Chris Bertram:
The latest Financial Times weekend had a piece by Simon Kuper about how studying English literature had spoilt the experience of reading for him. Whereas once, as a child or an adolescent, he could immerse himself in a novel, the academic study of them had taught him to read as a critic. That second-order relationship to the text, just made the whole thing much less fun than it had been. I see what he means. Relatedly, one of the problems about writing for a blog like Crooked Timber with so many readers who know more than I do on just about any topic is the the difficulty in sharing books, films, or music that you’ve enjoyed because I’m scanning the horizon (or the potential comments thread) for the dorsal fin of the Great White Critic for whom the immediate pleasure taken is a symptom of hopeless naivety and a failure to adopt the necessary critical distance. But to hell with that. Sometimes some discovery is so fantastic that I just want to share, and that’s how I feel about reading Anne Tyler.
On reading this, I had two thoughts in quick succession. The first is that I sincerely hope he's wrong. As someone who reads texts for a living, and more to the point attempts to convince the youth of today that those books are worth close, critical study, this sort of mentality seems dangerous. If that sort of reading is hostile to the enjoyment of a book, then it seems that the most cynical voices amongst students are correct: political theory, literature, philosophy are the systematic art of making the interesting into the boring. But I don't think that's right, and I suspect it's not what Bertram is getting at. The problem here seems to be some conflation between the amount of joy one gets from reading a book and its quality. They are (perhaps obviously, perhaps not) separate things, though the average educated reading tends to run them together. The very real habit of academics to have reading on the side whose quality they don't judge always seems to me to imply that the lesser must somehow be the unworthy. But there's no obvious reason this should be the case. To pick some examples: one of my favorite novelists is the British mid-20th century author Elizabeth Taylor. She's written one book that ranks among my favorites (Blaming), a couple that I very much like (In a Summer Season, At Mrs. Lippincote's), and a few of middling quality where the premise is either poor or haphazardly executed. Personal judgments notwithstanding, she is very much a middle-of-the-road novelist: her subjects are mostly on the small scale and her virtues run to tight prose rather than formal complexity. My enjoyment of her work is not incompatible with, or qualified by, my judgment that she's a lesser novelist.
Which, when one thinks about longer or greater works, is the sort of judgment we're prepared to make all the time. I love Dostoevsky but even in English translation his prose is uneven--his virtues play out in bigger space than a sentence. I know a lot of people who love The Republic, but few who think it provides a good guide to anything. And we all certainly know of some great works whose merits we are able to reasonably appraise without doing anything so foolish as liking them (Moby Dick for me).
The end goal, I think, is to reach a point where one can and does read as one wants to, without feeling the judgment or pressure to read only great works or to make the lesser works one is reading seem great.
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