The Future of Reading

Eric Purchase

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429844041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Why do we read? What happens to our imaginations when we read? To our knowledge? What creative forces are unleashed? What are the wider implications of all of this?

In a truly engaging and accessible style, The Future of Reading looks at the very experience of reading; not just the consumption and interpretation of texts, but also reading as an artistic process that demands creative freedom and unfolds from deep in the soul. Rather than analysing or critiquing texts, this book examines what happens to us when we read: the complex human experience which frees us from certain boundaries and constraints, and then looks at how we can use this freedom of mind to creatively tackle much larger issues in the world. Eric Purchase argues that creative reading enables us to generate answers for complex, real-world problems that cut across fields of knowledge and, therefore, defy solution by experts.

Enjoyable, challenging, unique, and astute, this book will open up the reading experience for students and all readers interested in using literature and reading as a positive force in their lives and the world.

CHAPTER 1

The freedom of a reader

Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m not going to form an opinion about our Afghanistan strategy until I hear from the Poet Laureate?” Probably not. We view literature as a means of reflecting on the world rather than as a way to engage it directly.

When we consume literature, we make unspoken assumptions about the nature of reading. Reading is a cultural form that encourages and discourages certain behaviors. If we change the form, we enable different behaviors. We give ourselves new capabilities. We can acquire more power over our own lives and in the world at large by adopting new reading habits.

Unfortunately, we accept the form of reading that we learned at home and in school without a second thought, not realizing how it limits us. To create a new form, we must reconsider the fundamentals of reading, starting with the main elements: the writer, the text, and the reader. Typically, we imagine the page as a kind of rear-projection screen. The author sits out of sight behind the screen and projects words onto it. We readers sit in front of the screen. We can’t see what the writer is doing. We merely consume the words as they appear before our eyes.

In this model, the writer plays an active role. He puts a great deal of thought and effort into creating the text. We admire this creativity. We allow him all freedom to develop it. The text comes from somewhere deep in the writer’s soul. Its source is ultimately unknowable. The writer’s uncommon skill and the inaccessibility of its source enhance the value of the text in our eyes.

By contrast, the reader is passive. We are supposed to take the text as a given. We do not question its integrity. We restrict ourselves to determining what the writer means. Or if we grant that the meaning extends beyond the author’s intention, we look for what the text means. We employ theories and methods to ensure we come up with an interpretation that remains true to the text, uncontaminated by our personal concerns. We do not allow the reader an artistic process, comparable to the writer’s, which demands creative freedom and unfolds from deep in the soul.

In short, we do not give the activity of reading enough respect. We do not distinguish reading clearly enough from the text. We study fiction, poetry, and plays in school because they are revered for their literary excellence. The term “literature” confounds what we read with the value we derive from it. We view the text and its value as nearly identical. We internalize the text in order to possess its value. We often satisfy our curiosity about a friend’s reading by asking for the title as if knowing which book someone has read tells us all we need to know about the value he derives from it. This melding of text and value makes it hard to conceive of a form of reading that is not just a mirroring of the text in our mind or a set of methods and interpretations. Yet we know such a model is inaccurate. Suppose we both read the same book. It changes your life, but it bores me. We didn’t merely interpret the text differently; we had radically different experiences of it. A lot more has gone on inside us than absorbing the text into our consciousness.

Reading is not merely an intellectual activity. It is a complex human experience, like the relationships, work, travel, health, and other circumstances that define our lives. Like them, reading can sustain our whole weight if we need it to. As with them, the feelings we experience when we read deserve minute observation. We can thereby turn reading into a deliberate pursuit. We can read more creatively and derive more value from the experience. And that value will be differentiated—uniquely mine, uniquely yours, fitted for where we are and what we need to do.

Creative reading enables us to imagine the world as a whole and to conjecture solutions for the problems we encounter in it.

This vision of reading can address “wicked problems,” which consist of multiple, interlocking challenges. We can’t solve Challenge A until we solve Challenge B. We can’t solve Challenge B until we solve Challenge C. We can’t solve Challenge C until we solve Challenge A.

Here’s an example. Say we want to increase crop yields to feed a growing world population. The plant scientists create a genetically engineered version of corn that resists weed killer. The farmer can efficiently spread herbicide over all of his fields to kill the weeds without harming the corn, which then grows fatter from not having to compete for nutrients. The corporation for which the scientists work patents the genes. The patent gives the corporation the power to dictate that farmers must buy new seeds every year for the corn—they cannot retain seed corn for the next year as farmers have done for 10,000 years. The corporation audits the farmers every year to ensure compliance. Wind blows the pollen from the genetically modified corn into a neighboring field and pollinates the corn there. The corporation, therefore, sues that farmer to claim the fee for its intellectual property, which found its way there by chance. Farmers using ordinary seed corn cannot compete with the yields garnered by farmers who use the genetically modified version, so economics forces them to buy the new corn, too. The triumph of the new version threatens to create a monoculture. A staple crop for humans and animals has become more vulnerable to being wiped out by a disease or biological attack. Other countries view the genetically modified corn as a threat to their agriculture and possibly to human health, so it becomes a cause of trade friction and a subject of testing by medical researchers. Thus, the plant scientists who simply wanted to increase crop yields have triggered a series of consequences, most of which they did not foresee, in farming, economics, accounting, ethics, law, medicine, national security, and international trade. There is no simple solution. If we ban genetically modified corn, farmers will produce less, and possibly consumers somewhere in the world will have less food to eat. If we allow genetically modified corn, the structures and expectations around farming must be adjusted, often painfully.

