Philosophy of the Performing Arts

theater, dance, and literature 129
usually viewed as the performing arts – music, theater, and dance. Peter
Kivy (2006), however, has recently defended the surprising thesis that lit-
erature in general – not just drama or even poetry – should be viewed as
a performed art, analogous to music. The novel, he maintains, is properly
viewed as a performable work whose performances are readings – datable
events – enacted by readers. Reading itself, then, is a performing art. The lit-
erary text, like the musical score, is a notational prescription for generating
instances of the work. Furthermore, silent readings of novels are analogous
to performances of musical works “in the head” by score readers: “We hear
stories in the head, the way Beethoven, when he read the scores of Handel,
heard musical performances in the head” (Kivy 2006, 63). Performances of
literary works in the head can be seen as expressive “soundings” which, as in
the case of soundings of musical works by score readers, embody an inter-
pretation of the overall sense of the work. The silent reader, Kivy maintains,
expressively impersonates the storyteller, while at the same time critically
commenting and reflecting on the content of the narrative. Such reflection
takes place in the “gaps” that punctuate, and the “afterlife” that follows, the
reading performance in the narrow sense. The case for viewing silent reading
as a performance of the literary work, he claims, depends upon the sense it
makes of our reading experience.
There are, however, reasons to question Kivy’s claim. The “storyteller” we
supposedly impersonate is the person held responsible for constructing the
story. Where novels have impersonal third-person narrators – as, for exam-
ple, in Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter – the silent reader imper-
sonates whoever is taken to be telling the story – Greene himself on some
accounts, or, more plausibly, a fictional author of some kind. What, however,
of a novel with a first-person narrator, such as David Copperfield? It seems that
the reader impersonates the storyteller who is himself impersonating David
Copperfield, since that is what the model takes a storyteller to do in telling
a first-person fictional narrative. In the case of direct quotation in such a
fiction, the reader must presumably impersonate the storyteller impersonat-
ing the narrator impersonating one of the characters. But this seems to be
a somewhat baroque description of the phenomenology of reading. If silent
readers do indeed expressively sound direct quotations in a fictional narra-
tive in distinctive ways, it seems more intuitive to say that they impersonate
the character herself, rather than enact the complex set of nested imper-
sonations just sketched.
Even if Kivy were correct about the phenomenology of reading, however,
it is questionable whether this could establish that the reading of literary
fictions is a performing art. One concern is whether the sounding of the
literary text in the head of the reader qualifies as a performance, given our
elucidation of this notion in Chapter 1. A performer, as we saw, is guided in