Ouch ouch! 'Rich content books', morals and moralisers, and learning from books - what is a teacher to do?

 (the first part of this post is here)

Q. 4: Is reading educational in and of itself?

That one is easy: of course it isn’t.

Wait, what? No, it is, of course it is: didn’t you learn while reading?

So what do you mean then: which texts? You mean text-books, or novels? You mean entertainment, or serious literary stuff?

More to the point: are you being educated just by being exposed to a text? Is it enough to be given an extract from, I don’t know, Shakespeare, for Understanding, Illumination, Depth, to suddenly come down to you? Baudelaire, the French 19th-century poet, thought it the greatest error possible to confuse Beauty and Morals – more exactly, the confusion between the Beautiful (‘le Beau’) and the Good (‘le Bien’): ‘Morality seeks the Good; Science seeks the Truth; poetry – and sometimes the novel – only seek the Beautiful’. This idea that literature is an immediate path to Morals (i.e. to Thinking, Reflecting, Understand, all those big words), which we could date back to the Enlightenment, and even earlier really (Aesop, anyone?) is still very much present today, as if exposure to thought inevitably led to thinking – how could that be?!

I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that; we’re not sponges who magically imbibe the Good and filter out the Bad. We need help – our learners need help. We don’t teach morals, we don’t expect morals to just be absorbed: we use texts to reflect and think. As Martyn Lyons writes: ‘For the Greeks, writing words was like writing music: it meant little until someone gave it voice’  - the text in itself is very little, singers are needed, and a choir-master to give indications: that’s us.  

In 1961, the painter Jackson Pollock wrote: ‘I am interested in expressing, not illustrating my emotions’. Expression can be hard to get at: that's why learners need help; illustrations are easy to read, expressions may not be.

 Q.5: Does reading make you a better person?

 A toughie that one. We know about people like Martha Nussbaum who believe in what is really an old chestnut: rich texts can make you a better person (see above 😊). It’s tricky because a part of me wants to say Yes! Of course! I know myself how much the books I read when young shaped me and my vision of the world. But at the same time, I know that many texts that did so had nothing ‘literary’ or ‘rich’ about them: humanist American science-fiction from the 60s and 70s, for example. Or Fredric Brown, a now obscure writer who specialised in ultra-short stories, science-fiction and detective stories. I remember reading Mishima at fifteen, being blown away, but I also know I didn’t understand anything, nor could I relate it to anything. I vividly remember reading André Gide in my teens when I knew nothing about him, Modernism or, well, anything much really. Did I ‘get it’? I certainly didn’t. But I got a lot – an awful lot – from Philip José Farmer’s classic science fiction novels (The River World), John Brunner, Van Vogt, Dish and of course Asimov: none of those would be given a look in in a literature class, none of those would ever be classified as literary, and none of them was a stylist as such (even if Asimov wrote extremely fluidly, another type of style). And that’s not to mention contemporary authors in that same genre (Roberts, Banks, McLeod, and a slew of French ones too) whose intensely political concerns (in the sense of polis, i.e. how to organise our lives) transcend said genre.

I think this discussion becomes difficult the moment there are undertones of morality, and classism. Morality in the sense of ‘rich means good as we want it’; ‘Rich in the ideas and the styles we think are good for people’. Classism in the sense of ‘This text is good, that text isn’t’: is Beckett good? Hemingway? Ezra Pound? Louis-Ferdinand Céline? (who was imprisoned after WW2 for his violently anti-semitic, pro-Germany writings, but who is also considered the most important and influential French writer of the 20th century). But more to the point of classism: is Asimov good? Is Farmer? Can sub-genres be good?

Here again, I fear it’s the accumulation rather than the intrinsic (hopefully) quality of the one text we handle in class. I read hundreds of cheap (and sometimes not so cheap) sf novels in my teens, as well as many top-notch literary writers from all over the world: which fed me the most? Which were the most beneficial to me? How can that question even be asked, when you think of it? It’s the accumulation, the intersection (Borges, Kafka, Gombrowicz, Dombrowsky, say), the inter-feeding. It’s not rich content: it’s contentS, and more importantly, what you do with it.

And remember: the less you read, and the less diverse and complex your reading, the slower your skills will improve and the less you'll be able to make connections between texts and ideas.

 Q.6: Is our insistence on the importance of reading just a moral stance?

Ask yourself: how many times have you heard people say something like: ‘Reading is good for you!’, or ‘People should read more’, or even ‘I wish I had more time to read’. Now ask yourself: how many people do actually read? The numbers everywhere are clear: a tiny minority (usually less than 10%) of the population reads more than 10 books a year. Most will read between zero books a year (a sizeable group) and around 5 (and that is already quite a number). Now, ask a final question: what do those people read, when they do? Here again numbers show clearly that the first 100 best-sellers will hardly ever contain much of what we term Literature, and certainly not the kind taught in your typical Literature class. So, in reality, not only do very few people read a sizeable amount each week or year: they mostly read what teachers often turn their nose at: (auto)biographies of celebrities, mass-appeal novel, fantasy novels, cook-books, and non-fiction (popular histories, funny facts etc.). Which can only mean that a large proportion of those people who urge us to ‘read more’ are, in fact, not readers themselves, or at least not serious readers of serious fiction. That’s fine, there’s no reason to be one in many ways, but that would mean there’s a large grain of morality in this exhortation: do as I say, not as I do…(something observable in parents’ reading behaviour to their children, too). 

Reading – and books – are associated with a strong whiff of morality therefore, which we cannot be think is related to the Question 5 above: somehow, the act of reading is redeeming, and morally meaningful. Or else it’s cultural capital seen as a marker: of class, of education, of social standing. Is that what we want? Is that how we think? Who does that help? And more to the point: who does that scare away?

 Q.7: Is a literary analysis of a text the same a reading with a purpose?

Definitely NO. Analysing is one thing, interpreting is another. They may be linked, they may be related, but they are simply not the same thing. This is like what happened with sociolinguistics in the beginning: a lot of analysing, a lot of ‘This is what happens, where, to whom’…but little interpretation, i.e. very few WHYS – why is it like that? What does it mean? What could it mean?

Be careful not to get lost in the land of Academia where putting labels on things comes to look like finding an answer: it is not. I can name things and use terminology until the cows come home, but the question is: what have I understood? Which ideas do I come to with this analysis?

It’s like people who find an old tool they’ve never seen before: they can analyse it (say what it looks like, how bits interact with other bits, the shape, the material) but they will be no closer to divining what it is for, that is, what they can do with it. It’s very easy to do the same with literary analysis, and even easier to find yourself in the same predicament as with a tool: you’ve labelled all the parts, it looks neat and tidy, but…what does it all mean??

But if your purpose is to use the text as a vehicle for thought, as an instrument to think, explore and open up to the world, then the analysis is in the service of you. If you just analyse, you are in the service of the text – and what good is that to anyone?

 Basically: choose not a book by its cover, whichever it may be – success, promotion, hype, canon, personal taste, lack of time, old memories. Choose a book (or a text) for what it will enable you to do with your learners, and for the horizons it will help you broaden.

Choose life, as the other would say.

 

I'm Vincent Hernot - born and bred in St Malo, Brittany, France, educated there and in Rennes, then in Ireland and in Normandy, pushed it up to a PhD in Irish things (Linguistics and Political Science), before moving to the Netherlands at the tail-end of my 20s. Found a job, then another, and finally stuck at it at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (University of Applied Sciences) where I've mostly been teaching all things Linguistics and a whole lot of Literature (at Bachelor and Master level). The one constant since my early teens has been reading - reading, reading, reading :) (and playing music, so that's two constants)

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