We leave these kinds of questions for experts and formal institutions to answer. We feel such problems lie beyond the power of an ordinary person to solve. However, experts also lack an ability to address them because they overflow the watertight containers of knowledge through which they understand the world. Doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers, scientists, and other professionals gain their authority by acquiring deep knowledge in narrow fields. That is because we have constructed institutions and incentives to reward specialization. Experts solve problems beautifully within their own fields. They flounder when problems extend beyond them.

We continue to put our faith in rational inquiry and specialists to solve problems for us, and they keep failing us when we need solutions most urgently. The International Monetary Fund recommended austerity to countries during the 2008 financial crisis, based on economic principles, only to admit error after those countries suffered terrible job losses. But even when economists recognized their mistake and found the right solution—increased government spending—they could not persuade politicians to follow their advice.

Every member of the U.S. Supreme Court attended Harvard or Yale. They may be the most highly qualified jurists in the court’s history. They have also divided along partisan lines, and the court has lost much of its reputation for impartiality.

Sophisticated medicine fumbles when it faces patients like my father whose disease cuts across medical specialties. The cardiologist knows little about bowel trouble, the gastroenterologist little about depression, the family physician little about blood disorders, and the hematologist little about heart conditions. So how will they diagnose a man who experiences symptoms in all four areas? He dies slowly while they search programmatically for an answer. After five fruitless trips to the emergency room, I decided to do a little reading on my own. I reasoned that my father probably had a common ailment and soon identified heart failure. I reached this diagnosis before the doctors precisely because I have no medical training and, therefore, lack the conceptual categories and protocols that divide up this field of knowledge. Doctors will warn against the danger of laymen attempting a diagnosis. Yes, it is dangerous anytime we allow reading to have direct, real-world consequences. It is also dangerous to trust experts blindly. I still go to the doctor when I’m sick, but I ask a lot of questions.

We have to go back to antiquity to find an intellectual model for a universe not divided by specialized knowledge. The ancients embraced a more comprehensive vision of the world than we moderns see. In The Nature of the Universe, the Roman poet Lucretius argues that people should not succumb to the worries aroused by superstition and religion because the world is wholly physical and can be understood rationally. The book’s famous invocation of Venus indicates how gracefully Lucretius melds the physical and the human realms:

Mother of Aeneas’s descendants, pleasure of humans and gods,

nourishing Venus, who enjoys visiting, under gliding

constellations, the ocean with its ships, the earth

with its fruits. Through you the whole kingdom of animals

is conceived and watches the sun’s light rising up.

You are the one, goddess, that the winds flee from; the clouds of the sky

flee before you and your coming; for you the sweet, beautiful earth

sends up flowers; for you the surface of the sea laughs,

and the calmed sky shines with spreading light.

(I, 1–9)

The elegance of these lines conceals a complex imagination of the world. The mythological figure of Venus is at once the planet Venus, sexual desire, and the mother of Aeneas, who founded the Roman people. Thus, the material objects of the universe, the human and animal instincts, and the historical and cultural context of Lucretius’ readers become inextricable. The function of Venus as a divinity quietly disappears inside these three aspects. We do not need to assume that supernatural powers govern the world because the material ones that Venus represents calm the earth on their own in a predictable rhythm just as reason calms a mind beset with irrational fears. If we respond to the beauty of the verse—how can we resist?—we have already primed ourselves to accept Lucretius’ philosophy before we have read ten lines.

