READING—what sort of subject is this? There are “reading scores,” and “my early reading,” and “reading the future.” There are neurology and pedagogy and linguistics and dyslexia and lipreading. And then there is plain reading for information and pleasure—neither very plain indeed.
In writing about reading, one is imposing more reading, a grave decision if the “worry” about reading, the decline of it, is more than a rumor. Virtue and pleasure attach to our subject. Virtue is conferred upon it from the outside, and the pleasure is to be subjective. It does not seem suitable to take a legislative tone, to invade by way of advice or censure, this solitary, private act.
I like the phrase “functional literacy.” It is, apparently, a diminished, but not entirely neglected, condition. Fifth grade, we hear, and what does that mean? Fifth grade is a state with many word-blessings. Lilac and rose (lipsticks); sheer black (stockings); men and ladies (toilets); bus stop, exit, take one before meals, 80-proof, on sale, free. But if I understand the term “functional literacy,” these words do not lead anywhere: fifth grade does not move to sixth, nor does exit to perilous curve. It is hard to understand a stasis, a cutoff, after the “functional literate” has arrived at “zip code,” an arcane bit of interesting and useful reading. There is some perturbation in the condition, and perhaps statistics are not able to keep up with the leaps and bounds that mere function provides like a set of muscles.
Figures about illiteracy among us may stun the mind of one looking out on a street filled with automobiles, hearing the planes whining down to the airports, knowing of sonics and stereophonics and miraculous little chips. We are, in literacy, forty-ninth among the 158 members of the United Nations, and that means 60 millions among us, including 47 percent of black youth, do not, cannot read. This fact seems to call up an ancient rural folk living in brutal, repetitive isolation, centuries past, one day like the next, the hut, the unlettered darkness. But that is not true; the illiterate are of course utterly contemporary in look and experience of life, and their plight is like some crippling or myopia, personalized and yet hidden, at least in some part of its manifestation. The scandal of it, surrounded by words like priorities, tax base, overcrowding, unfortunate methods of instruction, and the easy absorption of the figures without alarm would seem to indicate one of those shiftings in our apprehension of national destiny. The sacred school, the devotional teacher, the alphabet on the wall, the cutout apple in the window—these are nostalgic, small-town images whose hold on the imagination is merely sentimental. It appears that we can “live with” our expanding illiteracy and that it is to be thought of as a handicap, individually unfortunate, but not a stain on the national psyche. Education, then, is a sort of option, a curious settling down of the American half-serious utopian claim.
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To speak of a passion for reading is rather self-aggrandizing, as perhaps it would not have been in the past. This act, except for purposes of the classroom or for information, is self-propelled, unmortgaged, so to speak, not subject to obsolescence or engine trouble or the need for maintenance. It is not often that one is scolded for it, although biographies tell of the wishes of parents to interrupt on behalf of unchopped wood or expensive candles. Perhaps the love of, or the intense need for, reading is psychological, an eccentricity, even something like a neurosis, that is, a pattern of behavior that persists beyond its usefulness, which is controlled by inner forces and which in turn controls.
There seems to be a good deal of “practice” necessary to sustain the gift of genuine reading, practice being the adding of one book to another, the development of tone. Impediments to reading on the part of advanced students of literature are far from uncommon—not a reluctance before the act itself, but a sort of deafness in the matter of aesthetic tonality.
Too violent a contemporaneousness in the souls of some readers inhibits discussion and somehow infects the air, but with such subtle penetration it is hard to define. Things go on in a chatty manner, hardly to be understood as different from gossip about one’s friends. his may be thought of as propitious, the current right to remove literature from too great a degree of pedagogy and to restore it to experience. And, since about works of art there is no right opinion, it is something beyond that which troubles.
Tonalities and nuances give pause. Relentless contemporaneity produces some of the same reading defects, spiritual as well as vocal, that one often notices in the American performances of classical modern drama. The actors cannot get out of their own skins, despite the period costumes, the parasols, the old serfs shuffling in with a tea tray. Madame Bovary is an example that comes to mind because the text does not require exegesis. The students who have chosen literature for their university study are pleased to read the novel, perhaps again and again, and nothing onerous attaches to it as a “requirement,” such as might be felt in many cases about the burden of Spenser or Milton.
As the discussion goes on, we hear that Emma is “too romantic”; Ms. Homais is “just pretentious”; Charles is a “clod”; Rodolphe is “selfish”; and Léon is “weak.” The adjectives are to the point, naturally arrived at as descriptive efforts. Yet something is askew in the tone of the discussion. It is too intimate, too cozy; the distance has been traversed with a disfiguring speed. A masterpiece of created “tiresomeness,” becomes “tiresome,” and that is not the same thing. here is a sort of present tense of judgment that establishes a feeling of equity between author and reader.
