We’re getting to a highly subjective part of the argument here, and one that I suspect can never be adequately explained or accounted for since trying to rationalize any form of love is practically impossible - but let’s carry on regardless since the way literature expands your sense of selfhood lies at the heart of the experience of reading.
The interior pleasures of reading are well documented; the historian Edward Gibbon noted that he wouldn’t exchange the delights he got from reading “for the treasures of India”; Sir Richard Steele pronounced that “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body”; and no set of endorsements would be complete without a testimonial from Morrissey, who observed in another of his seminal lyrics “There’s more to life than books - but not much more.”
For a more rigorously academic analysis of reading, it’s difficult to beat Harold Bloom’s magisterial tome published in 2000, ‘How to Read and Why’.
To read human sentiments in human language you must be able to read humanly, with all of you. You are more than an ideology, whatever your convictions, and Shakespeare speaks to as much of you as you can bring to him. That is to say: Shakespeare reads you more fully than you can read him . . .We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life. . . We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading . . . is the search for a difficult pleasure. . . There is a reader's Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain, except for the even more precarious transcendence we call "falling in love." I urge you to find what truly comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and for considering. Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.
Which pretty much sums it all up, at least from the perspective of what Bloom labels the ‘solitary’ or ‘selfish’ reader. What he’s saying is that literature shines its light into corners of your soul you never even knew existed. So in a strange kind of way, the text is reading you as you’re reading it. It can give perspective, it can make connections, it can spark recognitions as your mind flashes around within it, giving new life to old meanings you may have forgotten. It’s both animator and re-animator, weaving patterns of meaning and significance into fresh designs. It involves you and the person you are in its meaning.
And it doesn’t do to forget that reading is also a visual medium; while you’ve got your proboscis in a book, all kinds of pictures come flooding involuntarily into your head - what Bertie Wooster looks like; the appearance of Gormenghast or Wuthering Heights. You’ll have your version, others will have theirs that is quite different. Whether they’re willed or uncalled for needn’t matter - these visions are there if you’re engaging with a text fully and you’re firing on all imaginative cylinders.
And it’s quite easy to get proprietorial about this world you’re creating. We’ve all known or heard about friendless children who seek solace in stories, and whose fictional companions are more real (and sympathetic) to them than any of their peers. Adjust the perspective slightly, and you’ve an adult using literature as a retreat from a noisy, cluttered life. Not necessarily an escape, perhaps, but a quiet place they can call their own where family and work colleagues can’t intrude. Nick Hornby’s creation Katie Carr, with whose testimony we began this section, discovers that in order to hang on to her sense of self that has been systematically eroded by the responsibilities of her job and by the twin roles of mother and wife, she has to find a space that she can sit in and decorate with things that mean something to her and her alone. Prompted by her reading of a biography of Virginia Woolf’s sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, she tries to construct “a beautiful life” for herself, but soon discovers that the only place she can do this is in her imagination. Being a GP, it’s the one area of her being that isn’t permanently on call. Books, and to a lesser extent, music, are the building blocks to create this private domain. But, of course, reality keeps intruding on any time she sets aside for her project, and Katie resigns herself to the fact that we all have to grab meaning as and when we can, even if it’s from a ‘Star Wars’ video. It’s a sad but realistic account of the modern Recreational Reader. It’s not merely selfish - it can be lonely too, having no-one to share your meaning with. More of which momentarily.
But let’s look a little more deeply at the ways literature strikes chords within us. If we examine this logically, there has to be:
Þ a point of encounter;
Þ next, the establishment of contact;
Þ and lastly, a process of communication
or what I’m going to refer to as ‘Accessibility’, ‘Dialogue’ and ‘Empathy’ respectively.
Just before we start: you’ll notice in what follows that I’ll be drawing examples from extra-literary disciplines (photography, painting and sculpture). This isn’t because I can’t find any in literature - far from it. Rather I’m trying to demonstrate the fact that interpreting literature and reacting to it shares many principles with the way we look at practically anything outside ourselves. So the study of literary meaning is as much to do with the way we use our senses and intelligence in this broader context than about different schools and theories of criticism, many of which tend to rope off literature as a separate field of study with its own exclusive sets of rules. I’m not saying there aren’t these exclusive methodologies, simply that you don’t necessarily need to be aware of them to interpret literature both satisfyingly and successfully - as we’ll see at greater length in Part 4. It can (and does) come perfectly naturally.
