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Tuesday
“Reading is a vice,” Adam Kirsch provocatively proclaims in a recent Atlantic article. Intending to push our buttons, he argues that reading means “cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive.” Since my blog and my book assert just the opposite, today’s post is my response.
Observing that reading is on the decline—Kirsch notes that, in 2023, “just 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day”—he observes that educators are taking the wrong tack to reverse the trend:
If people won’t read books because they enjoy it, perhaps they can be persuaded to do it to save democracy. The International Publishers Association, which represents publishers in 84 countries, has spent the past year promoting the slogan “Democracy depends on reading,” arguing that “ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.”
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum makes the most eloquent case for this position, contending that reading great literature can produce good citizens and good voters. Kirsch, however, says that it doesn’t matter whether or not this is true (as I believe it is). The problem is that such arguments
don’t actually persuade anyone to read more, because they misunderstand why people become readers in the first place. Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
Then he makes his “vice” argument:
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
And further on:
Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.
Kirsch’s point here reminds me of an article by my dissertation director, J. Paul Hunter, who in “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader” notes that many husbands in the 18th century were threatened by the million-word novel Clarissa because their wives would disappear into it for days, neglecting household responsibilities.
Kirsch goes on to argue that young people are more likely to read novels if their elders attack them, citing Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover as instances.
I won’t say this is entirely wrong. My eldest son read Huckleberry Finn on his own in high school—he even wrote an essay on it–after reading a Washington Post column contending that it shouldn’t be taught in high school as teenagers couldn’t understand the irony. Justin wanted to prove that he could get the irony. But Kirsch has it mostly backwards: teenagers don’t read books because adults condemn them. Rather, adults condemn books because teenagers like them. Samuel Johnson fulminated against the wildly popular Tom Jones because he feared it made vice look attractive, and German parents attacked the similarly popular Sorrows of Young Werther because they feared it would lead their teens to commit suicide. Similarly, kids aren’t reading Judy Blume novels or The Perks of Being a Wall Flower because Moms for Liberty are out to ban them—although that being said, knowing that the books are under attack can add to their allure.
But okay, let’s say that official approval doesn’t help matters. This is a point that Horace made back in 19 BC, noting in Ars Poetica that “the tribes of the seniors” (by which he means grumpy old men) “rail against everything that is void of edification” whereas “the exalted knights” (young men) disregard poems which they find to be “austere” (preachy and moralistic). But Horace doesn’t agree with Kirsch that reading should only be seen as a “private pleasure” or that we should promote books by labeling them transgressive and dangerous. Whereas Kirsch’s standard is whether a book will draw us in so much that we’ll read it under the covers with a flashlight, Horace, after agreeing, adds that it should also be instructive. The best poets, he wrote, “deliver at once both the pleasures and the necessaries of life.”
By focusing exclusively on delight—and by attacking utilitarians who think that literature can make us better people—Kirsch ignores the instructive side. It seems to matter little to him that the examples he gives are books that render a person mad (Don Quixote’s chivalric romances) or so discontented with life as to lead to suicide (Emma Bovary’s 18th century Harlequin romances). He appears to be saying that reading’s only purpose is to immerse us.
It seems of no concern to him, for instance, that the book that turns Emma’s head–Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s 1788 novel Paul and Virginia–is schlock. Emma is besotted with “the little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all of the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.” Such a work, however, fails to move Emma beyond her shallow, materialist desires.
And what about two 20th century works that have pulled readers in. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged so engaged Speaker of the House Paul Ryan that he used it as his inspiration to slash America’s social safety net. Jean Raspail’s Camp of Saints, meanwhile, continues to fuel rightwing xenophobia with its racist depictions of dark-skinned immigrants. Now that is reading as a vice, instances of books ruining lives. If Kirsch used these examples rather than Cervantes and Flaubert, he’d have to complicate the nature of delight and write a less edgy article.
As I learned from writing my book, there has always been a tension between literature as entertainment and literature as instruction. Whenever one side has had the upper hand, the other has struck back. When 19th century utilitarians like John Stuart Mill argued for literature as a social good, movements like art for art’s sake countered that literature should be an end itself. Kirsch is replicating that debate in his article.
My own view is that teachers and librarians have a role to play in introducing to young readers to works that will both entrance and educate them and that, by listening to their pupils’ needs, they can generate the enthusiasm that both Kirsch and the International Publishers Association desire. I think reading aloud in class, putting less emphasis on testing, and ignoring rightwing attacks on beloved young adult novels will help in the endeavor.
Allowing kids free rein in uncensored libraries is also essential. Reading specialist John Holt has written that the more kids read, the more discriminating they become and that quantity is more important than quality at the beginning. Early in my childhood I devoured the abysmally written Hardy Boy and Bobbsey Twin series but eventually started looking for more variety. I watch my own grandchildren veering between formulaic dreck and substantive books without consciously noticing the difference. They’ll gravitate naturally towards the better stuff the more they read and will be readers for life.
Oh, and thanks to their encounters with books, they’ll also grow up to be complex and reflective citizens. I saw it in myself and in my three sons, and I’m beginning to see it in Alban, Esmé, Etta, Eden, and Ocean.
