REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary
by James Reel

Literacy & Community

ENGLISH PROF-CUM-SOCIAL CRITIC Barry Sanders has made another petulant, playful parry and thrust in his ongoing fencing match with the forces of post-literacy. In The Private Death of Public Discourse (1998), the decline of literacy takes the blame for the descent of public discourse into mean, vacuous, loud ranting. Reading, Sanders maintains, leads to reflection; reflection results in ideas; the reasoned exchange of ideas builds community.

Yet the path from page-scanning to communitarianism isn't as straight as Sanders would have us believe. In Bohumil Hrabal's 1976 novel Too Loud a Solitude, a character carries this ideal of literacy to its extreme; the ideas become so congested in his mind, and so intertwined with disappointing, half-forgotten personal experiences, that this literate creature fails to become a social creature.

Hrabal's magnificent short novel is a poignant meditation on solitude, lost love, book worship, book trashing, and how knowledge gained through books cannot compensate for lost knowledge of self. It's beautiful, elegiac and ridiculous in the best Eastern European tradition.

For 35 years Hrabal's alcoholic Czech protagonist, Hant'a, has worked alone in a dim, grimy, mouse-ridden basement. He compacts wastepaper and books -- two tons of books each month. Hant'a is an artist of waste; into the center of each bale of compressed paper, he places a book, open to some significant passage. Although Hant'a gladly sacrifices these books on the altar of sanitation and public order, he has rescued literally tons of other volumes, carrying them home, filling every available inch of his apartment with them, until his own space for living has been as compacted as his bales of trash.

Hant'a doesn't just save books. He reads them; he savors them. Reading and dreaming have become a greater part of his job than crushing waste. The reading and dreaming, in conjunction with constant beer-swilling, have transformed Hant'a's brain into a mass of Great Thoughts, mingling with and largely concealing the more direct unpleasantness of Hant'a's past and present. Hant'a, of course, thinks that reading has helped him figure everything out:

My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. ... Such wisdom as I have has come to me unwittingly, and I look on my brain as a mass of hydraulically compacted thoughts, a bale of ideas, and my head as a smooth, shiny Aladdin's lamp. How much more beautiful it must have been in the days when the only place a thought could make its mark was the human brain and anybody wanting to squelch ideas had to compact human heads, but even that wouldn't have helped, because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.

And straight into the heart of its reader. Sanders would be pleased with this passage. It pre-echoes his thesis that the ideas we get from reading help us situate ourselves in the world, find our place in society, understand other points of view, argue issues coherently and process new information, be it intellectual or emotional. The only problem is that Hant'a hasn't reshaped those outside thoughts on his own and sent them back into the world. And because he fails to take full possession of these thoughts, possession enough to test them against the thoughts of other living, tangible people, he isn't as attuned to himself and the world around him as he believes. Hant'a is the high water that stalls out the engine of literacy.

Sanders expresses his central points eloquently enough to bear extended quotation. Yet it becomes clear that he isn't taking his argument quite far enough in the context of Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude.

Here is Sanders' central contention:

The metaphoric, interior space in which one entertains ideas, nurtures feelings, and concocts arguments affects the boundaries of one's behavior. The less deeply or fully one occupies that interior space, and the emptier and less powerful one feels, the more necessary it becomes to continually project oneself out at the borders, to 'come across' ... perhaps as excessive and strident, but certainly as a force heard and recognized. For those devoid of a large and rich inner life -- those left only with a meanness -- outlandish actions constitute a way of establishing a foothold in a world that feels overwhelmingly complicated. Such people have a difficult time 'getting some distance' or 'getting some perspective' on life itself. Literacy changes all that, in the most fundamental way, by providing a brand new, emboldened outlook.

Now, Hant'a has absorbed -- and compacted -- the finest books of civilization for 35 years. He can ponder the philosophical and existential conflicts between Jesus and Lao-tze. Yet however full his interior space may be, Hant'a himself lives, works and sleeps in a solitude relieved only sporadically by encounters with a few eccentric contacts. Through the entire course of Too Loud a Solitude, Hant'a struggles -- without realizing it -- to gain just that perspective on his life that Sanders thinks should come so naturally to so literate a person.

Hant'a knows of a gypsy who, every day, poses his women on the street and merrily snaps their photo, even though he never loads film into the camera. Similarly, Hant'a's has focused his mind daily on philosophy, history and literature, but he has never recorded his knowledge in a way that can be shared with others.