To that end, let’s rejoin our travelogue, which finds Chris and I staying at Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, an absolutely gob-smackingly beautiful slice of nature that could do with some better visitor facilities. At various points during the day, there’s a series of free lectures on offer, and one of these was conducted by Paul Johnson, a professional photographer, who gave an excellent talk on getting the best out of your camera. Which is, of course, not a bad idea when you’re surrounded by some of the most spectacular scenery, flora and fauna anywhere on the planet.
Throughout the talk and subsequent Q & A session, Paul repeatedly referred to the “drama” in a photo, and how this particular term is regularly employed in photographic competitions, or if you’re hawking your snaps round magazine picture editors. When I asked him how he would define it, he said he was referring to the element in the picture that draws you into it.
It may gently seduce you, or roughly assault you - but either way it gets your attention, makes you look twice, and, most importantly, is an incredibly compact way of telling you a story, however inconsequential. In short, the effect on the viewer transcends the literal image and takes you ‘behind’ the shot in a way that requires additional explanation.
Of course, Rod Stewart got there first: “Every Picture Tells a Story Don’t It?”, he asked rhetorically in 1971. Which he might have partially amended to “Every Good Picture”. Paul then produced some pictures that resolutely refused to tell any kind of tale, usually The Great American Family Group set against an anonymous backdrop. These photos, he went on, are untroubled by imagination, or, indeed, any attempt to make them interesting. Zero story potential. Usually taken to assure grandparents that the family had been where they claimed to be going, and hadn’t spent their entire vacation in Vegas. They’re evidence, not art. Even if there was a bison’s bum or something in the background, that might have been the catalyst for further discussion, a ‘way in’ to why that particular shot was taken, or at least a clue to where the family were. For example, did you know that there used to be 60 million bison in America? The plains in Yellowstone were black with them. Then, within the space of a couple of generations, over-hunting reduced the figure to under 50. And that’s not a typo. It’s amazing what a bison’s bum can do to help get your attention.
OK, so it’s not ‘War & Peace’ (unless, of course, you’re a bison), but it’s a start. ‘Drama’ doesn’t have to be anything as sensational as a bunch of war-weary troops raising a tattered Stars & Stripes at Iwo Jima, or a naked Vietnamese girl screaming in agony from the effects of Agent Orange. It can be the shadow on a tree. A dark cloud presaging a thunderstorm. Anything that engages the viewer, no matter how trivial it may seem at first glance. This is what ‘makes’ a picture. And this a is Principle 1 (of 3) in the process of how readers engage with literature - Accessibility. Just exchange the word “drama” for “meaning”.
By ‘accessibility’, I don’t necessarily mean ease of entry; rather it’s the issue of whether we get in at all.
Meaning is, among other things, like a door into the text; it’s an opportunity to come in and make yourself at home, poke about a bit, get yourself oriented, look at the books and CD’s on the shelf, get to know the personality of the writer who’s assembled all this from whatever clues he’s left lying around. You don’t necessarily need a formal invite - anything that captures your attention will serve as your calling card. But something needs to buttonhole you in this way, or else you’ll just skim across the surface of the text without necessarily engaging with it on any meaningful level. Or at the level the writer may have hoped.
It may be that the writer’s locked you out, or you may not have the right set of keys - the fault may just as easily lie with the reader as the quality of the writing. What you’re reading may lie outside the boundaries of your experience; you may find it too distasteful or disturbing; it may tax your reserves of patience, or you may find it just plain boring. One aspect of this disjunction between text and reader is taken up by the literary biographer Lucasta Miller in her re-assessment of Mary Braddon’s bestselling Victorian melodrama ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’:
. . . these novels [of sensation], do make you read them in a peculiar way. I’d had the same experience with [Wilkie] Collins’s ‘The Woman In White’ a few years ago. In both cases, I was almost affronted to find that I remembered almost none of the detail of their complex plots. It’s as if these narratives compel you to devour them at such lightning speed that they only go into your short-term memory - which means they can be just as exciting the second time.
I find this too, particularly in plot-driven literature like that constitutes most detective fiction. It’s difficult to say what the book’s ‘about’, because it’s all about the story. If I were a reviewer, I couldn’t discuss the book’s meaning in any depth, so I’d have to fall back on ‘circumstantial’ material - re-hashing the plot, comparing the book with previously-published works, or the writer with his predecessors and contemporaries in the genre - because there isn’t anything sufficiently arresting or distinctive to prompt a conversation between my imagination (which is meaning’s power supply) and the text. Sometimes, even with some of my favourite authors, I’ll get several pages into a book before realizing I’ve already read it - or even more galling, that I’ve bought the damn thing twice.
It’s like a species of ‘Under-Reading’ - not getting as much out of a book as you should, or as much as you suspect is actually there.
