Why do we read books?
Feb. 3rd, 2012 08:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrellKes: I'm fascinated by the opposing perspectives given to reading in these two recent articles, as one focuses completely on reading as work, while the other embraces reading as a kind of mental playfulness. I'm adding three of my favorite quotes about reading because my own reason for reading would probably best be described as "serious play," as I love the intellectual play of reading, but I also have a dead serious need for the way reading opens up possibilities for seeing the world differently. On the other hand, I loathe the sort of sentimental tripe which must force a trite feel-good message or moral onto a story--life isn't full of glib feel-good messages, so why should my books try to tell me it is?
Stories don’t need morals or messages
A "stupid" test shows that the Puritan ethic lives on. Why do we insist on learning lessons from the books we read?
BY
LAURA MILLER
>
block quote start
....I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).
As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful:
“to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.
If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.
In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare)
is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum).
block quote end
Book review: "As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality," a historical and cultural study of fiction fandom by Michael Saler Oxford, 283 pages, $27.95
By
TOM SHIPPEY
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409004577156860068204638.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs=article
block quote start
Mr. Saler's contention is that, as the developed world has grown more rational, progressive, secular, and "disenchanted" since the Industrial Revolution,
the dominant reaction, among the literary intelligentsia, has been to withdraw into "inner consciousness," to proclaim "art for art's sake," to scorn and
reject mere shallow entertainment.
From the 1880s on, though, the writers of what was sometimes called "New Romance" found sources of "re-enchantment"—Robert Louis Stevenson with "Treasure
Island," Rider Haggard with "King Solomon's Mines," Bram Stoker with "Dracula," as well as Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and in some ways the ground-breaker
for them all, Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in 1887. It was Holmes who gave rise to the first of the three literary
cults that Mr. Saler explores in detail, along with H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" and Tolkien's Middle-earth.
More generally, it was the New Romancers and their many successors whose imaginations created the world that most of us live in, at least part-time. How
many vampire stories, movies, TV series have sprung from "Dracula"? How many modern teenagers, and adults, could pass a stiff exam on the life of Buffy
or draw you a map of Narnia? How many have seen every episode of every "Star Trek", and read every one of the novels as well? Not to mention learning Klingon,
or the Elvish language Quenya? "We are all geeks now," says Mr. Saler, and if you take a broad definition of imaginary worlds (soap operas, fantasy dungeons,
Second Life online gaming), he could be right.
The essential ingredient for success seems to be to give the imagination something to feed on beyond the story. One of the things that characterized "New
Romances" was the use of "paratext"—supplementary material like maps, footnotes, glossaries, appendices. Kipling had his futuristic "Aerial Board of Control"
stories printed with mock-up ads for airships. Rider Haggard faked up a potsherd with Greek and Latin inscriptions and included photos with one of his
stories. There was always the sense of a wider world, of which the author was giving you only glimpses. So while there had long been devoted fans of novels
like Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" or Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," "New Romance" encouraged people to try to find out more, to interact with stories
in new ways.
The idea of "paratext" was to create a realist effect, an air of verisimilitude, and inevitably some people were fooled. They wrote to Doyle, and Rider
Haggard, and William Morris, whose "The House of the Wolfings" gave a kind of model for Tolkien, asking for more information, personal or historical or
archaeological. What was Dr. Watson's middle name? Those lost cities in Africa—might someone fund an expedition to find them?
Most readers, though, weren't fooled. They went along with the joke out of a sense of fun—and then they started to join in. The "first fictional creation
that adults openly embraced as real," Mr. Saler argues, was Sherlock Holmes. By the 1930s people had produced biographies, chronologies of his adventures,
speculations about his private life and Dr. Watson's and—continuing right up to now—many sequels and continuations. Conan Doyle had made it easy for them
by leaving so many loose ends, and building in so many provocative allusions, like the mention of the story of "the giant rat of Sumatra, for which the
world is not yet ready"—since told many times, perhaps best in Sterling Lanier's "The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes" (1986).
H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos," about ancient demonic entities and their attempts to reappear on lonely New England farms and in rundown seaports, had
the same effect. Lovecraft himself wrote only 13 such stories, from 1921 to 1936, but his paratextual references—notably the famous "Necronomicon," the
memoir of an Arab sorcerer—created such a powerfully imagined "Secondary World" (a term Tolkien popularized) that they generated more than 100 successors.
Lovecraft himself was not offended, but delighted. "It is rather good fun," he wrote, "to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude
by wide citation."
