Classic
- a book which people praise but don't read.
Mark
Twain
During
the past year there has been a spirited campaign, led by a growing
contingent of unhappy, that is unread, journalists and writers
lamenting the Internet-engendered decline of reading. But the
decline isn’t as novel as the recent proliferation of
jeremiahs would have us believe.
In
1948, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gassett, from a brilliant
small book of essays entitled The Dehumanization of Art,
writes: “the reading public buys fewer novels while the
demand for books of a theoretical character is relatively increasing
. . . suffice to make us suspect that something is amiss with
the literary genre of the novel.”
So
if the decline of reading’s roots run deeper than we might
suspect, in our time it is worrisomely more endemic and omnivorous.
In the 1940s and 50s, Ortega y Gassett proposed that the form
of the novel, which was driven by storyline, hadn’t sufficiently
adapted to the reader’s growing appetite for character
development, whereas today it is the medium of the printed page
that has fallen into disrepute. In fact the decline of reading
is so widespread that it is no longer beyond the pale to imagine
a day when the printed page will be added to the endangered
species list. And it is not just the novel that is being read
less but almost everything in print: news reports, op-ed pieces,
magazines, essays, scientific papers and textbooks. In short,
the word has been hi-jacked, co-opted by Internet-generated
graphics and videos. Since the turn of the century, the masses,
en masse, default to electronic media for their information
and entertainment. The practical reasons behind this seismic
shift do not augur well for the great tradition of reading.
In large part because the Internet, as a tool for accessing
information, is universally regarded as the digital path of
least resistance since it is demonstratively more efficient
than any page turning, which makes the one-click-away availability
of everything known to mankind a natural first choice. What
this means in practical terms is that the iGeneration spends
significantly more time on its iGadgets to the effect that reading
has become the equivalent of an ancient art.
Leading
the charge of the lament brigade are mostly opinion writers
and essayists, whose daily or weekly columns are not being read
or are being eliminated altogether and/or are being repurposed
for the Internet. In voce magna, they are mouse-quick
to come to the defense of the literary classics that most people
can’t name much less read, but their first concern is
themselves. When they trek (online) to their oracles and read
the print-out they see red alert.
Reading
has fallen into such disfavour if not outright ignominy that
there are persons personally known to me, who, without the slightest
compunction, freely admit they don’t read – almost
as if it is a badge of honour. Talk about turning the page.
They
argue they acquire their knowledge and information through television
or their iGadgets. A friend correctly pointed out that for most
of human history, knowledge was communicated orally. I offhandedly
remarked that if reading a book or two meant that you would
no longer have to live in a cave that had no central heating
and that your life expectancy needn’t be limited to 33,
perhaps the invention of committing knowledge to parchment and
vellum wasn’t such a bad idea after all. As if I simply
didn’t get it, he went on to explain: “I’m
a family man, own a house, drive a nice car, and am happy in
life, why should I read, what am I missing in life?” Well,
I thought to myself (conflict avoidance syndrome), if the nurturing
and development of the ability to reason and think is directly
related to reading (an activity inherently more demanding than
looking at a screen), perhaps the growing society of non-readers
aren’t doing as well as they think. So much for the examined
life.
When
I reflect on all the good reasons to read, I am personally dumbfounded
that people are reading less. Reduced to its lowest common denominator,
the written word is a medium that enables contact between a
reader and someone who isn’t present or is deceased. If
Shakespeare, for example, hadn’t left us the words he
wrote, we would have no way of making contact with him, or worse,
we might not have ever learned that he existed and thought profoundly
on matters of life and death. In the film The Scottish Play,
one of the characters proposes that if aliens were to discover
the planet earth they would name it Shakespeare.
With
J. D. Salinger and Earnest Hemingway in mind, let us try to
figure out why people no longer want to read, that is make contact
with these exceptionally interesting and talented figures. After
all, people pay huge sums of money to participate in séances
where the host-for-hire alleges s/he can facilitate communication
with the dead. If you are the granddaughter of Hemmingway, isn’t
it much easer opening up one of his books or notebooks than
attend a costly (dubious) séance?
Salinger
(1919-2010) and Hemmingway (1899-1961) continue to command the
reader’s attention and adulation because their art, their
creations, speak to present time. Acknowledging the groupie
within, don't we all dream of being admitted to those privileged
inner circles that form around celebrities and distinguished
people in their field? In their day we would have given an arm
and a leg to talk shop with a Salinger or a Hemmingway. Since
that is no longer possible, but in lieu of the fact that they
left a permanent record of their feelings and thoughts, we can
still easily get to know them by reading them.
From
the 5th to the 1st century BC, there are only handful of names
that are still known to us. One would think that we would be
curious to know who they are and what they had to say back then
– especially if what they had to say is relevant today.
