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In Unread America Geoffrey Nunberg "Fresh Air"
commentary, Dec. 8, 2004 The study evoked the usual cultural handwringing. A lot of people blamed the electronic media for the decline, though actually the report showed that there wasn't much of a correlation between novel reading and time spent surfing the web or watching TV. In The Weekly Standard, Myron Magnet suggested that our "speeded-up culture" has ended in a shortened national attention span, while the New Criterion's James Bowman decried the influence of neo-marxist academics who have disparaged the great works of Western literature as mere apologies for racism and colonialism. Whatever the reasons for the decline in novel reading and the like, people were painting the consequences as dire. If people stop reading books, wrote Andrew Solomon in a New York Times op-ed, "we cannot succeed in our current struggle against absolutism and terrorism." And the NEA's chairman Dana Gioia said that the decline of fiction reading cuts people off from the collective wisdom of the past and threatens our economic productivity, our democratic discourse, and our national character. But let's get real. The people who have been lost to novel reading aren't the dévotés of great literature.[1] They're the people who used to read a couple of romances or thrillers a year and have now switched to reading political screeds or magazines, or have simply decided to spend more time at the gym. If that puts anything at risk, it isn't the monuments of Western literature, but only the leisure activity that we describe as "curling up with a good book." As it happens, that phrase is more recent than you might suspect, at least as applied to grown-ups. When the Victorians talked about someone curled up with a book, it could only be a child nestled in an oversized chair, rapt in a copy of Little Women or Treasure Island. If grown men like Henry James or Herman Melville ever curled up with a book, it wasn't something they would have admitted to. In fact, it's hard to imagine any writer curling up with a book before Marcel Proust. And it wasn't until the 1920's that adults started using the phrase to describe their own reading. True, the new usage may have had something to do with changes in domestic furniture. Victorian seating wasn't very comfortable for large persons to curl up in, and it's no accident that the first recorded occurrence of someone talking about "curling up with a good book" appeared about the same time that Edward Knabusch and Edwin Shoemaker built the prototype of the first La-Z Boy chair in Monroe, Michigan. But the phrase really implied a new picture of the virtues and pleasures of compulsive reading. For the first time, grown-ups were permitted to read the way children did, curled into a fetal position and oblivious to the world around them. A 1923 advertisement for Borzoi Books said, "The man who has not learned to curl up on a sofa of an evening occasionally and 'lose himself' in a rattling good story… is missing one of the supreme satisfactions of living." Since then, "I'd rather curl up with a good book" has become a declaration that suggests social self-sufficiency and a lively imagination, one of the boxes that people always tick off on the personal profiles on singles sites. Of course, most of us don't do our novel reading in the setting that "curled up with a good book" brings to mind -- a sofa, a crackling fire, a rainy night, and ideally, a boring dinner party to shine on. We're more likely to be folded up in the back of an airplane, strung up from a bus strap, or lathered up and squinting through the sunblock in our eyes. But those can count as curling up with a book, too, as long as it's a book of the right sort. It can be Jane Austen or Sue Grafton, Virginia Woolf or Nero Wolfe -- what matters is only that it be one of those "rattling good stories" that shuts out the world outside. We may take pleasure or instruction from reading de Tocqueville, the South Beach Diet, or the 9/11 Report, but we wouldn't talk about curling up with them. But if that sort of promisucous, compulsive novel reading is on the decline, why should anybody miss it? Face it: as leisure activities go, it's self-absorbed, escapist, and regressive in a particularly futile way. As Graham Greene observed, nothing we read in later life can touch us the way books do in our first fourteen years. Yet we persist in believing that losing ourselves in a novel confers some special favor that doesn't come from watching a movie or playing a video game, even if the one is as lurid and trashy as the other. Elizabeth Bowen once said that in her youth the world was divided into the readers of story-books and the outdoor children. "Outdoor children were incomprehensible to me when I was their age, and I still find them dull. I do not, and cannot, find out what makes them do what they do, or why they like what they like."[3] That's still how fiction-readers think about people who prefer to use their time for other things. The non-readers may be no less intelligent or sensitive or well-informed than the readers are, and when the last fiction-reader has gone to the great La-Z Boy in the sky, the republic will still be in safe hands. Even so, it's hard for the readers not to be dismayed at the growth of unread America, with all its incomprehensible outdoor children. Notes
But the assumption that it's the classics that are suffering is convenient for Bowman, who wants to lay the blame on the "pernicious influence" of neo-Marxist critics who turn students off by teaching that "each that the great works of the Western canon, properly deconstructed, are not explorations of the human spirit but mere reflections of power relations and social pathologies.” Bowman is being strategically obtuse here. By the time a college student reaches the proximity of any literary critic who is teaching deconstructive doctrine, he or she has already acquired the habit of reading novels, and isn't likely to abandon it for any reason. It's the one-or-two-thrillers-a-year people who have bailed out on fiction reading, and they are not the sorts of people over whom academic critics have any influence in the first place. return 2. I'm grateful to Barry Popick for locating this citation. return 3. Elisabeth Bowen, "Out of a Book," in Collected Impressions. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950. return
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Copyright © 2004 Geoffrey Nunberg All rights reserved. |
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