A working philosophy for the practicing public reader

"When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings." -Emerson 

 i.

In one of my undergraduate lit courses, the professor was giving us ideas for our term papers. He threw out a variety of topics involving tying one theoretical school or another to the texts we were focusing on that semester: Marxism and the Romantics; Feminism and Frankenstein; Deconstruction and Wordsworth's Prelude. He then added, almost as if it didn't need to be said, words to this effect: or, if you don't want to spend a lot of time in the library doing research, you can take a work you identify with and do a close reading of it. You're never wrong doing a close reading. 

ii.

J. Hillis Miller, in his essay on Wuthering Heights "Repetition and the Uncanny," complained about other critics who, while not wrong in what they had said about the novel, approached it with too narrow a critical view. "The essays on Wuthering Heights I have cited seem to me insufficient, not because what they say is demonstrably mistaken, but rather because there is an error in the assumption that there is a single secret truth about Wuthering Heights. This secret truth would be something formulable as a univocal principle of explanation which would account for everything in the novel. The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that here is no secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way."

Writing in the mid-80s, the height of the influence of literary criticism, Miller was seemingly addressing something greater than just the critical reception of one novel. He seemed to feel that while the various theoretical schools--Marxist, structuralist, neo-historical, feminist, etc.--each had interesting things to say, there was something essentially wrong with seeing one school as THE school, the one that had arrived at the most fundamental way of interpreting texts. 

Most lower level literature courses adopt Miller's philosophy. A professor of students who aren't necessarily going to become literary professionals is happy to see a student apply any theoretical approach to a text, as long as it demonstrates some kind of insight gained from the approach. 

Most readers aren't literary professionals. They're curious people who bring a lot of their own experiences and intelligence to reading, but who might struggle, like the reader in Miller's essay, to "find a way in" to a text. Whatever gets them into a text is a good approach. 

In The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber points out that all theoretical schools tend to favor texts where their own theories work best. She was pointing out the limitations of all theoretical schools, but one application of her observation is that picking a theoretical approach to apply to a story is similar to how a mechanic chooses the right tool for a job. A reader who has an eclectic taste will benefit from the ability to switch theoretical tools. 

I was often frustrated by deconstructionist theory as a literature student, because I felt it was often being intentionally obfuscatory. One thing I do understand about it is that it values play and freedom. Unless one is going to only read books of a certain type, a good reader will need to also develop the ability to play different sorts of games.

iii.

You know a good reading or interpretation the same way you know a good primary literary text. It's interesting and insightful. The exact same criteria applies in both cases. 

iv.

Western thinking about literature has a long history of talking about the "interesting" and "insightful" aspects of stories. The ancient Roman poet Horace formulated these ideas as "to delight and instruct." 

Plato was suspicious of poets who made up stories, because he saw them as liars. Much of the history of Western literary philosophy has been an attempt to respond to this criticism. There have been many defenses of poetry written, including those by Sir Phillip Sydney and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Most of these defenses return to the "delight and instruct" concept. 

Writing in response to the attack that poetry corrupts morals, they often formulated arguments that went something like this: No, poetry doesn't corrupt morals. People don't naturally like being taught what's good, so poetry goes around that by giving people something that they do like, and in so doing, sneakily gets them to accept what is good and true. 

"Delighting" and "instructing" end up as two different things. They might be working in tandem like a one-two punch, but they are distinct from one another. 

I think this is something of a false distinction, though. Very often, instruction is itself delightful. A chess player will endure hours of grinding through drills in order to become a better player, because playing better makes the game more enjoyable. The same is true of a musician or really of anyone who is trying to perfect a craft. The drudgery of acquiring mastery doesn't need to be sweetened up for them, because mastery is itself a delight. 

v.

And so we return to the notion of play. 

Life resembles nothing in modern experience as much as an open-ended video game like Minecraft. There isn't really a way to "win" it. Winning it means enjoying it the most in whatever way you enjoy it. Whatever way you enjoy it, though, there are things you have to learn to get there. Players who enjoy Minecraft will enjoy learning these new skills because it will enable them to play the game in a way that fulfills them. They will take delight in instruction. I've seen this in my son, who generally hates reading, but will devour hours of wiki pages about a video game. 

