Does reading do us any good?

Stripped of easy moralising, literature makes us relish the search for truth in an age when many believe truth to be dead

by Flora Champy  BIO

Photo by Jeenah Moon/Reuters

is associate professor of French at Princeton University, US. Her research focuses on 18th-century French political literature and philosophy, blending literary analysis with political theory. She is the author of one and the co-editor of two French books on the period.

Edited byMarina Benjamin

Does reading turn us into better people? Does it make us more sensitive and empathetic? Does it improve our judgment? And if it is not edifying, then what good does it do? About 120 years ago, the indecisive, dilettante offspring of a wealthy physician found these questions so important that he took up his pen to argue that, no, books are never the instruments of moral betterment. He based his argument on his own memories. Though he had always been an avid reader, books, he claimed, never gave him any sort of useful, respectable instruction. That does not mean they were meaningless – far from it; they shaped his apprehension of life by preserving indelible impressions of his surroundings. Relatives now long gone, places he hadn’t seen in years – these were nevertheless still present in his mind through memories of his readings. Books helped keep past sensations alive. Literature made time tangible: something to be grasped without being abolished.

Marcel Proust by Otto Wegener, c1895. Courtesy Wikimedia

Hindsight makes it easy to find in Marcel Proust’s essay On Reading (1905) the spark that would later flare into his multivolume novel, In Search of Lost Time (1913-27). However, his essay was not the intuition of solitary genius. Rather, it was published as a preface to the French translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies (1865) – a cryptic title bringing together two lectures Ruskin delivered in Manchester in December 1864. Working on this text allowed Proust to realise why he deeply disagreed with an author he nevertheless admired: he resented Ruskin’s moralising defence of reading.

In his lectures, Ruskin bemoaned the general spiritual impoverishment of Victorian Britain, where every purpose has been ‘infected’ with ‘the idea that everything should “pay”’. The problem with this mindset, says Ruskin, is that it makes books superfluous – because genuine literacy is a training in disinterestedness, in generously reflecting on the meaning of chosen expressions. Provocatively, Ruskin describes his generation as illiterate – even in a time when education was expanding. He thought his contemporaries had lost any capacity for understanding each other or any important issue because they read superficially, and for the wrong reasons – chiefly, to get social recognition from a narrow group of peers. It was therefore, in his view, a matter of collective self-preservation to reverse course: to ‘organise, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers! …’

To convince his audience, Ruskin nevertheless attempts to speak the utilitarian language of his opponents – framing his argument in terms of gains and losses. He says it is ultimately a better investment if we value education as a training in close reading rather than as a point of entry into lucrative networking circles. Using a passage from John Milton’s poem ‘Lycidas’ (1637), Ruskin demonstrates how the mind encounters words on equal terms that will never apply to meetings with influential luminaries. A powerful politician, or an influential journalist, may turn out to be small-minded, dismissive or simply in a bad mood in the few moments you’re permitted an audience with them. Instead, he argues, library shelves brim with much more secure assets. There, the most powerful and smartest minds vie for the privilege of conversing with you, putting the wisdom of all ages and countries at your disposal. Books enrich and empower their readers.

Proust vigorously opposed this very idea. He found it preposterous to recommend reading as a valuable access point to a world of wisdom – akin to thinking you could access truth through ‘recommendation letters’. In response, his own defence of reading makes no concessions to the cost/benefit mindset, and owes nothing to financial or conversational analogies. In his view, it is futile to praise reading as an encounter with great minds. What happens in reading is substantially different from what happens in social life, where speech is always subject to social constraints. By contrast, a reader enjoys the utmost freedom to find the greatest writers boring, or to appreciate them for his own purposes, which may be utterly at odds with what they intended. Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things.

In this sense, books connect us with the richest part of ourselves. The meaning we attach to words as we read is uniquely connected to our experience – it can never be replicated. This is how reading becomes, in Proust’s view, the fullest, most concrete mediation to our sensations. And it allows us to expand our experience beyond all measure when it lets us enter into contact with the past. When we read age-old texts (Proust gives the examples of Racine and Saint-Simon), managing to make sense of them beyond the evolution in language and customs, we have access to nothing less than immortality.

Proust shared Ruskin’s veneration for the power of the written word. Yet they expected widely different benefits from reading. The difference in their position lies in the respective role they attribute to reader and writer. Proust considered reading as a form of ethical training rather than moral education. The ‘miracle’ of reading, in his view, does not even depend on exposure to good writing. Mediocre books and poor writers serve just as well – what matters is that, by experiencing contact with the ‘oeuvring self’ of the writer, a term Proust invoked in his essay ‘Against Sainte-Beuve’ (1895-1900), you open up your deepest self too, discovering new spheres of experience you would never have imagined or fathomed before.

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