Similarly, the physical, moral, and poetic arguments of Lucretius’ work reinforce one another. Lucretius asserts that the universe consists of atoms moving through a void, a proposition not too different from the teachings of modern physics. Nevertheless, his universe never becomes the inhuman emptiness it does in our science. The very images that Lucretius uses to explain the universe keep it human. For instance, he demonstrates the atomic theory of matter through the example of a gold ring which becomes thinner after years on someone’s finger. Invisible particles must have been wearing off the whole time. Atoms thereby become associated with a symbol of warmth and remembrance. He shows that the universe is infinite by asking us to imagine what would happen if the universe did have an outer limit: a warrior could run out to the boundary and hurl a spear over it. There must always be further space for the spear to fly into. This vignette reads like episodes from Roman military history where the centurions hurl battle standards over the palisade of the enemy’s camp to spur the troops into storming it to retrieve the standards and the honor of the legion. In a wholly physical universe, the gods are unnecessary; the world progresses on its own through the movement of the atoms. This godless, materialistic, yet human-scale universe implies its own morality. The grand objects of life in society—god and country—mean nothing in a universe of innumerable atoms and infinite void. Therefore, according to Lucretius, the best people can do is maximize their personal happiness. The good life involves quiet, moderate enjoyment of friendships, study, and physical pleasures. We must not overdo anything, he warns, not become a slave of our own appetites once we have liberated ourselves from the illusion of religious and political duty.

Lucretius addressed a complex challenge of his time at the end of the Republic. Rome had acquired a vast empire. Many residents of Rome came from somewhere else. They brought their own gods and religions. Roman religious institutions started to seem less inevitable and sometimes a bit parochial, such as the college of 15 haruspices, who sacrificed a goose, examined its liver for portents of future events, and reported them to the government. Rome’s official religion functioned as an extension of the state. Only the politically powerful and their associates could hold important priestly offices. Religious ceremonies and teachings reinforced the government. Getting ahead in this environment involved questionable activities: joining the army to accumulate booty from foreign conquests, becoming a government official to skim money off the top, or using connections with powerful people to start a business. Various factions at Rome vied for political power, and the winners had a habit of executing or exiling the vanquished. Success of any sort was fragile. This situation posed a number of questions: Where do you direct your energy if politics and self-dealing taint the conventional measures of success, such as military glory and wealth? What does a moral life consist of if the traditional Roman virtue of selfless dedication to the noble fatherland is no longer possible? How do you find meaning in life if you lose respect for the religious customs and institutions you grew up with? Today, one imagines that experts would tackle these problems separately—the theologians addressing the spiritual question, the political scientists addressing the political question, the psychologists addressing the personal question. Yet these challenges are interlinked. Religion is tainted by politics, politics is driven by private ambition, private happiness depends on spiritual satisfaction, and so on. The lack of specialization in the ancient world allows Lucretius to propose a coherent solution that addresses all facets of the challenge at the same time.

As an artifact, The Nature of the Universe seems alien to us today. We cannot imagine someone writing a seamless combination of science, philosophy, and poetry. At most, we can imagine a philosopher writing about science or a scientist writing about morality, but such a work would not exceed the bounds of specialized knowledge (the philosopher studies the philosophy of science, not science itself) or would present a mere curiosity (the scientist working as an amateur ethicist). We could never imagine someone writing a true combination of science and philosophy in verse. Why needlessly compound what is already a demanding task by writing dactylic hexameters? We tend to explain the oddity of ancient texts such as The Nature of the Universe in a patronizing way. “This is what science was like back then,” we say to ourselves, or “This is how they wrote.” We must keep reminding ourselves that The Nature of the Universe sprang naturally from the cultural life of the first century B.C. Readers of the time accepted the work on its own terms as an organic whole. They didn’t think of it as pieced together from separate disciplines. That notion merely reflects our own preoccupation with specialization.

What would it take for us readers to imagine our world comprehensively just as Lucretius imagined his? We need the audacity to grapple with the big problems of our life and of the world, despite our own lack of expertise. We can allow ourselves to imagine, conjecture, fancy, and fabricate solutions—in other words, to use our freedom of thought and expression even if it takes us outside our comfort zone.

Suppose we take up the freedom to propose solutions to the world. Where would we get those ideas? Where would they come from? Not from books, but from reading. Books contain other people’s ideas. We generate our own ideas through the friction of reading a text. The act of reading throws up ideas spontaneously much as wool rubbed over a glass rod creates a static charge. The eyes move smoothly across the page, but the soul resists the text, catches at it with a thousand microscopic fibers. What was that word? Does that idea make sense? Is this chapter relevant to me? Why did my mind wander to that particular daydream? Is this passage worth paying attention to? What would have been a better way to write it? What does it remind me of? What do I see in it? Does it give me pleasure? Do I prefer to dream my own dreams? The answers, in fragments, tumble pell-mell through our subconscious while the conscious mind heroically decodes the text. These ideas build up like an electric charge on the surface of our experience, waiting for us to assign them a direction, a pathway through which to discharge their tingling energy in a rush.

The imagination always tugs the reader in a different direction than the book and its author want to go. In a graduate class on the Beats, I once wrote a paper on the open-ended forms of postmodern poetry. I argued that traditional, closed forms of poetry (with uniform meters and rhyme schemes) restrict the imagination. Modern, open forms free the imagination to create new kinds ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The freedom of a reader
• Part I The experience of reading
• Part II Ways of reading
• Part III The functions of reading
• Index