Reading literature is one form of building skills for life. Reading well enables greater enjoyment.

vi.

There are four disciplines one can apply when reading: review, critique, theory, and analysis. There is some interplay between the four, but review is generally about whether something is good, critique is about what something means in both its literary and historical context, theory is about the fundamental contexts in which texts have meaning and readers understand those meanings, and analysis is about how a text works or how it accomplishes what it accomplishes.

All of these four matter when reading. Which one matters the most at any given moment is much like deciding which theoretical approach to take: whichever one makes sense for the text given. Which is to say, whichever one leads to a reading that delights and instructs. 

vii.

The same goes for the different possible centers of reading: author-centered, text-centered, and reader-centered. The "right" one varies from text to text, and you'll know when you've found the "right" one by how interesting and insightful the result of the reading is. 

vii.

There is a personal aspect to reading. While review, critique, theory, and analysis can all be done without bringing the "I" of the reader into it, reading as a whole, meaning the process of using texts to play the game of life in a more fulfilling way, cannot. 

ix.

When I read and respond to works, I am using the four disciplines, but there is at least some sense in which what I am trying to do is the full sense of reading, the one that invokes the "I." I am not a critic or an analyst or a theorist. I'm a person reading in the fullest possible sense and sharing that reading in public. 

x.

I very nearly quit doing this last year, because I felt like I wasn't educated enough about theory and criticism. It made me think I lacked the vocabulary to explain complicated aesthetic reactions. But if that's true, and I'm not really capable of reading responsively, then who can? Only tenured professors of literature? Wouldn't that then mean that ordinary people can't really use literature as a way to improve their own enjoyment of life? Or does the reading of ordinary people always have to be mediated by priest-professors? Can't people, bringing whatever they have, read fiction in ways that add to the texts? 

Of course I need to continually learn more about the disciplines that go into the full activity of reading, but in the meantime, I can read and share my reading for other people who are reading and living, too. So when I can pry the time away from other activities enough to do it, the point of this blog is to provide public readings, in the fullest sense, hopefully for the benefit of other readers.  

Greater empathy or immunity from it?

A friend of mine was telling me the other day that over a weekend, he and his daughter were sitting on the couch when the movie Dead Poets Society came on. His main reaction to re-watching it was that it hasn't aged well, but his daughter was moved by it. When I think back to when I first watched it, I think I was moved by it, too. Nowadays, my thoughts of the movie tend to be closer to those of Kevin Dettmar or Stephen Marche. It's a lot of schmaltz with a few superficial ideas about the humanities or how literature can affect our lives.

When I first started to study literature in a semi-serious way, I checked out a poetry anthology from the library on base where I was stationed. I have forgotten what anthology it was, but I remember reading a justification of why poetry mattered in the introduction. That essay argued that learning to read poetry well could help us to separate the truly moving from the "mawkish," a word I learned for the first time reading that essay. Its meaning is close to James Joyce's definition of sentiment, which was "unearned emotion." And this really is one of the better uses of not just reading poetry, but of close reading of any kind. People who are easily swayed by emotion can be manipulated, whether it's by the people in their lives or the companies that advertise to them or the governments that ask for their compliance. Learning to read in a way that withholds your emotional responses to characters until they have earned it can also teach you to make real people in your life earn your love and loyalty.

But doesn't this sort of clash with another oft-cited benefit of reading literature, especially literary fiction, which is that it increases our empathy? People who defend the value of reading literature will often cite studies that suggest those who read fiction, especially literary fiction, have a higher level of empathy than those who do not. So how does that square with the idea that literature also teaches us to be more discerning about the things we give our emotion away to? Wouldn't being more discerning mean the claims others make to you emotionally have less sway?

