Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers–which is to say the great majority of people who continue to read–read for one purpose and one purpose only. They read for pleasure. They read to be entertained. They read to be diverted, assuaged, comforted, and tickled. The evidence for this phenomenon is not far to seek. Check out the best-seller lists, even in the exalted New York Times. See what Oprah’s reading. Glance at the Amazon top 100. Look around on the airplane. Reading, where it exists at all, has largely become an unprofitable wing of the diversion industry.
Life in America now is usually one of two things. Often it is work. People work hard indeed–often it takes two incomes to support a family, and few are the full-time professional jobs that require only 40 hours a week. And when life is not work, it is play. That’s not hard to understand. People are tired, stressed, drained: They want to kick back a little. That something done in the rare off hours should be strenuous seems rather unfair. Robert Frost talked about making his vocation and his avocation one, and about his work being play for mortal stakes. For that sort of thing, assuming it was ever possible, there is no longer the time.
But it’s not only the division of experience between hard labor and empty leisure that now makes reading for something like mortal stakes a very remote possibility. Just over 20 years ago, students paraded through the campuses and through the quads, chanting variations on a theme. Hey, hey, ho, ho–they jingled–Western culture’s got to go. The marches and the chants and the general skepticism about something called the canon seemed to some an affront to all civilized values.
The conservatives, protected by tenure, slammed the windows closed when the parade passed by. They went on with what they were doing. Those who concurred with the students bought mikes and drums and joined the march. They were much in demand in the news media. The Washington Post was calling; the Times was on the other line. Was it true? Were the young professors actually repudiating the works that they had purportedly been retained to preserve?
It was true. But the media–most inconstant of lovers–came and the media went, and the academy was left with its cultural authority in tatters.
Now the kids who were kids when the Western canon went on trial and received summary justice are working the levers of culture. They are the editors and the reviewers and the arts writers and the ones who interview the novelists and the poets (to the degree that anyone interviews the poets). Though the arts interest them, there is one thing that makes them very nervous indeed about what they do: They are not comfortable with judgments of quality. The academy failed and continues to fail to answer the question of value.
Entertainment culture suffers no such difficulty. Its rationale is simple, clear, potent: The products of the culture industry are good because they produce immediate and readily perceptible pleasure. Beat that, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Touch it if you can, Emily Dickinson.
If it makes you feel good, it must be good. If Stephen King and John Grisham bring pleasure, why, then, let us applaud them. Let’s give them awards. Let’s break down the walls of the old clubs and colleges and give them entry forthwith. The only really important question to pose about a novel by Stephen King, we now know, is whether it offers a vintage draught of the Stephen King experience. Does it deliver the spine-shaking chills of great King efforts past? Is the mayhem cranked to the desirable degree?
What’s not asked in the review and the interview and the profile is whether a King book is worth writing or worth reading. It seems that no one anymore has the wherewithal to say that reading a King novel is a major waste of time. No chance. If people want to read it, if they get pleasure from it, then it must be good. What other standard is there?
Media no longer seek to shape taste. They do not try to educate the public. This is so in part because no one seems to know what literary and cultural education would consist of. Another reason the media don’t try to shape taste is that it pisses people off. They feel insulted, condescended to; they feel dumb. Public entertainment generally works in just the opposite way–by making the consumer feel like a genius.
Even the most august media outlets no longer attempt to shape taste. They merely seek to reflect it. They hold the cultural mirror up to the reader–what the reader likes, the writer and the editor like. They hold the mirror up and readers–what else can they do?–fall in love with themselves.
Narcissus looks into the book review and finds it good. Narcissus peers into Amazon’s top 100 and nothing insults him; nothing pulls him away from that gorgeous smooth watery image below.
Is it possible that there are people in the world who suffer not from an anxiety that they might be influenced, but rather from an anxiety that they might never be? Perhaps not everyone loves himself with complete conviction and full abandon. Maybe there remain those who look into the shimmering, flattering glass of current culture and do not quite like what they see. Maybe life isn’t working for them as well as it is supposed to be for all in this immeasurably rich and unprecedentedly free country.
Reading in pursuit of influence–that, I think, is the desired thing. It takes a strange mixture of humility and confidence to do as much. Suppose one reads anxious about not being influenced. To do so is to admit that one is imperfect, searching, unfinished. It’s difficult to do when one is young, at least at present (some of the oldest individuals I meet lately are under the age of 21). It’s difficult to do when one is in middle age, for that is the time of commitments. One has a husband or a wife, a family and job–or, who knows, a career. Having second thoughts makes everyone around you insecure. One must stand steady, and sometimes one must pretend. And in old age–early or late–how can one still be a work in progress? That’s the time, surely, to have assumed one’s permanent form.
As one writer observed, those who attempt to create art are never finished. The rest of us are never truly finished, either. What Narcissus wanted was completion, wholeness; he wanted to be that image in the water and have done with it. There would be no more time, no more change, no more revision. To be willing to be influenced, even up to the last, is tantamount to declaring that we’ll never be perfect, never see as gods see–even that we don’t know who and what we are, or why (if for any reason) we are here, or where we’ll go.
The desire to be influenced is always bound up with some measure of self-dislike, or at least with a dose of discontent. While the culture tells us to love ourselves as we are–or as we will be after we’ve acquired the proper products and services–true readers do not find themselves adequate at all. They look in the mirror of their own consciousness, and they are anything but pleased. That is not what he had in mind at all. That is not what she was dreaming of.
But where is this truly common reader–this impossible, possible man or woman who is both confident and humble, both ready to change and skeptical of all easy remedies?
In our classrooms, in our offices, before the pages of our prose and poems, watching and wondering and hoping to be brought, by our best ministrations and our love, into being.
Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. Excerpted from The Chronicle Review (Feb. 4, 2011), a section of The Chronicle of Higher Education, an award-winning weekly newspaper for college and university faculty members, administrators, and students.www.chronicle.com
This article first appeared in the May-June 2011 issue of Utne Reader.