And it’s so easy. We merely have to turn the page and
we hear, from one of his famous dialogues, Mr. Plato expatiating
on subjects such as virtue, the passions, politics.
And
not to be trifled with are the many practical reasons why we
should prefer the book to meeting the autor in real life. First
and foremost, reading obviates all the aggravations associated
with dressing up (or down) for the initial get-together. In
terms of the actual meeting, we don’t have to pretend
we have read everything the writer has written, or fear that
the writer might find us uninteresting, or not sufficiently
literary. We don’t have to deal with a writer’s
particular quirks: body odour, an off putting voice, a drinking
problem, volatile mood swings, trips to the bathroom, the writer’s
unhappiness over the reception of his latest book, health problems,
relationship problems. In fact the more we learn about the writer’s
life, you would think we would be begging for the book over
the person.
Unlike
the unedited, diamond in the rough of the writer’s daily
life, what we encounter in the book has been painstakingly distilled
out of the chaos of his life such that his very best is presented
to us on a platter, and it is ‘we’ who choose the
hour of the day when the moveable feast begins. We merely have
to open the book and the writer’s style and voice (his
DNA), which constitute his world view, is rendered numinous
through the words he left us. And in proportion to the effort
we put into meeting his words (his thoughts) on their own terms,
there is a meeting of minds that perhaps no actual meeting can
equal. The best argument for reading over meeting the writer
is that there are no performance issues other than the effort
we must put in to render the words meaningful.
And
yet reading continues to decline.
Marshall
McLuhan distinguishes between hot and cold media: TV is cold,
reading is hot. And what he means is that when our minds become
lazy, non-performing, the TV continues with or without us. But
not the book. When the mind tires, fatigues, the book, the reading
stops. Reading requires a minimum amount of mental effort that
cool media do not require. Which suggests that the mental muscle
required by reading has been rendered flabby as a result of
our overriding preference for cool medium: television and all
of its offshoots (Internet, iPhone, iEverything).
And
into this changing of the guard, we must guard against short-shrifting
human nature. From our humble beginnings in the steppes of Africa
to the present, when the option is available, human beings will
invariably find and pounce on the path of least resistance.
So if TV and the Internet are more easily accomplished than
the act of reading, it is predictable that the former will become
the dominant mode of communication, and that is precisely what
is happening on our watch.
Only
13% of readers read the op-ed section of the newspaper. Why?
Because they lack the mental muscle required of serious reading.
For the same reason, all of us, avid readers included, don’t
read legal documents or the legalese that is included in all
the agreements we sign on to as it pertains to our purchases
and subscriptions. The language of legalese is lifeless, strictly
utilitarian, and most of us can’t be bothered, that is
we lack the mental muscle to make it understandable to ourselves
– and we pay big money to trained professionals (notaries,
lawyers) who can write it and read it like a mother tongue.
McLuhan
hypothesized that when a new mode of communication comes to
the fore, the old one begins to atrophy, and we are perhaps
witnessing the beginnings of this atrophy as it concerns reading.
Especially among the young, the well-trodden path of least resistance
leads to the Internet, where the prevalence of the moving image
is more impactful than reading. Which is to say, it is no longer
the specifications that sell the car, but the shapely, upwardly
mobile woman at the wheel taking a sharp corner at speed.
So
if it can no longer be doubted that reading is in serious decline,
it also appears there is no telltale sign that there is a cure
or reversal option on the horizon. Thankfully, there is no evidence
that the decline of reading is resulting in civilizational decline.
The advances in technology and medicine upon which our collective
well-being depends continue unabated. We only have to look to
the recent miraculous development of the Covid 19 vaccine. Prior
to the pandemic, vaccine development and implementation required
a minimum of five years to ten years. The Covid 19 vaccine was
accomplished in a mere 14 months. And if we should discover
that among the many scientists who worked on the vaccine that
there would be some who don’t read or read significantly
less, would it matter? On top of which there is no metaphysical
evidence that a non-reader’s life is less meaningful than
the reader’s. And there is no empirical evidence that
reading less is tantamount to thinking less? Or that the aesthetic
enjoyment from reading is greater than the enjoyment derived
from conducting a complex online operation, or mastering a video
game?
Man
is constantly at war with the outer world which is everywhere.
He endeavours to arrange it so that he can find time to develop
his inner world to better understand his greater circumstance.
Reading is one of the many means he employs to better prepare
for the contingencies of life. That reading no longer enjoys
favoured status in this fugitive quest does not necessarily
render man less adept in dealing with contingency and adversity.
Let us recall there was a time when the poets thought the world
wouldn’t survive without verse. So we must distinguish
between the indisputable fact that reading is in decline over
and against the effects of this development as it concerns the
individual’s ability to make a better life for himself,
his family and society at large.
What
we can state with some confidence is that in the years to come,
we will be better informed on how the apparent decline of reading
is affecting the world as it turns.