After I started reading seriously, I remember one of the things I lost interest in was country music, which I had only just been introduced to by friends in the Marine Corps. Whether because I really started to know what fake sentiment was or because I wanted to appear to, the emotional register of country music didn't interest me anymore. Some people think reading literary fiction--which, let's face it, is just an industry term for "serious" fiction or maybe even "worthy" fiction or "quality" fiction or something like that--makes people discerning. Some think it makes people into snobs, too good to sing along to "Friends in Low Places" or to enjoy the kinds of movies that don't qualify as "films."

You think you're too good to cry at this, Jake? Do you? 

Not too long ago, I dumped all over a story about a young child with a brain tumor, because I thought the story relied on a false appeal to emotion. Was I being too harsh? Have I become so skeptical about the possible existence of bathos I'm now unable to recognize genuine pathos?

There are two dangers for those who read a lot of fiction seriously when it comes to empathy. One is the same one that concerned Saint Augustine: that we will become so enthralled with our vicarious empathy, we fail to care about the real suffering person in the real world. The other is that we can get desensitized to pathos, the way too many action movies can make someone desensitized to violence. Nothing moves us anymore.

For me, I think the latter is a real danger, but it's probably a danger even without being a discerning reader or film viewer or music enthusiast. For everybody, life makes it harder when we're older to become emotional about the same things that make us emotional when we're young. "Win one for the Gipper" might work on college athletes, but it's not likely to work on 35-year-old cornerback just trying to survive one more season. Discerning reader or not, life has a way of taking the sentimentality right out of us.

The ennui we get from excess of empathy from literature is a disease that brings its own cure. By inoculating ourselves early to the false promises of cheap emotion, we help preserve our limited supply of empathy throughout our lifetimes. We also learn to focus our care on proper objects. Literature teaches us to be more disciplined about giving our love away, so it doesn't become too diffuse to have an effect.

We ought to remember that everyone is going to have their own empathy level. Bridge to Terebithia is the saddest thing in the world if you're eleven. It was sad to me when I read it with my son a few years ago, but not as sad as it was to him. We all change as time goes by. It really is okay to be moved by Mr. Keating standing on the desks if you're sixteen. The sort of person who finds that satisfying at sixteen is the same sort of person likely to find it no longer satisfying at forty, because she needs something more enriching and less sweet to keep drawing nourishment from narratives about made-up people.

In other words, yes, literature should make you more discerning the more you read. That might mean you like fewer things. But narrowing your own empathy to a finer point shouldn't mean you lose so much empathy you forget what it's like to experience emotion more broadly. When it starts to do that, I think that's when literature actually becomes destructive, and maybe it's time to take a step back and do something else for a while. There's likely never been a time in history when there is a greater danger of this kind of emotional eating beyond our ability to digest, because we now live in a world where we can stream hours and hours of high-quality fictional stories in our homes. We're building our own empathy-resistant super bugs the way we're creating antibiotic-resistant diseases. Superfluity of emotional response-causing narratives might be making us less empathetic overall.

Raison d'etre and the writer, explained mainly in Monty Python references

There's an old Monty Python bit about an agnostic who is protesting the racket coming from church bells. The punch line, after the agnostic finally achieves his end, is this: "I've always said there's nothing an agnostic can't do if he really doesn't know whether he believes in anything or not."

I may have objected to a joke like this at one point. I'm an agnostic, in the sense that I don't believe any religion on Earth has a convincing enough story I'm willing to overrule my skepticism and accept it. But I wouldn't say that equates to not believing in anything. That's the theist's absolutism that without God nothing means anything, not mine.

But the longer I'm alive, the more I wonder if I'll ever really be able to believe in something again, at least enough to be moved to meaningful action by it. I suppose I am moved enough by the feeling of responsibility to my family that I am willing to work a lot every week. I even put a fair amount of effort into it. So I guess I'm moved to do what nearly every other human on Earth does and work for a living. But beyond that?

If I try to come up with ideas I believe in without reservation, I can only come up with one: I believe strongly that the world is complicated and most simple answers are probably wrong. There may be elegant answers that take something complex and express it simply, but if the underlying idea is actually simple, it's probably wrong. That's it. That's all I've got.

