sotto voce

Good writing slows down the skimming gaze, either because it forces you to think, or because it forces you to sound.

Every silent reader contains a sotto voce reader, undoing the distinction between talk (putting out) and reading (taking in).

Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading, p. 30.

Jacobus is here thinking the mouth as a site where words enter and exit our body; in other words, a form of border control. In general, at the border, one wishes for the queue to move as quickly as possible and to get past the officer without incident. So it is with much of my academic reading, trying to get through it as quickly as possible, adding the critic’s analysis to my store of knowledge without being overtly challenged. And yet for all that, the critics whose work I value most are not the ones who are fastest to read but, on the contrary, slowest. I used to think that their words were so beautifully thought that they force me to pause and reread. Ponder. But, in fact, some critics construct arguments so musical in their movement that they demand to be read out loud. Like a poem or phonetic transcription.