Book Review:  How to Read, by J. B. Kerfoot

Subject:  First Area of Involvement of Kerfoot’s Constructive and Critical Reading Method of Learning How to Read:  Reading as Producing a Mental Movie

The first blog entry on September 15, 2023 reviewing J. B. Kerfoot’s How to Read introduced the book and looked at Kerfoot’s assertion that “reading is a form of living.”  In this blog entry, I will examine the first area of involvement in Kerfoot’s constructive and critical reading method of learning how to read:  reading as producing a mental movie.  This is a continuation of the first chapter of Kerfoot’s book entitled, “How to Read.

++++++++++

After considering the dinner party where he and the other guests became engrossed in the possibilities of reading, Kerfoot begins another line of query by stating that, “Until ten years or twelve years ago, no man who ever lived could tell another person a story.”[i]  He says that down to the recent present that authors (Homer, Chaucer, Dante, Dickens, to Conan Doyle) could not and “The best that the very best of them ever succeeded in doing was to trick or to coax, or to compel their readers, or hearers into telling stories to themselves.”[ii]  He says it was now the cinema that literally could provide the details and characterizations for a story to be told.

To prove his point, he takes us to a film play entitled, “The Two Rattlesnakes.”  Briefly summarized the film’s story is that Jim in a remote desert cattle ranch in Arizona is bitten by a rattlesnake and is gravely ill.  His beloved, Mollie, in her New York City apartment, receives a telegram to rush to Jim’s side. She takes a train West and encounters a villain, a human rattlesnake, who learns of her situation and abducts her to his cattle ranch of thieves.  Then the rescue of Mollie takes place and in the final scene of the film, the villain is thrown down into the ravine to face the rattlesnake that bit Jim.

Kerfoot likens reading to producing a mental movie but with a big difference from a movie produced by a movie company.

A movie company has an author’s story to tell and produces the story with its physical resources to make a film.  It provides the location/settings (a ranch in Arizona, a New York City apartment), the particulars needed for the settings (a rattlesnake), the actors to play the parts (the parts of Jim, Mollie, and the Villain), directions for the actors to play their parts, the actors attire, and every other aspect needed to tell the story.  The movie company’s final rendition of the story is projected onto a movie screen and is specifically telling the viewer of the film how to view the film as rendered by the movie company.

With a mental movie the big difference is it is the reader is who is rendering the author’s story being read with his, or her, own mental resources by providing the specific details of the story.  For Kerfoot it is the art and skill of an author to give the reader a story to produce.  The author is inducing the reader to produce a story in their mind with their mental resources (i.e., their built-in movie company) for the locations, scenery, costumes, and the like to produce the mental movie.  The reader’s resources in producing the mental movie are the reader’s living experience, thoughts, and feelings all combined into imagining the story.  For Kerfoot, there is no other way this can happen since the book’s story is not being literally projected as the images of a movie would be onto the reader’s mind.  It is the reader who is generating and furnishing the images that a movie would be to tell the story. Further, Kerfoot strongly emphasizes not seeing reading as merely a receptive act of taking in the words of the story (the text) as if the reality of reading is the words of the text and nothing more is needed to be done by the reader, analogous to a viewer taking in the images of a movie and having to do nothing more.  Instead, he sees the author’s text as a scenario, a set of instructions, and, in collaboration with the author, the reader produces, or creates, the scenario-their version of the scenario given their living experience and understandings- in their mind.  It is what happens inside one’s self when reading and what one makes of what is being read that are the important matters for Kerfoot:  “For reading consists of our making – with the aid of the pattern and the hints supplied by the author, but out of our mental stock,  which we have produced by living – something that never existed before; something that only exists at all so far as we make it; something that can never be duplicated by any other reader; something that we ourselves can never wholly reproduce.”[iii]

Reading then is a partnership with the author, with the reader using his, or her, built up living experiences, knowledge, and emotions to produce the author’s text in the reader’s mind.  Reading is not passively receiving the text by the reader from the author, but is actively partaking in creating the meaning of the text.  It is the reader who creates what is being read-it is not given to him or her as it would seem by the text of the book.  Kerfoot recognizes the importance of the author’s text, nevertheless he favors what the reader makes of the text of the book read as having more importance because learning to read means engaging and enlarging one’s resources.

Note, just as there is story scenario to be produced, there is also an idea scenario to be produced. For Kerfoot, what happens in the readers mind in producing a story, a work fiction, has its parallel counterpart in reading nonfiction.  If every reader has a mental movie production company to draw upon in their mind to produce a story, then every reader additionally has an idea distillery in their mind to process ideas and information from the text being read.  When reading a nonfiction book, the author is prompting the reader with ideas and the reader is sending these ideas to the idea distillery in his, or her, mind to be distilled into pairings of existing thoughts, or synthesized into new understandings, in both cases using the living experience and knowledge of the reader.

As an area of involvement, producing a mental movie is a constructive reading activity.  In partnership with the author, the reader is using their mind with its built-up living experiences, knowledge and emotions to produce the author’s text.  And with each book read in this ongoing process of producing mental movies, the reader is increasing their stores of experience, emotions, and knowledge, as well as constantly turning over these accumulated stores in new ways and directions.

Also, one final matter. The dinner party that Kerfoot attended and the movie play he gave were scenarios that Kerfoot invented-they, in fact, never happened.  He invented them in order to guide the reader in understanding how to read. Kerfoot is putting into practice what his reading method is by proffering scenarios for the reader to produce to gain an understanding of learning to read.  To quote Kerfoot, “This volume, in short, contains no royal road to learning- not even learning to read.  It contains a scenario which you as my partner of the moment, are invited to ‘produce-the scenario of an inquiry, leading to conclusions.”[iv]  This is part of Kerfoot’s style and substance, both of which are considerable. I will not in forthcoming entries be using the various scenarios he uses; I will be taking from the reasoning and conclusions he provides.

The next blog entry on reviewing How to Read, by J. B. Kerfoot will be on September 22, 2023.  It will consider the second area of involvement in Kerfoot’s constructive and critical orientation to learning how to read: handling the meaning of words.

FOOTNOTES

[i] How to Read, 1916, 6

[ii] Ibid, 6

[iii] Ibid, 21

[iv] Ibid, 55