Everything else is just things I'm sure I don't believe, followed by a lot more stuff I'm uncertain about. I know I don't believe that any of the main sects/denominations of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism offer deeply true explanations of the world. But that's just an affirmed non-belief, not an affirmative belief in something.

Lately, I've been reading Fashionable Nonsense by the physicists Alan Sokol and Jean Bricmont. It's about the way French thinkers of the 60s to the 90s who are roughly called "post-structuralist" or "post-modern," and later their followers, abused science and math concepts in order to add authority to otherwise nonsensical theories.

The "nonsense" they were attacking is no longer fashionable--the book is twenty years old--but it was still quite influential nonsense when I was an undergrad and grad student in literature in the late nineties and early aughts. I could never quite understand what the philosophers were saying. I used to credit that to my being stupid, but I'm now relatively certain that there really wasn't much there to understand, and that's what was so difficult about it. I don't think anyone else--the professors included--really knew what the hell Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, and so on were saying. They just learned key phrases and would repeat them at what seemed like the right moments--much like Sokol and Bricmont claim that these same philosophers did with math and science.

The writers of Fashionable Nonsense seem to believe these thinkers were the cause of a great deal of epistemological relativism, the notion that one way of explaining things or understanding things is as good as another. I don't know if this weird blend of linguistic theory, sham psychology, abused science, and erudite white noise was every really influential enough outside of the literary theory crowds I hung with back then to effect any real change in the culture at large, but it was certainly influential to me. Having ditched Christianity in my early twenties, finally gotten out of the Marine Corps--another cult of sorts--a few years after that, I was anxious to see what college had to show me. The best it had was these charlatans, whose message, as best I could make it out, was that everything was meaningless. The best you could say about the attempt to create meaning was that it was entertaining to watch people try to make meaning stick and then fail at it.

This intellectual nihilism flew in the face of everything that the centuries before had been about. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intellectuals had believed in their ability to improve their understanding and the world around them through the application of human reason. I understand that--to use the general explanation of how these theories came about-- Europe grew weary of intellectual optimism after a few world wars built upon a positivism about the meanings of things nearly killed everyone. But to date, there really has been nothing that has come after de-constructionism, no reconstructive philosophy. All we've done is keep applying a new post- suffix: Post-post-post modernity.

As a writer, if I don't have some animus driving what I write, it's all just tricks and workshop hocus-pocus putting together things that seem to have what a story should have. It's achieving all the formal, external characteristics of story without any of the heart of it. Stories can certainly be satirical; they can serve to tear down what needs to go. They have also, though, been the mythos that energized civilizations, that caused them to work and explore and create and fight and do all the good and bad things that civilizations do. I don't see much of that in the stories I read today. The world is too much with us, and our ambition is much too small.

I say this as an inveterate deconstructionist. It's not unusual for me to play the role of iconoclast in the social settings I inhabit. And I don't always have to have the answer. I don't need to know how to cook a steak well to know my steak tastes like shit, to use a metaphor a friend of mine often cites. But once in a while, I ought to be ready to offer a vision of what I want more of rather than just what I want less of.

My brother, a lawyer in the Air Force, recently wrote a piece for the War College entitled "Hope Isn't A Strategy, It's the Only Strategy." My brother has apparently been in one too many meetings where someone wrote off an idea that didn't have every base covered ahead of time by saying "hope is not a strategy." My brother points out that while it is of course important to plan, waiting for a perfect plan before acting just prevents action indefinitely. I read a copy of it before he published it, and it influenced my thinking when I wrote about liberal pessimism last week.

As a writer, I don't have to know everything about the universe to have something worth writing about. There can be a certain ad hoc nature to truth. It can be something you find out as you go. That's a lot different than the intellectual certainty that pre-dated the deconstructionists. It's more difficult to obtain. But accepting that truth on my terms in more difficult than I thought it would be once upon a time doesn't mean it's not there. Some things, you figure out beforehand. Others, you jump, and you figure out on the way down how you're going to land.

Parachute or pancake, at least you've done something. And it's a lot more fun believing you might be able to solve the riddle and failing than just giving up trying.