The implications of reading

 

Woman reading, by Corot (National Gallery of Art)

Daniel Karlin, a former professor of English literature, writes about how he gave up reading for a year to see what effect it would have. What did he learn?

Just to clarify, he made it clear he didn’t actually give up reading – although retired, he continued to edit literary texts by the poet Robert Browning during his non-reading phase. He states he didn’t get any withdrawal symptoms — “mine wasn’t a habit” — but this may be connected with editing Browning, which might have been enough to put him off reading anything else. Nonetheless:

1. He found it difficult to think for himself. “By depriving myself of books, I had removed the wall against which I bounced my thoughts.” He reports, but doesn’t accept, Charles Lamb’s statement “I live to lose myself in other men’s minds”. I certainly agree that we read to “bounce” our thoughts, rather than to lose ourselves.
2. He finds it difficult to remember specific extracts, and even the plots, of works he is familiar with. I don’t think this is exceptional: most of the books I have read I have forgotten the details of.
3. “The world of books is still the world”, a statement by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, implying that what we read and what we experience are interlinked. Like the world, books can corrupt, as well as inspire.

It’s that last discovery that fascinates me. Karlin marvels that when he read Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe as a young teenager, he identified more with “the ideals of Englishness, Britishness” than the Jewishness he was born with, “the side from which I turned away”. “Scott was joined by C S Lewis, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan and Ian Fleming … I became, and have remained, “English” by a form of literary-ideological adaptation.”

It is remarkable to read this from an English literature professor, who accepts that as part of an English degree “we are obliged to read books which, originally, could only solicit our attention”. Surely this is a clear example of “the world of books is still the world”? The set texts he read as a student are a very specific collection of cultural baggage, typically (from a course in English literature) around “Englishness”. An English degree, can, and certainly in my experience did, have the role of imposing a set of attitudes about Englishness (far more than Welshness, or Britishness) on its students.

Perhaps one reason for this is the justification for the canon of great works. the context of English literature as taught. The stated criterion, of literary quality, is held as the highest goal; the claim is that it doesn’t matter what the writer thought, as long as the writing is good. Literary quality is a very nebulous concept, and something of a mask to hide the absence of historical, political, economic contexts in which each of these writers existed. I don’t disagree that the world of books is certainly not the world. If you take a typical school-leaver starting at university to study literature, they have a head full of books they have read, but often little knowledge of the world, and it shows in their responses to that literature. This means that they unfortunately have little capability or experience to critique the canon of great works they are given. In three years of an English degree a student can only read a tiny fraction of the literature, and the choice of what is read is a culturally determined activity. Paradoxically, the insistence on reading constantly, of providing more than can be absorbed, can prevent any reflection and wider awareness of the context of books. When I studied English, for example, I had little concept that the Enlightenment had ever taken place.

I commend Karlin’s dedication to his purpose, but perhaps the real lesson was not what he intended at all. Perhaps from his year without reading he revealed that even if he was not “addicted to reading”, it  required a prolonged period without reading to begin thinking about how books can have the side-effect of preventing you reflecting on what reading means, and, perhaps, can lead you to grasp what is hidden behind the assumptions of the literary canon.

The common perception is that reading is a good thing, and so, by implication, the more you read, the better. I asked genAI (Copilot, to be precise) about what writers had said about reading, and it was fascinating that all  the quotes it found for me were favourable to reading, for example:

George R.R. Martin: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

Mortimer J. Adler: “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

These are just two examples, among many. We are besieged with messages about how good books are for us. So perhaps the paradox that Karlin has discovered is how you might learn more about reading by doing less of it – at least for a while.