At the beginning of February, I wrote about all the books I was reading simultaneously. I wrote, “Reading several books at once is probably not the best way to read, but it is how I read now for some reason.” Now, thanks to one of the books I was reading at the time, I have an answer for why I read so many books at once..
The book is Why Read by Will Self. It is a collection of his essays written between 2001 to 2021, a time period that happens to coincide with such technologies as smart phones and portable reading devices. Perhaps not surprisingly for a novelist like Self, this transition is one of the subjects that he returns to again and again. Many of the pieces are focused on reading as an activity, as opposed to reading specific things. Thus essays with titles like “Why Read?”, “How Should We Read?”, “The Printed Word in Peril”, “What to Read?”, and “Reading for Writers.” Sometimes Self narrows in on specific works of literature, including Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, Junky by William S. Burroughs, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad and the oeuvre of Kafka. Then there are a few that are literature-adjacent, like “The Death of the Shelf”, “The Last Typewriter Engineer”, “The Technology of Journalism” and several more. While this collection is wide-ranging and slightly scattershot, it does have an over-arching subject, the demise of what Marshall McLuhan called the “Gutenberg mind.” This is specifically expressed in “A Care Home for Novels.”
Self points out that novels keep being written and read, but as a vital art form, the novel has had its day. “Many fine novels have been written during this period; novels of true significance, beauty, and—adopting the ghastly modern idiom—relevance, but I would contend that for all that, these were, taking the long view, zombie novels, instances of an undead art form that yet wouldn’t lie down.” A surprising assertion from a novelist. But he makes a point that places the novel into a category of art forms that exist mostly through a kind of momentum. “I believe the serious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse.” As someone who loves novels, easel paintings (and I include really large paintings that can’t be produced on easels in this category, as I assume Self does as well), and classical music, it is a gloomy but difficult-to-deny truth.
In “The Printed Word in Peril”, he expands on this contention and explains why. “In March of this year, I gave an interview to the Guardian in which I repeated my usual—and unwelcome—assertion that the literary novel had quit center stage of our culture and was in the process—via university creative-writing programs—of becoming a conservatory form, like the easel painting or the symphony.” A “conservatory form” is a great phrase—it is simultaneously inarguable and dispiriting. Why did this happen? Technology (and therefore culture) evolved. “I referred above to ‘bi-directional digital media’—by which I mean the suite of technologies comprising the wireless-connected computer, handheld or otherwise, the wordwide web and the internet. Henceforth, I’ll abbreviate this to BDDM.” While I feel pretty doubtful that “BDDM” will catch on, it does describe well something that didn’t exist before the early 2000s, when smart phones and the internet became ubiquitous.
I first encountered computers when I was in junior high, but they were far from today’s BDDM. They did, however, require that we communicate with a distant machine. The computer was owned by our school district, and for us to use it, we had to log in remotely via a telephone modem. This was about 1976. There were a few programs that tried to mimic bi-directional communication; Eliza, the psychotherapist program (apparently written in the 1960s) and Advent (later called Zork), a word-based fantasy adventure game. I spent hours playing Advent. But even after email became common, we hadn’t gotten to the stage of BDDM that would inhibit novel writing or reading. But, “If there are writers out there who have the determination—and concentration—to write on a networked computer without being distracted by the worlds that lie a mere keystroke away, then they’re far steelier and more focused than I.” Indeed, in writing this paragraph, I have been distracted by twitter and used Google to look up Eliza.
I mentioned in “Unread Books” that I was reading a pile of books simultaneously because I found it too hard to concentrate on a single book at a time, perhaps because of the ever-present lure of BDDM. I was reading 11 books, but finished The Greek Alexander Romance and Why Read within two days of each other. (They were quickly replaced by two more unread books.) But this is apparently how Self has always read books: “Reading on paper, I had a tendency to have maybe ten or twelve books ‘on the go’ at once. Reading digitally, this has expanded to scores, hundreds even.” I have read quite a few books digitally—I recognize my need to have physical books is an act of vanity; they just look so cool on my shelves. But I like reading on my iPad. I have a very fond memory of reading Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov on my iPad during trips to and from work. The iPad was most helpful because Nabokov employed an insane vocabulary that sent me frequently to the built-in dictionary. I kind of wish I had read Why Read on my iPad for the same reason; Will Self is a very sesquipedalian writer. Here is a small sample of the words he used that I had to look up: velleities, neurasthenia, inanition, and metaphrand.
Indeed, Self describes this kind of promiscuous reading as the way one should read. “By the time our culture reached ‘peak paper’—in the late 1990s—my bedside table boasted a teetering stack of books I was reading simultaneously. Twenty years on, there’s only an e-reader, loaded up with perhaps as many as seventy texts I’m currently carrying on with. Don’t get me wrong: I still find the time—and possess the guile—to have clandestine rendezvous with particularly alluring works; and I will cleave just as strongly to the idea that it’s on the oscillation between textual monogamy and polygamy (or polyandry) that we find our true love of—and engagement with—reading.” He explains that these simultaneous texts produce interesting juxtapositions. He describes it almost sexually—think “positions” instead of “juxtapositions.”
To read promiscuously is to comprehend the caresses of on work in the arms of another—and the promiscuous reader is a pedagogue par excellence. How should we read? We would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text. No one told me not to pivot from Valley of the Dolls to The Brother Karamazov—so I did; any more than they warned me not to intersperse passages of Fanny Hill with those written by Franz Fanon—so I did that, too. By reading indiscriminately, I learned to discriminate—and learned also to comprehend, for it’s only with the acquisition of large data sets we also develop schemas supple enough to interpret new material.
BDDM may spell the end of the novel (and many other formally dominant art forms). Does this make Self sad? He doesn’t seem to be. He is reporting and reflecting on a phenomenon without judging it. He does say that when he writes such things in his essays for the Guardian or Harper’s, he will get howls of outrage from the peanut gallery. But Self continues to write novels that are printed on paper that are read by people like me, and that seems to be sufficient. He even gets invited to beautiful places like Australia for book festivals, the subject of his essay “Australia and I”, so what does he have to be sad about?
Self has a very interesting background—he famously was a heroin addict as a young adult. It is probably because of this that he was asked to write an introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of Junky, about which he wrote, “From the vantage point of my own not inconsiderable experience of intoxication, I can say Junky is unrivaled as a book about taking drugs.” This is for me the value of reading a book as good as Why Read. It leads me down other paths. On my current reading pile of books are Junky, Austerlitz, and The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, which he praised in his essay on Kafka. Writing this is like being a drug addict praising his dealer for supplying him with some excellent new shit. Thanks, Will!
(My dealer, who sold me my copy of Why Read, is Basket Books. )
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