The Reader

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

Curious of the love scenes between a fifteen year-old kid and a woman more than twice his age, I watched Academy award-nominated “The Reader” at Vivo on Tuesday afternoon.

The passionate scenes were, to say the least, arresting. They definitely add up to my repertoire of images of intimacy and human touch. What struck me more than the unconventional love affair between the 15 year-old Michael Berg and 30 plus year-old Hannah Schmitz, though, was the film’s portrayal of oral interpretation (oral reading) as “a re-creative art” and of literacy both as an instrument of liberation and oppression especially of the non-literate (or of those still operating in the realm of oral cultures).

Listening to the 15 year-old Michael read stories from great literature out loud to Hannah (as part of their lovemaking ritual) brought to mind memories of one of the courses I taught back in the UP. I taught Oral Interpretation for two semesters in Los Banos and if I were to teach that course again, I would include the film in my list of required audio-visual texts.

Oral interpretation – the study of literature via performance – features the text and makes use of body, voice, and other accoutrements to suggest the life of prose or poetry as understood by the reader after a careful study of the literary piece. Unlike that of acting or impersonating, oral interpretation’s primary goal is for the piece of literature to come alive from the printed page; the performer is merely a vessel through which listeners get a taste of literature as performed – as it should be, that is. (More sophisticated speech departments have renamed this area “performance studies” which has generated a number of advanced theories on text and performance.)

The film’s take on oral interpretation gets more riveting when an older Michael records his oral reading/ interpretation of great – more like “canonical” – literature on tape: from Homer’s epic “Odyssey” to Anton Chekov’s “The Lady with the Little Dog.” He sends these tapes to Hannah in her cell in Germany, who at this time was serving life sentence for war crimes during the Nazi regime.

Ralph Fiennes’ Michael, definitely crispier in his renditions of literary masterpieces, suggests that the performer is a living text. What can be gleaned from the older Michael is a more experienced performer whose life intertwined with the life of the literature he reads out loud re-creates art in a much more mature and more informed fashion compared to how he read them orally when he was a kid with raging hormones.

Then there’s the part on literacy. Hannah Schmitz’s character – ably portrayed by Kate Winslet – is an illiterate tram conductor who later in the film is revealed to have worked as one of the guards for a Nazi satellite. She is later tried and sentenced for life for an act she accepts with full responsibility but for which evidence available to Michael’s character (this time as a law student witnessing the trial) proves otherwise. In this gripping story, Hannah would rather choose to be punished incommensurate to her participation in the war than to experience the shame of being discovered illiterate.

The depiction of Hannah’s debilitating illiteracy has its ups though – at least to me as a viewer. Her appreciation of a book read aloud – of the spoken word – seems rare and distinct from how most of today’s and even the previous generations would find, say, Homer’s “Odyssey” interpreted orally. Thanks to Kate Winslet, Hannah’s character as a non-literate woman but whose mind operates in an oral culture comes very much alive to me.

In his classic book “Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” (1982), Walter Ong characterizes thought and expression in the primary oral culture as “additive rather than subordinative”; “aggregative rather than analytic” (reliance on formula); “redundant or copious”; “conservative or traditionalist” (premium on old wise men); “close to the human lifeworld” (little concern with abstraction); “agonistically toned”; “empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced”; “homeostatic”; and “situational rather than abstract.” Some of these features are evident in Winslet’s characterization of Hannah. Her empathetic reaction towards every story becomes startling because it is something most people trained in written and printed (chirographic and typographic) cultures would not express. For instance, her utter embarrassment at hearing the words from DH Lawrence’s controversial “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” manifests in some way her mental model’s closeness to the human life world. Hannah is also portrayed by Winslet as agonistically toned – argumentative and aggressive – especially in the courtroom scene where Hannah responds to the judge’s questions on her participation in the Nazi regime.

One of Ong’s important insights about the oral mind is that it is most capable of listening intently and appreciatively to every sound it hears; it can also create patterns – mnemonics – to preserve what it deems worth preserving in memory. Hannah, it seemed, held on to the sound of great literature to remember what is beautiful about human nature and the world in order to erase from her memory the horrors of the past. Interestingly, it is the electronic medium (represented by the recorder and the cassette tapes bearing Michael’s recorded oral readings) that ushers her entry into the written/ chirographic world.

Much as I would like to be celebratory about the beauty of the oral mind, it remains a fact that in a world once dominated by the printed word, and now, by the electronic media, the wisdom of orality as demonstrated by non-literate peoples will always be relegated to the sidelines. While the film is outright about its take on (il)literacy – that there is no other way but to promote literacy to liberate the human mind – it also brings to the fore what literacy can do to marginalize or even to disable people.

A text-centric culture relies on, and therefore submits fully to, the primacy of the documented written or printed word. At the time Hannah was on trial, the written documents – a published account of Jewish oppression from a mother and a daughter who survived the Holocaust and a report attested to by Hannah and the other defendants – were supreme. They were the warrants and the back-ups that supported the link between data and claim, between stories of eyewitnesses and the accusations for which the defendants were tried. They constituted a part of the history of the Holocaust and the war.

While there is a lot to celebrate about literacy, it cannot be denied that it can also obliterate that which can be expressed in ways other than writing or print. To some extent, it simplifies the complexity of what has been. It shuns information and insight from that which is unavailable to the silent reader. Admirably, “The Reader” – communicated through a medium that uses visual text and the spoken, written and printed words – subtly poses this problem to its viewers for them to ponder and to think about.