Challenging long-held beliefs

I used to think that there was something rather important about reading literature. I held that the act of reading was an opportunity and a challenge. The reader risks his comfortable worldview, risks encountering new and contrary insights and convictions, risks facing fictive individuals and situations that he must shun or assimilate at cost. In return the reader gains entry into the great project – the collective process whereby we shape and evolve what it is to be human. I thought that project was what our moral lives were about and for. Reading – and significantly the community through which we share and reshape our readings – was a vital component in the development of our moral personhood.

Deep down, I suppose, I still hold with most of that. But now I think it obvious that I misjudged the relative importance of reading to the larger project. Not because of Lord Jim issues concerning the efficaciousness of literary exemplars. Not because the practice of individual reading is clearly a modern invention. And not because the vast array of novels currently available suggests that no single volume or even a canon will be read by anything approaching enough people to constitute a live practice. Those are all excellent counters to any pollyannaish conception of literature’s moral worthiness. I hope, however, my long-held belief in literature’s importance was more than that.

Rather, what has me doubting my previous conviction is a realisation of the practical impossibility of sharing our readings in anything more than a superficial way.

I regularly join with a group of people who love to read. We undertake to each read the same novel within a certain time frame. We then come together to discuss said novel. One might think this would be fertile ground for the great project. It is not. Sometimes some of us agree on the merits of a book. There is always a certain level of dissent. And I find that in practice I cannot discern anything morally significant, instructive, or praiseworthy about either our agreements or our disagreements. Moreover I now think that the effort that would be required to thoroughly investigate our various readings with the aim of reaching a consensus view on a text would utterly and comprehensively undermine any hoped-for benefit.

We appear to read for our own delight. We neither find the novels we read particularly morally instructive, nor do we find them abasing. We come together to share our thoughts on these books, if we do, in a convivial atmosphere that says more about our public commitments than our private convictions. This is the kind of thing that I do; I read. We are readers.

Is that all there is? It seems a bleak observation. It reminds me of the kind of thing I used to hear with dismay, “There’s no accounting for taste.” Is there really no accounting for our differing opinions? Is there no value in reconciling these differences even when these differences are over our readings of a novel? And must we conclude that literature itself is of no importance, or at least no more significant than our affective posturings?

That’s a hard road to take. I don’t know where it leads. I suspect, based on no more than a hunch, that it leads to a cul de sac. Even if it does, that will not in itself provide a ground for my ongoing conviction that reading literature has moral import. It may very well be that I am merely in the grip of picture.

One positive comes out of these observations. I am once again challenging my own long-held beliefs. Perhaps that itself is the next step needed for me to take up again with the great project.