“When people ask me what I do, I usually say I’m an essayist or a critic. More honorable terms, both, and they mostly fit. They almost conceal the fact that the greater part of what I do is read and write about books.”
In writing that, Sven Birkerts expanded his repertoire into writing about reading and writing about books.
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. A title like that tips the conclusion; Birkerts is not optimistic. This collection of essays circles around the image of Birkerts standing with a hand-written sign saying, “The End is Nigh.”
The book isn’t much of a Whodunit, though. What killed Reading? The internet with its insidious allure. Even more remarkable, the book was published in 1994, so this is before Netflix. Even back in those days, however, Birkerts described talking with his students about reading:
And what emerged was this: that they were not, with a few exceptions, readers—never had been; that they had always occupied themselves with music, TV, and videos; that they had difficulty slowing down enough to concentrate on prose of any density; that they had problems with what they thought of as archaic diction, with allusions, with vocabulary that seemed “pretentious”; that they were especially uncomfortable with indirect or interior passages, indeed with any deviations from straight plot; and that they were put off by ironic tone because it flaunted superiority and made them feel that they were missing something. The list is partial.
Yeah, Birkerts despairs. (Interestingly, he later did a stint at Mount Holyoke; alas, I never met him.)
What is the problem? It is not that students are illiterate or not interested in learning things. With a student that enjoys talking, it really isn’t hard to find some set of topics for a mutually pleasurable conversation. Students have opinions, strong ones. They have a wide assortment of factoids at their disposal. And they carry around a pocket encyclopedia.
But, by and large, they don’t read books. Then again, many of my colleagues also don’t read books. Sure, they read journal articles and suchlike, but they are not what you would call Readers. Indeed, most of my acquaintances are not Readers, and I suspect I have an unusually high number of readers as acquaintances. Birkerts think we have collectively lost the habit of reading.
What is true of art is true of serious reading as well. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake it. And true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitement of film.
And, note, we no longer need big screens for the excitement of film. Your tablet and wireless headphones are a portable surround sound movie theater.
At this level, Birkerts is joining the choir, often composed of people who write books complaining that other people don’t read books anymore. Of course some people still read books…just not that many books. Only a quarter of Americans report not reading any books in the last year. The median American reads about 4 books a year. About a third of Americans read at least a book a month. Around 5% read at least book a week. So, it is not the case that people never read books; they just don’t read enough books to make people like Birkerts happy.
However, the lack of a broad reading public has a couple of rather important effects. In a discussion of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination—itself a collection of essays about reading books—Birkerts is intrigued by something other than Trilling’s remarks about books.
We may be surprised by the realization that he is writing not for his fellow academic but for the intelligent layman; that there was once a small but active and influential population of such readers, enough for publishers to count on, enough to support a literary culture outside the university radius. These readers were assumed to have a broad general acquaintance with literary classics—James, Austen, Dickens, Flaubert—as well as modern works by writers like Hemingway, Forster, Mann, and Sartre. They would have the rudiments of Freudian psychology, Marxist science, philosophy (certainly a smattering of Descartes, Kant, Bergson, and Nietzsche), classical history (Tacitus, Polybius, Thucydides), and so on. Not a great deal to ask, but how many readers like that are out there now? Some, of course. But do we ever think of them as forming a constituency, as representing a cultural power, as representing anything besides a quirky exception to the norm?
A fascinating observation, that. Of the Americans reading four books a year, how many of those books are Shakespeare’s plays? Even among the book a week or more types, is it Austen, Dickens and Hemingway, let alone Trilling? What happens when people stop reading Descartes and Thucydides for pleasure? What can a writer assume the audience has read? Is asking about whether people read Thucydides or Dickens an interesting question or a pretentious question?
Of course people read all those important books in school…or at least they read important sections from important books in school…or at the very least they read a summary of the important sections of the important books in school…or at a minimum they were supposed to read a summary of the important bits of the important books in school. This, though, leads to another aspect of the decline of reading. Who controls the syllabus of books which will be read in schools? In the last few decades, this has been an enormous battle ground. Why? Birkerts notes:
As Katha Pollitt argued so shrewdly in her much cited article in The Nation: if we were a nation of readers, there would be no issue. No one would be arguing about whether to put Toni Morrison on the syllabus because her work would be a staple of the reader’s regular diet anyway. These lists are suddenly so important because they represent, very often, the only serious works that the student is ever likely to be exposed to. Whoever controls the list comes out ahead in the struggle for the hearts and minds of the young.
For those of us who think the Great Books are important, this is a massive problem. If the average person is only going to read 4 books a year for the rest of their life, then the books assigned in school will make up a noticeable percentage of one’s reading material. It suddenly makes a big difference how many Shakespeare plays you read in high school because this will be for very many people the last time they ever read Shakespeare. If you don’t read Toni Morrison or Ernest Hemingway in high school, you may never see either one.
Does it really matter if people read books? That is a tricky question to answer. It is manifestly true that a person can lead a very meaningful life, full of purpose and love, and never read a book. People led productive and wonderful lives for thousands of years before Gutenberg came along. Even after the printing press, books were not cheap, so you would have to be enormously wealthy to have a moderately sized library of your own. Public libraries are remarkably recent historical inventions. A life without books used to be the norm.
So, if reading books is not crucial to leading a Good Life, why does it matter? After 220 pages of angst, Birkerts arrives here:
My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth—from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery—and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral connectedness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days?
Reading books promotes depth. Yes, you can get the facts from a breezy article on the web. Yes you can imagine yourself walking in another’s shoes in a 2 hour movie or a one hour TV show. But, the book forces you to slow down, to set your mind wandering in vaster plains, swimming in deeper waters, climbing greater heights than your daily life will offer. The book always moves at the pace of your mind, allowing the words to work their magic at exactly the tempo you desire. Books are neither necessary nor sufficient to a life well lived. But, books, Great Books, will make whatever life you are living even better.
Leave a Reply