Sanders writes that "our inner lives fill out only under the conditions of literacy," but something has gone wrong with Hant'a's inner life. He covers only a portion of the distance Sanders thinks he should traverse so easily. Sanders continues:

One of the most astonishing things imaginable happens as one reads: The idea of the text is internalized, and day after day one inscribes on that text the events of one's life. As a creature of literacy I can return to that metaphoric text, to the permanent record inside the thing I call me, for consultation whenever I please. The record I carry around inside me creates a new kind of memory, something not found in oral cultures -- a conscience. Permanently etched deep in my being, events continually dog me, causing me to feel remorse, sorrow, or regret about some of my actions. On that internalized text, the social contract gets written.

Yet Hant'a remains largely self-absorbed, hardly sensitive to the real world. He is kind and generous to the few eccentrics he regularly encounters, but the rest of the world means little to him. He isn't even conscious of how repulsive he must seem when, chronically unwashed, covered with grime, reeking of beer and worse, he staggers into a pub. He assumes that the barmaid draws back because she's seen a mouse peeking out from his clothing. He's taken in so many foreign ideas, and so much Pilsner, that his intellectual digestive system fails to work as Sanders describes:

Literate people ingest reality -- take it in, sort out what they need and discard the rest. Again, literacy makes the sorting, the critical thinking, possible. In speech, words disappear as soon as they are sounded. No listener can pin my meaning down. The recollection of my word must stand against the recollection of yours; the evidence continually flies away. Once letters remain fixed on the page, anyone can return to them, over and over again, a process that enables readers to arrive, in their individual ways, at that key concept, meaning.

Here is the step Hant'a has missed. He has not really sorted out the information he needs and discarded the rest. It all remains in his head, and in the tomes lying heavily on the shelves creaking over his bed and toilet. Hant'a is a reader both careful and passionate, but even after 35 years of book compacting, he is not yet a critical thinker. Too Loud a Solitude charts Hant'a's last, late efforts toward reflection and critical analysis. What he gradually understands through his private, internal analysis is not the meaning of his life, but how his life absolutely lacks meaning. Through the very use of literacy that Sanders maintains is so empowering, Hant'a realizes how powerless he really is.

"Literacy forges a new space inside each individual, a mental space that is then projected out into the world," writes Sanders. "This new space is produced through a reciprocal relationship negotiated between a literate mind and the concrete world that the mind encounters." But where's the part about one mind encountering another? Hant'a doesn't play his idea-crammed brain off against anyone else's. At best, he negotiates a relationship between his literate mind and his past, rather than the present world. And that past is a trail of crumbs made from stale bread, a few of the crumbs crushed under other's feet, the rest blown out of pattern.

Social constructionists maintain, a bit too breezily, that all our perceptions of reality are pieced together through the language we find to articulate them. This applies most especially to our sense of our own identities. A social constructionist would declare that Hant'a lacks a clear sense of his identity because he holds only his sense of things, and that sense has never stood the test of response from outside through sharing a common language with significant others in his world.

Hant'a's interior life is like his bales of trash, compacted and meaningless. Nuggets of wisdom are buried inside, but he has no way of externalizing them. Those nuggets are shapeless because they are never subjected to external wear. Hant'a's reality is so completely internal that he can't function in society; his social realities have never been refined by the give and take of live interaction. Our interior metaphors, which are so important to Barry Sanders, are modified through negotiation with other thinking minds as well as through reading.

So Sanders' The Private Death of Public Discourse is essential reading, but you should erect two intellectual buttresses of your own to support a weak wall of Sanders' argument.

First, read Hrabal's lovely, disturbing Too Loud a Solitude and consider it an appendix, a warning of what may happen if literacy fails to spur a thinking individual to public interaction.

Second, go out and discuss the books with someone. Interact.

Titles discussed in Reel Politik may be purchased at a discount
on the Reel Reading aisle at The Bookstall.

Reel's Archive

Reel Politik 1: On The Future Of Reading

Reel Politik 2: How Not To Read A Book

Reel Politik 3: Plagiarists Of Experience

Reel Politik 4: Logolingus: A Private Pleasure

Reel Politik 5: A Community of Dreamers

Reel Politik 6: The Sensuous Bibliophile

Reel Politik 7: A Divine Madness

Reel Politik 8: Show Me The Books!

Reel Politik 9: The Argument

Reel Politik 10: Literacy & Community

James Reel is the arts and entertainment editor of
The Arizona Daily Star, a contributor to Fanfare,
and the author of The Timid Soul's Guide to Classical Music.

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