What was the secret of Lovecraft's success? It certainly wasn't the aesthetes' favorite quality, stylistic subtlety. He never saw a strange adjective he
didn't like, and he was addicted to using italics for emphasis. But he left room for you to wonder. Those "Great Old Ones" always trying to break through
and prey on humanity—how many are there, and did Lovecraft list them all? (Google "Lloigor" to see a string of different opinions.) Can the New England
town "Innsmouth," where the Dagon-worshipers live, be identified? "Devils' Reef" off Innsmouth: Would depth charges be a good idea? Those legends of "legend-haunted
Arkham," where Miskatonic University is: Tell us more!
....The world of "As If" requires rejection of the idea that things must be "just so"—and Kipling's "Just So Stories" (1902) exploited exactly that joke, mimicking
a traditional voice of authority while ironically deflating essentialist claims. Too often the joke has been missed by grave intellectuals, like Johan
Huizinga, who concluded sadly in his book "Homo Ludens" (1938), that "the play element in culture [is] on the wane."
It has, of course, increased enormously. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic series "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (1999) is a classic of crossover
fiction, bringing together the Secondary Worlds of most of the New Romancers. These and their successors continue to dominate mass culture, especially
online gaming, where the creations of James Joyce and other academic favorites have not even a toehold. And the billions who appreciate "As If" worlds
are learning to develop an ironic imagination, and a sense of provisional perspectives. "I will keep my eyes open, and find out things," as one Holmes
fan declared.
block quote end
"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one’s chances of survival increase with each book one reads."
Sherman Alexie
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
James Baldwin
"You should never read just for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.” Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of “literature”? That means fiction, too, stupid." John Waters
Stories don’t need morals or messages
A "stupid" test shows that the Puritan ethic lives on. Why do we insist on learning lessons from the books we read?
BY
LAURA MILLER
>
block quote start
....I’m sure Stone and Nichols are right that the current, reductive obsession with standardized testing has made this propensity worse, but discomfort with fiction — with all its slippery, non-utilitarian qualities — goes back to the beginning of American culture. As the historian Gillian Avery observed in her “Behold the Child: American Children and Their Books, 1621-1922,” 17th-century Puritans had big doubts about any kind of non-scriptural storytelling, for adults as well as for children. They were as determined to teach their kids to read as any modern helicopter parent, if for other reasons: For Puritans, reading the Bible was essential to getting into heaven, rather than into Harvard (though to hear some people talk today, you wouldn’t think there was much of a difference).
As the Puritans saw it, writes Avery, fiction might “deflect the reader from more profitable occupation” and was furthermore “untrue, therefore a lie.” It belonged to a category of falsehood known as the “sporting lie,” whose purpose was neither white nor black, but something too troublingly colorful:
“to make one merry or to pass away Precious Time,” as one Boston schoolmaster put it.
If you think we’ve gotten past this starchy point of view, guess again. Today’s parents may anxiously urge their kids to read novels like “Charlotte’s Web” or “Fahrenheit 451,” but any desire to make their offspring merry is far overshadowed by the belief that reading is essential to getting ahead in life. You have to be a “good reader” to get good grades and you need good grades to get into Harvard (or wherever) and you need that prestigious degree to get a good job. The Protestant work ethic has not so much forgiven reading fiction for passing away Precious Time as it has swallowed it whole. Reading books has become a kind of work, at least for children.
In adults, the old Puritan attitude leads us to treat fiction as the delivery mechanism for instructional or inspirational messages. Whenever a novel’s merits are described in terms of the “life lessons” that it “teaches,” you can detect that old uneasiness over the “sporting lie” being appeased. In movies and television, literature class discussions almost always consist of students earnestly announcing that what Fitzgerald (or Hemingway or Shakespeare)
is really saying is that you should follow your heart (or face your fears or be true to yourself — pick your empty nostrum).
block quote end
Book review: "As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality," a historical and cultural study of fiction fandom by Michael Saler Oxford, 283 pages, $27.95
By
TOM SHIPPEY
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409004577156860068204638.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs=article
block quote start
Mr. Saler's contention is that, as the developed world has grown more rational, progressive, secular, and "disenchanted" since the Industrial Revolution,
the dominant reaction, among the literary intelligentsia, has been to withdraw into "inner consciousness," to proclaim "art for art's sake," to scorn and
reject mere shallow entertainment.
From the 1880s on, though, the writers of what was sometimes called "New Romance" found sources of "re-enchantment"—Robert Louis Stevenson with "Treasure
Island," Rider Haggard with "King Solomon's Mines," Bram Stoker with "Dracula," as well as Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells and in some ways the ground-breaker
for them all, Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes stories began to appear in 1887. It was Holmes who gave rise to the first of the three literary
cults that Mr. Saler explores in detail, along with H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos" and Tolkien's Middle-earth.
