It seems a rare accomplishment that a book on the pleasures of reading could actually pull off being pleasurable itself. But Alan Jacobs’ newest book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, does just that. It is a marvelous manifesto of sanity in an age of jeremiads about the modern predicament of attention loss on one hand, and those proud champions of distraction singing the hallelujah chorus of a world devoid of long-form books on the other. “Read at Whim” is Jacob’s advice and motto for a new generation of readers. Read, Jacobs proclaims, for the sheer pleasure of reading; simply for the hell of it. And by all means, don’t get bogged down by the authoritarians who smugly look down their noses at those who aren’t reading the “right” books on the “list.”
Jacobs enlists the wisdom of the great readers for pleasure, from the frolicking G.K. Chesterton to the jocular David Foster Wallace, in his defense of not reading to impress others, but for the sheer joy of losing oneself in another world within the world and thereby becoming more and more a whole self. Jacobs rallies against the “lists” of books proffered by many an intellectual whose methods seem to inhibit the pleasures of reading instead of evoking desire for new worlds and new eyes.
There are those who “read to read” and those who “read to have read.” It is Jacobs’ desire to give hope to those who have been burnt out by the latter, and to encourage the lost souls’ journey into the former. Reading, for Jacobs, is about love and being changed. What Flannery O’Conner says about grace can also be said about reading: “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” Jacobs is trying to teach us the grace of reading, and though reading can often seem painful (in myriad ways), the wayfaring through pages is a life-long experiment in love.
A central theme of the book, then, travels the paths of an Augustinian ordo amoris: a reordering of loves and desires. It is not that lists are in any sense intrinsically bad or harmful—and the books on the lists are no doubt classics that deserve to be read—but it is the psychology, or frame of mind, of the “read to have read” that tends toward the dulling of reading. Jacobs is really criticizing book snobbery, and the worst thing about this snobbery is the paradoxical sense of not being satisfied with what one is so snobbish about. People can tell when someone truly loves a book—or any form of art— as opposed to the one who simply wants to check another classic off the list.
In his famous essay, Authority and American Usage, David Foster Wallace uses as his epigraph a succinct yet profound quote by St. Augustine: Dilige et quod vis fac. Love, and do as you will. Wallace’s and Jacobs’ essays may deal with different content, but the same thread of loves and pleasures—and the freedom they enable—permeates each text. And it is this love that must take precedence in all debates of authority. I know this may sound a little too didactically precious, but lets face it: real love is the strongest antidote to sentimentalism. And book snobbery is an intellectual species of sentimentalism.
Authority persuades most rigorously through love, and this is why the authority of Wallace and Jacobs is so powerful. Neither is eschewing that there really are books that are better than others, or ways of writing that really are superior. Books and language are like lovers longing to woo and be wooed, rather than, say, the trophy wife (or husband) that is only beneficial for bootlicking cocktail parties. Jacobs is trying to admonish those who, unwittingly or not, transpose the “friends with benefits” culture into one of “books with benefits.” And unfortunately this has been the tendency of many so-called avant-garde art scenes of late; a sort of anti-authoritarian authoritarianism that uses piddling influence—instead of truth, goodness, and beauty—to persuade.
At one particular point in the book, Jacobs recalls the impact of a high school teacher’s anecdote of rereading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time every summer. This initially perplexed Jacobs. How could someone not get sick of reading the same book over and over throughout a lifetime? And doesn’t this go against the conquering “booklist” mentality? He thought this ritual was something people only did with sacred texts such as the Bible. It wasn’t until he matured as a reader that he began to understand the manifold pleasures that one piece of great art could give over and over again.
And this is truly the crux of Jacobs’ project: that the pleasure good art gives, need not be jealously preserved at such an elitist price; that one need not satisfy the status quo. He seeks not to pick fights with the list makers and taskmasters of reading, but simply to renew tired eyes and minds. To remind us, as Proust once said, that: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”
Trevor Logan is a Postgraduate student in Theology at the University of Nottingham, England.
RESOURCES
Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
Comments:
I've read Proust three times, one of those in French, and inevitably I've had new eyes every time. I hadn't planned to read it this summer but now you've given me an idea...
I love reading. But there is a hermetic, even autistic side, to hermeneutics after all. Reading needs to be supplemented by/read againts real-world experience.
Did you say "artistic" ... or autistic.
1. Judith Butler, “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” Diacritics (1997): The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
2. The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994): If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
3. Ed Lilley, Twelve Views of Manet’s “Bar” (Princeton U P, 1996): As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (”Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.
4. Stewart Unwin Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997): Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life’s everlasting quest for survival, and canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such necroliths in the museum’s observational/expositional performances.
5. D. G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself, State University of New York Press, 1996: Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).
' The dragon spewed a torrent of water ..' verse in Book of Revelations ..we are familiar with what bad ideas in dragon infested hearts can do - esp. in destroying faith !
Summer around the corner ..and how good it would be for families to make commitment to read The Word ..
Wondering if one reason more persons , esp.the young , do not spend more time in The Word is all the unpleasant or difficult to understand sitautions in there ..
Such as , by calling for The Word , by calling on The Name of Yeshua, as a way to make it a deeper , more prayerful experience in every incident in there - such as in Genesis - scene of temptation , calling on The Name , instead of just reading through , with that 'sinking' feeling of what is to follow ..( true , for those who are more mature in faith , the awareness of the New Adam and praise and worship for our salvation is already there .)
and thus , may be even bringing the presence and mercy , of the ' lamb slain from the foundation of the world ' ..into persons and people from its foundation ..to the many who have gone into the other realm and into our own lives too , who also face similar sitautions , even if only in a spiritual manner !
A blessed Memorial Day !
Two books I had to read for high school and thought I would hate, but actually loved: Moby Dick and Les Miserables. The latter I could not put down! A book I read recently because I thought I should and actually loved: The Brothers Karamazov. Book I was most surprised of all time to love: Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yes, it's sentimental and weepy, but I looooooooved it.
Book I was most surprised to find I hated: Dr. Zhivago. HATED that book.
Most of our reading nowadays is unfortunately away from books. Most people's reading comprises Facebook and Twitter "updates" now. :(
I highly recommend the book "Media Virus!" by Douglas Rushkoff. It explains exactly how you are "changed" by what you read in the media daily and how to identify that manipulation.
So, for me -- great authors or books I can't stand:
Ulysses
The Great Gatsby
The Sun Also Rises
To the Lighthouse
Books I love, though I thought I might not at first:
Gilead
Kristin Lavransdatter
almost anything by Mauriac
Diary of a Country Priest
I'd like to say in passing that much of what Jacobs writes in his book, at least from what I gather in this post, would seem to echo C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism. If so, I wonder if Jacobs is conscious of the fact - or if it's more the case that great readers (and writers) like Jacobs and Lewis share similar predilections in reading?
