I was going to write a post about how I was a really bad English major. I’m a reader, not a critic, pathetically subjective and skeptical of so-called objective criticisms. I love subjective writing and always looked for opportunities to inject my academic papers with arguments on its behalf. I was the girl who by my senior year of college couldn’t resist the urge to critique a book based on whether or not I liked it, thus had to find something to hate (i.e. tear apart) in order to start and finish a decent paper.
During one unfortunate class with one rather unfortunate T.A., I complained all the way through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I still maintain sucks for profundity’s sake, only to find myself two years later thumbing through an antique book of Coleridge’s poetry with my mother, explaining the metaphors and finding myself oddly moved. Hell, my modernist mind can’t move beyond naive rhymes like,
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink
regardless of how vengeful that blimey albatross may be. I swear, every time I get to that stanza I roll my eyes.
Worse, my irrational hatred of Shakespeare had me putting off the required Shakespeare lecture until my last year at university, and the karmic gods of collegiate scheduling had me resigned to a 7:30am lecture in a cool, dark room in which the professor showed movie adaptations of British stage plays. The coffee shop got a good hunk of my grant money that semester.
Despite knowing better, I pick out books at the library based on their covers and re-read my nostalgic favorites (like anything by S.E. Hinton) at least once a year. I also develop irrational literary crushes on authors whose work is consistently good, or if not good, then predictably within my range of positive taste. See T.C. Boyle, master of the short story.
Nevertheless, my education in literature and its rhetorical whimsies was also tempered with the study of education and its rhetorical whimsies, and through my educational career found myself far less interested in the substance of the thing than whether or not I could convince others to invest in it, too. This became my sole interest in teaching, convincing the naysayers that despite the dorkiness of the PSA reading really is fun. This is why I get so angry when people out-snob one another on whether the Oprah book club is sufficiently literary for “serious” books or whether or not Harry Potter will ruin a generation.
People who might otherwise NOT READ are READING. This is a good thing.
But Amanda essentially wrote the post I was intending to write defending the stupid Harry Potter reading masses from snobbish criticism, so we’ll read her instead.
Most of Charles’ op-ed is about the decline of reading, which he kind of sort of blames Harry Potter for, amongst a bevy of bad guys, including other light fiction and distractions like computers, video games, and TV. It does make sense that people with more entertainment options are going to be more diverse in their tastes, which isn’t, to my mind, such a bad thing. But, as Charles notes, it’s not just that people read fewer novels than before, but that they don’t dig at all and learn what they like, instead sticking religiously to the bestseller list. For which he blames mega-marketing like the kind behind Harry Potter.
She continues:
What I find more interesting… is that his friends say they simply don’t have time to read and contemplate Serious Fiction. I say to take them at their word—Americans work more hours and have less leisure and make money than we have in the past, which leaves very little time for the leisurely reading of novels. An 800 page book of Serious Fiction—which I love, mind you, so I’m not picking on the pleasures of it—takes much, much longer to read than it takes to breeze through a Harry Potter book. If people are turning to Harry Potter, it’s because they want to have the joys of reading a narrative within the time that’s been allotted to them in our capitalist society to read. Nor do we have the allotted brainspace to set aside work worries and devote our entire minds to more thoughtful literature.
I had dubbed this summer of ‘07 The Summer of Classics, devoted to reading notable books and watching notable movies to increase my narrative and cultural literacy beyond the weird stuff I take in independently, but after a trip to the library for some Faulkner (The Sound and The Fury) and Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow) I found myself back there checking out T.C. Boyle and Christopher Buckley.
I spend all my good brain hours earning a paycheck, and when I get home I’m looking for good ol’ American escapism.
Aren’t a lot of English majors readers first, but not all are critics first or even second? I thought that’s why folks go into English: they like to read, they like books, they maybe even like to write their own stuff.
And I don’t think you’re not such a critic. You’ve always been able to succinctly tell me your synopsis on a book and give me its highs and lows. Isn’t that critique?
There’s a woman at our county library who is in charge of ordering books for a certain section. She says she spends most of her budget ordering patron-requested graphic novels because that’s what folks request most and shit, at least they’re reading.
A lot of my friends are into Harry Potter, but it’s mostly like you, for escapism. They’re university students and scholars and are usually stuck with textbooks and conference papers. It’s fantasy and light reading and there’s nothing wrong with that from my vantage point. We all need breaks.
Me on the other hand, I’m buried under a currently-reading list full of nonfiction that should have been required material for my undergrad but wasn’t. Maybe I’ll pick up a TC Boyle at our next library trip since you praise him so well.
Don’t bother picking up any of his books from the library, since I have his virtual library right heres.
For the most part, I really don’t care whether or not people read. There are lots of ways to access interesting information these days.
But for that same reason I cannot give props to someone simply because they are reading. Crap is crap regardless of the medium. I don’t believe that crap in the form of text somehow magically makes it better. (Please note that I have not specified what is crap and what is not. I am relying more here on our own individual idiosyncratic senses of what is crap and what is not, in a manner that says more about what we like than what others should like.)
I am sensitive to the notion that people are too drained by capitalism to read “serious” literature, but I would appreciate greater specificity regarding why these people do not read said literature. The claim that they do not have enough time is bogus, because these same people spend an inordinate amount of time watching television, playing computer games, and/or Internetting. To say that they avoid “serious” literature because of the additional work required to digest it is an altogether different claim, and one that contains the kernel of the argument that you yourself are arguing against.
What is narrative for?
I went through a period of reading primarily hard-boiled murder mysteries starring the lone female detective who wins grudging respect from authorities who are consternated and oppositional to her otherwise. And there’s the formula, the genre, right there. That formula was haiku, though: there were ones written well and ones written poorly; there were fully drawn characters and characters from the head of someone catching a trend.
I needed to hear that Coyote story, and I needed to hear it often, and I needed it to star someone I could identify with. Studying english and psych and women’s studies helped make it obvious what I was doing, but I would have done it anyway.
I can and do read classics, and some hit me as mythos and some hit me as intellectual exercises and some hit me as both. The myth making ones become me and live in me and become part of who I am, helping me access life in a new way. Now that I am no longer on the edge, I have more emotional space for more nuanced novels, but I am using them in the same way I used my tough-lone-wolves; they are helping me to create ways of being.
Intellectual reads are sometimes interesting puzzles - but reading JUST to say how “good” something is (which I certainly have done) strikes me as sort of self-indulgent ego stroking, holding myself back with the strength of my ponderous brain.
Something that still hits me in the myth maker even though I have the tools to look under the engine? That’s a book I’ll read again.
So my answer to “crap” is usually “why?” and I think there’s often an interesting subtext to the Zeitgeist that produces such phenomenon. Harry Potter is loved not because of marketing, because the mythology is loved. I would suggest it is needed or lacking.
Literary “snobs” might need something else. Good for them. I mean that seriously - if they love a book deeply enough that it changes them, and they cannot love Harry Potter that way, that’s fine. However, if the engine analysis takes over the ability to love - well, that’s just sad to me. It’s Don Juanism, literary playin’.
My reading throughout my life has consisted, by a very large margin, mostly of non-fiction, so I’ve never felt part of this particular debate.