In the latitudinarian air of the classroom, and no doubt elsewhere, there is the tendency among readers to populate works with themselves, their friends. There is too much self-esteem and too little surrender. So the students say this novel, with its diversions, “drags,” and Chekhov doesn’t make a “real point,” and Jane Austen is often silly, meaning that, in their view, the throb of afternoon calls, the bow at the ball, cannot bear the intentions attributed to them by the characters and, along the way of course, by Jane Austen herself. The personalization of fiction, the reduction of it to the boundaries of the reading self, often one who has lived for only a few decades in the twentieth century, is an intensive democratization not quite so felicitous for the spread of literature as one might have predicted. It bears some relation to the deformations of Socialist Realism—that is, the inclination, in this case, unconscious and without ideology, to impose current conditions upon the recalcitrant past. Some feminist critics wonder why Dorothea Brooke, after the “disaster” of her marriage to Casaubon, wants to marry the vaguely nitwitted Ladislaw? Dorothea has the money to “make a new life,” and in any case, she could go to work, if there was work then for women. So, psychologically nothing is to be accepted as given, created, composed, in accordance to the truth and imagination of its own terms.
On the other hand, less knowledgeable readers do not, in my view, read for a validation of their own experience. The stack of romances at the supermarket is noticeably shorter at the end of the day, showing the movements of commerce. For certain women, these seem to be a sort of daytime gift to themselves, as the washing machine growls through its cycles. It is something of an insult to ordinary people to imagine that they, for the moment, believe it possible to be as fascinating and sexy or as romantically cruel as the impossible characters on the page. They, the readers, will not experience in life a charming, interesting, detailed betrayal, but, if any, a dull, extended, paralyzing impasse. These mass-produced entertainments are rather like a glass of beer—Miller Time. They offer little instruction about the reading public for works with the claims of literature, are not in competition with them, and cannot be discussed except as items of capitalist market seduction.
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One of the results of genuine power in business, in politics, in law and medicine, is that there is no time to read. Time, that curious loss in a world of time-saving, is indeed running out, we might say. It takes with it the time-consuming reading. No doubt those who address their print to the powerful adjust their psyches and perhaps their styles to the inevitable reduction to memo and summary that lies ahead—summary, the passageway of information to those whose attention is solicited for the sake of the country, the legislative plans, the conduct of wars, the dilemmas of justice. Not reading has certain benign aspects for the powerful, who are thereby spared deprecations, advice, rumors, and plain insults.
For the chic and the rich, a certain ectoplasmic culture—thought to be taste—is considered of value. A crossword puzzle familiarity with names and tags is preventive, warding off embarrassment. Names have a glow, like a pear in autumn, and are a sweetening acquisition. The list is not punitive either. Renaissance, perhaps, but not necessarily the Risorgimento; Hamlet and Macbeth, but not Laertes and Macduff; Lazarus is metaphorical and Ezekiel isn’t; Dante, yes, but no shame will attach itself to a smile of confusion about Brunetto Latini, who, except for his learning, is very like one’s friends. In the television program about the Duke of Windsor, Mrs. Simpson had to explain to the Prince of Wales who Emily Bronte was—all done with a tolerant smile.
This is as it must be. Knowledge of literature is an idiosyncrasy, professional sometimes, and a scarcity otherwise, The literature of history and philosophy are also little mandarin buttons worn on the caps of a few. Perhaps a certain discrete honor accompanies these accomplishments, but the large, educated, reasonably prosperous public will for the most part want to buy and read books that have elements of current interest, either in the immediacy of the subject matter or in the strength of striking ideas. Yet, a considerable number of difficult and supremely valuable books are published each year, and someone buys them for the purpose of reading, else they would not be made available. This seems all we can ask, and what education and self-education have failed to stimulate cannot be forever lamented. And of course there is always the humbling fact that even the greatly learned and devotionally pursuing will indeed care and pursue less than they might.
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When one considers the nature of contemporary fiction and poetry, it would seem to deny the supposed lack of sophisticated culture and ready-reference comprehension on the part of the reader. The greatly admired authors are freely anarchic and demanding. It appears that those who read at all have read a lot. Much important contemporary writing is intensely “literary.” These compositions are not addressed to a void, but rather assume a common culture out there somewhere. Skimming the pages of a book of poetry that just arrived in the mail, my eye comes upon Faustus, Uccello (followed by a single-word sentence: Bird.), Orpheus, Alcibiades, Degas, Crivelli, Bechstein, Poussin, Myshkin, Beauvais, for a beginning list in verses that might be called “open.”
For a writer like Borges, the library is the landscape of human drama; it is experience, tragedy, social history. Among our own writers, satire and parody and mimicry are directed to a mind that must itself be richly aware of banalities, old movies, literary texts, conundrums, puns, a torrent of references. Ellipses, allusiveness, disconnection, are to be filled, identified, connected by the imagination and knowledge of the reader; otherwise the creative effort, so detailed, so mindful of tone, will have been in vain. “Description of physical appearance and mannerism is one of the several methods of characterization used by writers of fiction,” John Barth says in an early story. “But to say that Ambrose and Peter’s mother was pretty is to accomplish nothing.” This asks of the reader a contemplation of physical description in narrative; it also, perhaps, asks him to smile—knowingly.
Proust left a short book titled On Reading. It says, of course, many beautiful things about himself, about decoration (William Morris), Carlyle, Ruskin, the Dutch painters, Racine, Saint-Simon—on and on. And then somewhere in the pages he notes the insufficiency of reading and says that it is an initiation, not to be made into a discipline. “Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it.”
So, perhaps we should not solicit, insist, badger, embarrass, on behalf of this almost free pleasure.
1983