Tuesday
I’ve been thinking about the lament, in a Guardian article that came out earlier in the month, that our digital age is ruining our novel reading. “Surrounded by screens,” moans freelance writer Ioan Marc Jones, “I lost my ability to read some of the best books ever written.”
The article got me wondering whether screens are having any impact on my own novel reading since I now move constantly between different forms of electronically delivered fiction, from Kindle to Guttenberg novels on my laptop to Libby novels an on my phone to audiobooks (Libby again). And while I still read two or three novels a week, it’s true that I no longer bury myself in them for hours at a time.
Jones uses his parents to depict the ideal reader:
My parents hail from the literary working class, a subsection of society that believes great works lead to a richer life. Reading for them was an inverted form of class snobbery. My dad could read as well as anyone. He’d prove it on package holidays, sitting on the balcony the entire time, head bowed, cigarette in hand, flicking through the pages of Jane Austen or Herman Melville.
Inspired by them, Jones too was once such a reader. In his late teens and early twenties, he says, he worked his way through the great works, especially falling in love with Middlemarch. (“I was a smart lad, prone to bad decisions, unsure of my place in the world. It is perhaps no surprise that I identified with Dorothea.”) Later he moved on to such contemporary authors as Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Elena Ferrante, Roddy Doyle, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Jones experienced his moment of self-doubt when he encountered the Guardian’s list of “the 100 greatest novels” (here’s my post about the list) and set out to read the 32 he hadn’t read. Suddenly he found himself impatient where once he had been engrossed. Dickens no longer captivated him, and he describes Our Mutual Friend as “complicated, the prose as heavy as the 900-page book.” With Dracula he struggled “with the glaring absurdity of the epistolary format.” Tristram Shandy, meanwhile, he found to be “inexcusable,” with the language “verbose,” the language “indecipherable,” and the detours “infuriating.”
I should note, in Sterne’s defense, that he anticipated that readers would balk at his detours. We know this from his over-the-top praise of authorial digressions.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;——they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
Henry Fielding, whose Tom Jones I would have chosen over (or at least placed along side of) Tristram Shandy, also anticipates readers chafing at his self-reflective introductory chapters. “There may be no parts in this prodigious work,” he writes,
which will give the reader less pleasure in the perusing, than those which have given the author the greatest pains in composing. Among these probably may be reckoned those initial essays which we have prefixed to the historical matter contained in every book; and which we have determined to be essentially necessary to this kind of writing, of which we have set ourselves at the head.
To eliminate these introductory chapters, however, would be like (to use a parallel I applied when teaching Tom Jones) removing the framing device from the movie Princess Bride: suddenly we would get a love story without the wonderful cosmopolitan irony.
Novel reading can be compared to the slow food movement: the point is savoring the work as you go along, not simply filling your stomach with plot. Sterne, Dickens, and Fielding are all inviting us into a friendship that will grow over time. Having just listened to an audiobook of Our Mutual Friend, I found nothing at all heavy about it—but that was because I took my time. The same was true with Fanny Burney’s 900-page Cecilia, which I recently read for the first time. Each evening I would read twenty or thirty pages and, by the end, could understand why Jane Austen was a fan.
Another way to think of this is that authors are charismatic cult leaders, using their individual style to reprogram our minds. But we have to be willing participants in this reprogramming—we must suspend our disbelief—in order to experience what they are offering us. It can be a gradual process.
Jones comes to this realization in the course of writing his article. For instance, he quotes a senior lecturer in 19th-century literature at St Andrews, who
advocates the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: “Replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.” Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and plenty of others initially appeared in that format. Self-serialising slows us down, lets us linger on the text, and creates suspense. “Read one chapter per session and you’ll be better placed to appreciate the detail of these Victorian worlds – and their cliffhangers.”
A number of writers have observed that reading is like a muscle, which must be exercised over time. To this, Jones adds that good reading
begets better reading. In The Novel: A Biography The Novel: a Biography, Michael Schmidt writes: “Reading is a cumulative act, adding skills, increasingly creative as it goes. To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure.” The more you read, the richer the reading.
After getting those muscles working again, Jones reports returning to his early love of Dickens
I’ve adopted the “Read like a Victorian” strategy: I cover only a few chapters at a time and put the book down, with a thud, even if I want to continue. I am taking Our Mutual Friend slowly, without rushing towards a self-inflicted finish line. The digressions still bore me, but I’m learning to appreciate the arguments, the flurries (at least the good ones). I’m slowly getting used to the longer sentences, the shifts in register, the complicated syntax. My love of classics is creeping back.
While I’ve never lost this love, it’s true that the presence of electronic texts volleying and thundering to the left and right of me have disrupted my reading. Writing a literary essay a day has also eaten into my reading time. A few chapters in my down times, however, still offer up immense rewards.
