Woolf wrote, “We like to feel . . . that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers.”[1] I daydream about examining the Ransom Center’s collection of books from Woolf’s personal library, summoning her ghost as I survey the physical traces left by her reading.

COVID-19 has stalled my travel plans indefinitely. Even as my fingers itch to work with archival materials, I am more grateful than ever for the resources that exist in digital form—everything from the Ransom Center’s online collection of the letters of Katherine Mansfield (Woolf’s friend, fellow modernist, and sometimes-rival), to those bread-and-butter research materials, articles from academic journals. I am newly struck by the ease and speed with which I access such content. I remember, as an undergraduate, descending into my college library’s basement and twisting the crank that would move the rolling shelves apart so that I could find the journal I was seeking. It was a slow process.

Since the onset of this pandemic, I have been reflecting on the speeds at which we read and research. I study the novel, a genre that has an ambiguous relationship to speed. On the one hand, the novel is long. Indeed, its length is one of the few attributes theorists of the novel agree on. As digital media have prompted anxiety about their impact on users’ ability to read long, complex works, many scholars have held up the novel as the paragon of deep, contemplative reading. The Internet is fast, such critiques imply; the novel is slow, and slow is good.

On the other hand, the novel has long been a vehicle for quick, voracious reading. We speak of “page turners” and “beach reads,” names that imply zipping effortlessly through a story or breezily escaping into fiction. Literary history is replete with critiques of the novel as an inferior genre precisely because, these accounts contend, novels encourage readers to speed through them too rapidly (and, perhaps, too pleasurably), rather than reading them with slow and deliberate critical rigor. In practice, we may experience either speed or slowness when reading a novel: we may swiftly thumb through a paperback or linger for many days over an immersive story.

Research, at least in my experience, is more usually a slow process. Certainly there are bright bursts of inspiration, invigorating moments when I dash down a research rabbit hole in pursuit of a new line of inquiry, or when I, too, get swept up in the pleasure of reading a novel in my field. On the whole, however, research consists of the slow burn of meticulous reading and writing, working through an argument as I shape and reshape the lines of my analysis.

To analyze a novel, a researcher must grapple not only with its specific issues of style and plot but also with its cultural and historical contexts. My own research explores how novels and reading are conditioned by the media cultures within which novels circulate. When writing about Woolf’s Orlando, for instance, I have discussed that novel’s commentary on the relative virtues of manuscripts versus mass-printed books, as well as the significance of the choices she made about Orlando’s typographical layout.

From the book’s size, to the texture of its paper and ink, to the placement of its section breaks, Orlando’s earliest readers experienced aspects of the novel often lost to later readers. To take an example from the Hogarth Press’s first printing: at the moment when, in one of the novel’s most dramatic and mysterious moments, Orlando is transformed from a man into a woman, five asterisks cross the page. It is as if they mark a rupture that neither language nor the printing process can adequately represent.

The material, medial history of books matters to the study of the novel. If we are to account for the slowness or speed of the novel, for instance, we must consider the media that house it. The print book marshals a reader’s time and attention in particular ways. It allows for such novelistic affordances as the ability to bind hundreds of pages of narrative together, to flip back in a long narrative, and to bookmark and easily resume one’s place. Digital platforms have their own impact on the speeds at which readers consume novels. When I download an audiobook from my local public library—as so many library patrons have done since the start of the pandemic, as rates of novel consumption have skyrocketed worldwide, especially via digital platforms—I can set it to play at an accelerated speed.

Research, at least in my experience, is more usually a slow process. Certainly there are bright bursts of inspiration, invigorating moments when I dash down a research rabbit hole in pursuit of a new line of inquiry, or when I, too, get swept up in the pleasure of reading a novel in my field. On the whole, however, research consists of the slow burn of meticulous reading and writing, working through an argument as I shape and reshape the lines of my analysis.
—JULIA PANKO

The most robust theorizations of the novel’s relationship to media culture often proceed from careful engagement with archival collections. Digitized records can play a crucial role in this work, generating serendipitous discoveries. While searching the Ransom Center’s Digital Collections, I was surprised to find a letter from Woolf in the PEN Teaching Guide’s Writers in Exile and Global Refugees collection. In addition to learning that Woolf had attempted to assist Mia Spera, a Jewish writer in exile—an episode from Woolf’s life that I had not known of previously—I was fascinated by this document as a media artifact.

The general neatness of the typescript is disrupted by the X’d out letters where Woolf adjusted her wording mid-sentence, as well as by the crookedly placed “Yours sincerely.” The typewriter’s colored ink contrasts with that of the printed letterhead (displaying the address “52, Tavistock Square”—the residence from which Woolf operated the Hogarth Press). Both are juxtaposed with her handwritten signature at the bottom of the page. This is a rich object for literary history and media history alike. How, I wonder, might we revisit our understanding of Woolf the writer through the lens of her typed correspondence?

While digital materials can suggest new avenues of inquiry, one of the greatest pleasures of research is visiting an archives in person. In my own work, it involves discovering new clues from the material forms of novels, books, and other media. To understand Woolf as a novelist is to grapple with her relationship with books. The novels Woolf printed at the Hogarth Press have received the most scholarly attention, but the books from her personal library also shed light on Woolf’s habits as a reader and collector of books. Woolf spoke of “the pleasure of owning the books [one] read[s].”[4] Studying the Ransom Center’s collection of books that Woolf owned, and seeking the insights they might yield, is itself a pleasure that I hope to experience in the not-too-distant future.

Books and other media are part of the story of the novel in non-trivial ways. They guide researchers in uncovering the histories of novel reading and literary production, and they illuminate the novel’s cultural significance. In the process, they show that media are not simply incidental containers for the texts they hold but are rather a vital part of the history of literature. Even as digital platforms and networks offer new points of access to archival collections and new, convenient platforms for reading, the slow pleasures of the novel—reading it, and researching it—continue to intersect with those of the print book.

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[1] Virginia Woolf, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia,” in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth, 1980), 40-50, 40.

[2] James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903), Pink Note–The Novelette, 1883-1884. Watercolor on paper, 25.3 x 15.5 cm, F1902.158a-c, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, CCO. (See the full image on the Smithsonian site).

[3] Letter from Virginia Woolf to Storm Jameson dated January 22, 1939 featured in the Ransom Center’s PEN Teaching Guide. PEN (Organization) Records, 1912-2008, Box 97, Folder 3, 001.

[4] Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, “Are Too Many Books Written and Published?” (1927), intro. Melba Cuddy-Keane, PMLA 121, no. 1 (2006): 241.