Learning To Read
(Or Reading, Writing and Ramifications…)
“The Fall
Agatha Christie’s detective series, science fiction, and the like). “The Fall” opened up for me a whole new world of reading. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it also opened up a whole new world of thinking.
A new study has shown that the flu is more common in the winter because the virus remains more stable and lives longer in cold dry weather. The debate about why the flu was more common in winter had raged for decades. The researcher’s clue to testing the flu’s communicability under controled conditions (more explicitly, what animal to test on — Guinea Pigs) came from reading a report from 1919 about a flu pandemic in New Mexico. (The author of the report noted in passing that Guinea Pigs at Camp Cody had succumbed to the flu.)
And in a New Orlean’s court case today, where the defendants may be asked to present their genitals for review in order to help prosecute a rape case, Defense attorney Robert Jenkins made the comment “I’ve never seen it before. Even in fiction, you don’t see this kind of stuff.” Which, when you think about things you do see in fictionalized court cases, is a statement as bold as the prosecutor’s request.
My wife, a lover of purchasing books if not always reading them, has set herself the challenge of reading ten books while she’s pregnant. When she asked me if I had any suggestions Camus’ “The Fall” was right up there. It’s a short book and she’s about half way through. Last night she felt so affected by what she was reading that she paused and read out loud a passage in which the narrator recalls a traffic incident in Paris. Stopped at a traffic light behind a stalled moped the narrator, who saw himself as the victim of events, ended up being seen by everyone around him as the villain. I don’t remember enough of the book to summarize its themes and aims, but my wife has been struck by the way that Camus exposes the layers of psychology that enwrap our everyday lives: Why do we try to be nice and good? Do we have an ulterior motive? Is that our only motive? How do we know? What makes up a person, his actions or his thoughts?
Camus, Faulkner, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Graves, Gunter Grass, James Joyce, Proust and so many other great writers wrote fiction that provokes inquiry and thought about the nature of the human condition and, in many ways, the nature of existence. Reading such texts communicates this process. We don’t need to agree with the writer’s perspective, and rarely is the writer’s perspective explicitly declared or even implicitly declared, but it is difficult to read the books of such writers without pausing to reflect. And it is difficult to reflect without acquiring some new insight.
The flu researcher makes his own case for writing down points of interest that may seem incidental at the time (such as Guinea Pigs with flu), but that can open up whole new realms of insight for readers in a dim, distant and indeterminate future. “Sometimes it pays to read the old literature,” says Dr. Palese, who made the discovery.
And the Defense attorney in the New Orleans court, unwittingly I think, points to the value of fiction as a way of expanding the realm of the possible. Fiction has been instrumental in changing what’s acceptable, possible, and conceivable. That the Prosecutor in the case has outdone fiction is a credit to his imagination if not his legal prowess.
All of which makes me want to go and read.
But before I do, I must stop to consider the flip side of this literatic love-fest. Even the best of texts can be misunderstood and misused. And the worst of texts can be downright dangerous in the wrong hands. The intent of the writer and the perspective and persuasion of the reader will determine whether a particular text generates more good than ill.
And what’s considered a dangerous book by one generation may be lauded as a groundbreaking work of innovation and courage by the next. (James Joyce’s Ulysses
Can we say then whether the overall value of literature and writing is in general positive, negative or neutral?
(This reminds me of a discussion I had earlier this year with someone who questioned, since truth and scientific understanding is not absolute, whether we can say that science has made progress.)
The question, in practice, is clearly unanswerable. Even if we were to agree on definitions for positive and negative, how would we compile a quantitative inventory of all of the positive and negative influences of things written and read?
Which reminds me that things written, while they should stir and prompt our own thinking, should not replace our own thinking. Whatever dangers exist in things written don’t derive from the writing itself, however inciteful and twisted, but from our being influenced by them without sufficient reflection and questioning. Just because we read Justine doesn’t mean that we’ll become amoral. Although if we swallow de Sade’s words without reflection, we may well come away worse off than when we arrived. But surely that would be our fault, not de Sade’s?
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Tags: albert-camus, art, banned-books, camus, court-case, fiction, influenza, literature, morality, new-orleans, reading, stranger-than-fiction, the-fall, value, writing