REEL POLITIK

Contrary Commentary
by James Reel

How To Read For Yourself

WHAT GOOD IS LITERATURE? Can being well-read substitute for being well-bred?

Old questions, those, so old that bored liberal thinkers have declared them beside the point and abandoned them to conservative non-thinkers who value literature only insofar as it can be appropriated for moral instruction. Which is scary when all you get out of Shakespeare and Flaubert is that Macbeth and Emma Bovary were bad people who got their just deserts.

So it's a relief to have these questions voiced again by someone who's bright, witty, and capable of writing a thoughty little book that sells very well. I'm just not entirely comfortable with the man's answers, especially because I suspect he's partly right.

I'm referring to Alain de Botton, whose 1997 How Proust Can Change Your Life is an amusing, stirring and mildly disturbing small volume. It's a tongue-in-cheek self-help book inspired by Marcel Proust's design for living, as deduced from Proust's letters, essays, habits and multi-part novel Á la Recherche du temps perdu. Incidentally, de Botton correctly translates Proust's title as In Search of Lost Time rather than the more common but mildly misleading Remembrance of Things Past.

In the chapter "How to Read for Yourself," de Botton advises us to emulate Proust's tendency to seek something personal and familiar in every book and painting. By this method, art no longer expands our inner world; it serves merely to illuminate our immediate external world. That's disturbing to those of us who would like to believe, despite so much contrary evidence, that art can draw us out of our shallow selves and into a way of life and thought that is more varied and profound.

Proust's approach, though troublingly solipsistic, is, I fear, essentially realistic. Don't we experience a little joyful buzz when a character in a novel reminds us of someone we know? Don't we develop a sentimental attachment to stories set in a place we love, or a time for which we're nostalgic?

Even if we can get past the personal, what can a book or a painting really teach us about life and thought? Not much, if we're not alert. In his chapter "How to Open Your Eyes," de Botton points out that ''Because of the speed of technological and architectural change, the world is liable to be full of scenes and objects that have not yet been transformed into appropriate images and may therefore make us nostalgic for another, now lost world, which is not inherently more beautiful but might seem so because it has already been widely depicted by those who open our eyes.'' This is what happens when we allow artists to open our eyes for us; we experience the beauty of their world, not our own. Only by opening our own eyes, de Botton implies, can we begin to understand the sights, sounds and people around us.

So de Botton seems to be saying that literature, passively ingested, will dull our senses to our own world; yet literature is the very thing that can open our eyes if we truly engage it, grapple with it, and possess it.

"But why would readers seek to be the readers of their own selves?" asks de Botton. "One answer is because it is the only way in which art can properly affect rather than simply distract us from life." The author goes on to list the benefits of solipsistic reading, the most important of which, I think, is this:

"The value of a novel is not limited to its depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life; it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been able, to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own."

Which leads, after several delightful digressions, to one of de Botton's key chapters: "How to Express Your Emotions." It's really about precision and color of language, and the numbing nature of clichés. As de Botton observes, "(Clichés) are asked to account for an experience, but their poverty prevents either ourselves or our interlocutors from really understanding what we have lived through. We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition."

And, central to the argument:

"The problem with clichés is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Clichés are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. And if this matters, it is because the way we speak is ultimately linked to the way we feel, because how we describe the world must at some level reflect how we first experience it."

Here, I think, is the real value of relating our reading to ourselves. It doesn't matter whether Sancho Panza reminds us of a next-door neighbor or Humbert Humbert calls to mind a particular creepy uncle. More essential is that Cervantes and Nabokov -- in these cases through exaggeration and satire -- inspire us to puzzle over and begin to comprehend certain aspects of human nature we'd otherwise be too blasé or uncomfortable to contemplate. Similarly, an arresting description of a sunset won't simply help us appreciate this evening's scrape of star against horizon; it will remind us of how remarkable everyday things can be, if only we experience them rather than merely coexist with them.

I tried to apply de Botton's principles to the next novel I read, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain, in which a Confederate deserter undertakes the long walk home, where the formerly pampered woman he loves is attempting to resuscitate her failing farm. While Frazier's characters are richly, tenderly drawn, and not unlike the flawed but honorable people most of us imagine ourselves to be, I didn't see my friends or myself in any of them.

But I was drawn into a new world through Frazier's skillful use of language and his exhaustive (though never exhausting) descriptive passages. I know nothing about agriculture beyond what it takes to neglect a backyard vegetable garden, but Frazier's detailed narrative made me understand, quite precisely, what was required to plan and maintain a farm in 1864. Frazier does not rhapsodize over the romance of sowing and reaping. He details the mending, the bartering, the rough plowing, the chicken-butchering that build, one chore at a time, into a hard life.

Frazier's farmers -- women who are strong by necessity rather than by birth -- shamed me into going into my own back yard to plant some aloe that had long ago outgrown its pot. As I shoveled aside the half-inch of topsoil and began slamming a pick into the rock-hard caliche below, I thought of Frazier's Ada Monroe -- and her real-life counterparts -- facing work like this every day for a lifetime. After blistering three fingers on my gloved left hand, I went out and rented a jackhammer.

So, yes, Cold Mountain and my life did intersect even more vigorously than Marcel Proust and Alain de Botton might expect. Still, I value Frazier's novel not for the new and probably short-lived little aloe patch in my yard -- not for how the novel entered my life -- but for how it transported me to a vividly imagined past, rich with the stench of men and the demands of the land.

I value it for keen sentences like this, in which Frazier evokes the visual-arts concept of the vanishing point, which is key to maintaining perspective, as a complex, half-hidden metaphor: "And if Ada would go with him, there might be the hope, so far off in the distance he did not even really see it, that in time his despair might be honed off to a point so fine and thin that it would be nearly the same as vanishing."

I value it as an act of storytelling and as a work of literature, not merely as an inky mirror to my life. Which, I suspect, is how Proust would have liked us to respond to In Search of Lost Time. And, indeed, given his delight in anecdotes and well-crafted witticisms, that's probably how de Botton would have us regard How Proust Can Change Your Life.

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

Reel Politik 11: Real Writers Need Real Editors

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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