'I don't want to think when I read!'

'I don't want to think when I read!'

The historically dominant view of literature over more than a hundred years has been academic, intellectual and moral.

Academic, because universities have dominated the landscape for a while, creating Literature Departments, Literature Degrees, Literature Professors and Literature Lists. That, in turn, has canonized some texts and relegated others to a Below-Par, Academically-Unworthy purgatory. And that, in turn, has ostracised plenty of writers and readers.

Intellectual, because academic studies immediately imply intellectualizing, developing the tools of the trade, creating a specific jargon, categorizing, labelling, sub-grouping. And that, unsurprisingly, has ostracised many, many readers and authors.

Moral, because the written word, for millennia, has been associated with the ability to read it, write it, use it, and that little by little, the idea that Literary texts are superior has morphed into the idea that Reading-is-Good, Reading-does-you-good, Reading-is-for-intelligent-people – Reading is serious stuff indeed. Not to forget the old Writer-as-a-great-(wo)man trope…

(I hear many of you say: But…what about aesthetics? What about Beauty? Alas, those are best left aside for now as it’s hard to think of objective criteria we could use to define those terms)

If you find that hard to believe, witness the opposition between Reading for pleasure (or Escapism) and literary reading. For most of my students, literary reading is work – pleasure reading is, well, pleasure. Hence the remarks I’ve now heard many times in class (or a variation on that theme):

‘I read Young Adult books because I don’t want to think when I read’.

And by extension, anything which is not ‘Escapism’ or Easy-reading is Literary, therefore hard, therefore it’s for others, it’s for specialists – it’s not for me.

Not to forget the classic: ‘I don’t get it’.

Which leads many to the say another classic: ‘I’m not good at literature’.

The problem here is that verb: Think – what do you mean by that?

And another: ‘Get’: get what?

And what about ‘good’, huh? What on earth do you mean by that?

Typically, ‘being good at literature’ seems to mean ‘being good at identifying what the author means’; if not that, the equally spurious ‘being good at finding the message, finding what it means’ (‘it’ being the text, of course).

Spurling’s remark, many moons ago, about people mistaking the theatre for the post-office (that is, thinking theatre is there to deliver a message) is apt here: most casual readers tend to think of Literature as the post-office, where they (should) get a package with a clear meaning, and off you go. A situation that already posits as a premise that there is a package, but ok, let’s leave that aside for a minute.

‘Being good’ is basically ‘being there to receive the package’; ‘being bad’ is not being home when the package comes.

If that seems hard to believe – if only because we’ve been told so many times that books carry messages and that our role is to find them – remind yourself of that exchange between Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov (you’ll find it Nabokov’s ‘Correspondence’). Wilson (writer, academic, translator) had just written to Nabokov that ‘Malraux is probably the greatest contemporary writer’ (Malraux was a 20^th century French writer, and later Minister for Culture). Nabokov responds, baffled, with a 12-point missive listing Malraux’s shortcomings and adding: ‘Is literary taste so subjective a matter that two persons of discrimination can be at odds in such a simple case as this?’.

The answer is yes, Vladimir – many times yes. Taste is subjective, and meaning very often is, too.

So, can we address that by ‘thinking about things’?

End part 1