Peter Kivy is known mainly for his work in the philosophy of music, but in his 2006 The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature he suggests that silent reading also has a musical quality: It is a performance by a performer to an audience of one who happens to be identical to the performer. A recent TLS review summed up the argument:
“silent reading is (despite appearances) a performing art, made up of recitals in the ‘mind’s ear.’ He employs the figure of the Homeric rhapsode in Plato’s Ion as a way of portraying this idea. ‘[An] illuminating way of characterizing the silent novel-reading experience is as a performance in the head of a rhapsode who, like Ion, not only tells a story but comments on its philosophical, moral, or other content.’ In practice, this makes a literary text something akin to a musical score: not itself an instance of the work of art, but rather the template from which instances are generated, the ‘performances’ of which vary depending on who is reading.”
This has, Kivy argues, major implications for understanding the aesthetic experience of reading fiction.
The TLS reviewer again: “Kivy adds that one reason novels tend to be read no more than once is that, unlike other arts, the reader is confined to the same performer of the story each time (namely themselves). This combination of phenomenological poverty and limited performative scope is, so to speak, the structural condition for the most common variety of novel-reading . . . . it is wrong to imagine that in order to attain something like a “real” experience of literature, one must learn to reread and to pay attention to the structural aspects of the art. This is simply not what draws most people to novels, and Kivy sees nothing wrong with that.”
He doesn’t despise fiction by any means. He only wants to specify its aesthetic effect. And he ultimately draws a stronger conclusion: “Kivy risks a meatier claim near his conclusion when he writes that, in general, novels will command less emotional clout than plays or movies in virtue of their comparative aesthetic thinness. But instead of exploring the potentially interesting nuances of this idea (for instance, might it only apply to relatively transient emotions, such as joy or fear, or also more durable ones, such as love?), he swiftly adds the caveat that it needn’t correspond to experience in any individual case, given the number of imponderable variables in play.”
