Reading

Whenever something new enters our lives, we begin to question its merits. It happens all the time: rock and roll is corrupting our children, television is killing brain cells. Now we have the internet. In a recent article, Motoko Rich explains a growing fear of educators, in the New York Times:

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

The problem is not the internet. It's not television or movies. It's easy to blame the medium. Yes, it's more enriching to read a novel than to scroll through pages of meaningless web pages. But there are garbage novels too. There are plenty of writers who produce money hungry works of worthless art. And I have news for you. Must of the art in the mainstream is horrible. It bows to our demands, while promoting accepted ways of thinking. Beware of art that panders to you. Avoid art that preaches accepted values.

The internet is a symptom of a much larger issue. Many people may be literate, but they don't know how to read. There is a major difference. Reading is an act of discernment; it's an active experience. Reading is struggling with a text. While reading fiction, we should pull apart its form, deducing meaning from the author's tone, style, diction, structure, etc. While reading a persuasive essay, we should follow the author's train of thought, wrestling with our own ideas and preconceptions. This is reading. Reading is work, just as writing is.

No one seems to stop and ask themselves the obvious question: Why read? Many educators will tell you that reading improves a student's education. Reading makes students more literate. They will learn to read and write well. But these are stupid PC answers. The problem is cultural. For whatever reason, high-culture is ignored in our society. At worst, people denigrate it. The media avoids it because Don DeLillo and Joyce Carol Oates are too difficult. They don't match up with advertisers' demands. They're right. They don't. But we're better off for it. They question and challenge the systems we are accustomed to. Reading DeLillo or Oates, watching Robert Bresson, will make us more perceptive to these things too. But only through deep concentrated reading. We can only reach a higher knowledge, by wrestling with words and images. We need to study works closely and intimately.

We can start, by changing the way literature is taught. We probably all remember our high school days. I always talk with people who say, "I hated high-school English." The popular belief is that literature should be dealt with on a figurative level. We are told: authors hide meanings, so look for symbols and metaphors. This is bullshit and it's ruining arts education in America. If you teach literature, film, painting this way, you're lazy. In no way is this reading; it's mindless interpretation. It's turning art into an abstraction. This is why people get confused and disillusioned. Why not teach the mechanics of writing? Teach students about form; give them the tools to deal with a text on a surface level. Why don't we do this? Because it's difficult. It's easier to make something into what we think it should be; it's challenging to push students away from symbolism and toward more profound methods of reading.

This is the way our culture operates. We're supposed to respect everyone's opinion. And literature, unfortunately, is no different. "No interpretation is wrong," I've heard teachers and professors say, "as long as you can back it up." This is inaccurate. There are wrong interpretations. We shouldn't be buttressing our ideas with examples from the text. This leads to foolish accusations. One could criticize Joshua Ferris for not ending his novel, "Then We Came to an End," with a dazzling denouement. The novel, in fact, does fizzle at the end. When the crazed, recently fired Tom returns to the office, we believe the plot has thickened. Oh the suspense! But the "gun" turns out to be a paint ball gun. The scene is sad, not suspenseful. Sorry. But that's the whole point. Ferris illuminates the human psychology of office culture, particularly how we often invent plots, pull practical jokes, and exchange gossip to overcome the dullness of our office lives. And as the novel progresses, the humor begins to fade. It's not funny anymore. But that's the point. Ending the novel with a suspenseful plot point would be counterintuitive. Attacking Ferris for not living up to your expectations is ludicrous. Deal with the text first. Read.

The internet could be a valuable tool. Without space constraints, our news coulbe be more detailed and informative. Movie reviews and book reviews could be longer. Critics fear the end of newspapers, but the internet could be their savior. I'm sure advertisers will argue against it. "Who has the time to read a long essay or a large book review?" Yes, we have access to more information, but will we take advantage of it? Will we read?