More generally, it was the New Romancers and their many successors whose imaginations created the world that most of us live in, at least part-time. How
many vampire stories, movies, TV series have sprung from "Dracula"? How many modern teenagers, and adults, could pass a stiff exam on the life of Buffy
or draw you a map of Narnia? How many have seen every episode of every "Star Trek", and read every one of the novels as well? Not to mention learning Klingon,
or the Elvish language Quenya? "We are all geeks now," says Mr. Saler, and if you take a broad definition of imaginary worlds (soap operas, fantasy dungeons,
Second Life online gaming), he could be right.
The essential ingredient for success seems to be to give the imagination something to feed on beyond the story. One of the things that characterized "New
Romances" was the use of "paratext"—supplementary material like maps, footnotes, glossaries, appendices. Kipling had his futuristic "Aerial Board of Control"
stories printed with mock-up ads for airships. Rider Haggard faked up a potsherd with Greek and Latin inscriptions and included photos with one of his
stories. There was always the sense of a wider world, of which the author was giving you only glimpses. So while there had long been devoted fans of novels
like Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa" or Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice," "New Romance" encouraged people to try to find out more, to interact with stories
in new ways.
The idea of "paratext" was to create a realist effect, an air of verisimilitude, and inevitably some people were fooled. They wrote to Doyle, and Rider
Haggard, and William Morris, whose "The House of the Wolfings" gave a kind of model for Tolkien, asking for more information, personal or historical or
archaeological. What was Dr. Watson's middle name? Those lost cities in Africa—might someone fund an expedition to find them?
Most readers, though, weren't fooled. They went along with the joke out of a sense of fun—and then they started to join in. The "first fictional creation
that adults openly embraced as real," Mr. Saler argues, was Sherlock Holmes. By the 1930s people had produced biographies, chronologies of his adventures,
speculations about his private life and Dr. Watson's and—continuing right up to now—many sequels and continuations. Conan Doyle had made it easy for them
by leaving so many loose ends, and building in so many provocative allusions, like the mention of the story of "the giant rat of Sumatra, for which the
world is not yet ready"—since told many times, perhaps best in Sterling Lanier's "The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes" (1986).
H.P. Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Mythos," about ancient demonic entities and their attempts to reappear on lonely New England farms and in rundown seaports, had
the same effect. Lovecraft himself wrote only 13 such stories, from 1921 to 1936, but his paratextual references—notably the famous "Necronomicon," the
memoir of an Arab sorcerer—created such a powerfully imagined "Secondary World" (a term Tolkien popularized) that they generated more than 100 successors.
Lovecraft himself was not offended, but delighted. "It is rather good fun," he wrote, "to have this artificial mythology given an air of verisimilitude
by wide citation."
What was the secret of Lovecraft's success? It certainly wasn't the aesthetes' favorite quality, stylistic subtlety. He never saw a strange adjective he
didn't like, and he was addicted to using italics for emphasis. But he left room for you to wonder. Those "Great Old Ones" always trying to break through
and prey on humanity—how many are there, and did Lovecraft list them all? (Google "Lloigor" to see a string of different opinions.) Can the New England
town "Innsmouth," where the Dagon-worshipers live, be identified? "Devils' Reef" off Innsmouth: Would depth charges be a good idea? Those legends of "legend-haunted
Arkham," where Miskatonic University is: Tell us more!
....The world of "As If" requires rejection of the idea that things must be "just so"—and Kipling's "Just So Stories" (1902) exploited exactly that joke, mimicking
a traditional voice of authority while ironically deflating essentialist claims. Too often the joke has been missed by grave intellectuals, like Johan
Huizinga, who concluded sadly in his book "Homo Ludens" (1938), that "the play element in culture [is] on the wane."
It has, of course, increased enormously. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic series "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (1999) is a classic of crossover
fiction, bringing together the Secondary Worlds of most of the New Romancers. These and their successors continue to dominate mass culture, especially
online gaming, where the creations of James Joyce and other academic favorites have not even a toehold. And the billions who appreciate "As If" worlds
are learning to develop an ironic imagination, and a sense of provisional perspectives. "I will keep my eyes open, and find out things," as one Holmes
fan declared.
block quote end
"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one’s chances of survival increase with each book one reads."
Sherman Alexie
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
James Baldwin
"You should never read just for “enjoyment.” Read to make yourself smarter! Less judgmental. More apt to understand your friends’ insane behavior, or better yet, your own. Pick “hard books.” Ones you have to concentrate on while reading. And for god’s sake, don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction. I only have time for the truth.” Fiction is the truth, fool! Ever hear of “literature”? That means fiction, too, stupid." John Waters
