6.34: The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts

 

The Walled Garden of Consumption

 

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men;
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow.
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

Ah, the rest and wonder of being free of all of this! Of allowing our fatigue with this world to be forgotten, to enjoy our personal fancy for no more reason than pleasure, or—dare I say it?—contentment, the kind Matthew Arnold finds in his “Garden.”

Or at least, that he believes he does. 

One of the most common questions my students asked me was something like this: “Don’t you ever get tired of ruining everything?” or “Can’t you just enjoy what you read?” or “Why do you have to think about this stuff all of the time?”

In brief, my answers are No, Yes, and Because. 

First, I don’t believe what we do in asking questions of what we read as ruining anything: it’s adding new meaning and richness to reading. And so yes, this is part of the enjoyment of reading, though I recognize I’m not responding to the spirit of the question. Thinking—as opposed to not thinking—is what humans do. And I would ask, with some dangerous edge in my voice: “Doesn’t the prospect of not thinking, even for a moment, terrify you? Who are you when you’ve stopped?”  If I were feeling particularly snarky, I might suggest that this is what dead people do.

But here, you tell me, and be honest, because I’m going to be: How often do you use books as a kind of walled garden—an escape—where you can hide from the world?  To be sure, and we’ll talk about this, otium, a true and temporary rest, a distraction or entertainment, is actually essential for our brains, our psyches, our physical recovery from difficulty. But when we do it with the latest beach read or romance or fantasy, we are also participating in a marketplace of frictionless consumption that profits over our desire for escapism and dopamine hits.

Critic Rita Felski, though, agrees with you. In her book The Limits of Critique (2015), Felski worries about our constant desire to critique, by which she means criticize, to lean into the negative. She knows, correctly, that constantly hunting for hidden ideologies or secret complicity in texts can destroy the very joy of reading. We all get worn out. It’s Richard Adams’s rabbits caught in a cage of conceited intellectualism. Come on, she might say, can’t we just go outdoors and enjoy the fields and sunshine? Haven’t we lost our ability to simply love a story? Is there no place in the Garden that isn’t a denial of its joy?

I can definitely see her point, and in my own classroom, I had to walk carefully with my students, determined as I could be not to destroy that joy in reading, as so much of public schooling already had. My reading spaces there and now have as much fun and nonsense as serious inquiry; I consume as much pop culture candy as I do classic or literary; and I am absolutely a fan of science fiction, solid fantasy, and pulp horror. Just catch my October “13 Days of Halloween” sometime to get a taste of that. 

And why do we fall to these spaces (and I should add romance, westerns, fanfiction, most YA, thrillers, mystery, some historical fiction), to escapist genres? For myself? I agree this far with Felski: pure pleasure. As I write this, behind me sits a book that parodies H.P. Lovecraft that I’m reading. I admit it’s not very good, but it offers that “mental break” from everything else I’m doing. A break, an escape, and even—subtly—a passive exercise in imagination. And so it’s not the garden, the escape choice, that I’m really interested in so much. I don’t expect to make you a fan of the 1972 Spanish-produced Horror Express where Telly Savalas plays a Russian cossack, but if I am to understand that my pleasure and contentment is escapist, a larger contextual question outside of the reading choice still exists: escape from what? A break from what? A garden wall to seal out what? Seneca on the shores away from what? A celebration in Omelas to help us all forget about what?  

Felski is right. This is tiring. And I can feel our fatigue, just as I heard it from some of my students for so many years. And escape and let’s not say “thoughtless” pleasure is a necessary and healthy strategy from time to time. But these are not opposites, not stark choices, and as we discussed in our talk about Seneca and Zhuangzi, never absolutes. Felksi worries that we are too much in the realm of critique, and I admit that some in her academic circles might be. But, as we’ll see today, I fundamentally reject her conception of what criticism is; just as I fundamentally reject the act of escapism as being pure. If it was—the “not thinking” enterprise my students claimed—we would surrender the faculty that makes us humans with choice. Like the Deltas and Epsilons in Huxley’s Brave New World, we would be all but comatose while we ingested the entertainment, drugs, and sex manufactured to keep us there, a grotesque luxury that convinces itself that the simple and artificial worlds we invent are real. 

So no, I don’t condemn the reading of romance or fan fiction or even the reading of new Tom Clancy novels even when he died in 2013. And Felski, to be sure, doesn’t condemn theory and thinking. What we all seem to agree to is that we require moderation, a balance, where one is ever aware of the other, ever conscious that we are complex critters with complex needs. 

And for me? It isn’t that we need to worry so much about over-analysis today. That’s hardly such a trend. The real terror is quite the opposite, the over-suspension of critical thought. And here, too, Felski agrees with me, I think. It isn’t that we are thinking too much. Felski herself has a life-long dossier of writing and editing books and journals on the very things we discuss. Her concern is not that we think too much, but that our thought seems dominated by a pessimistic mode of asking questions, that we need to be far more open and flexible in our approaches, that we must adopt other ways to meaning and knowing.

Are you feeling a bit fatigued with all of this? Well, let me help you with that. Because today, I agree with my critics, and we talk about what we’re talking about.

 

Theme

 

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I’m going to ask: Why are you reading, anyway? 

 

The Empathy Trap

 

So I’m going to talk a lot about friction today, I think, and this is my own term for a particular way of reading. Frictional Reading is the title of my next book, in fact, where I’ll explore it at even greater length and depth than we can in this little podcast. 

As a first toss at this, let’s start here. To read frictionally implies that we slow our reading down, that we decelerate. We all understand, I think, how fast everything around us wants us to move, to do, to spend, to consume. Our otium vacations are definitely the minority of our time and they are carefully scheduled for most of us. Be back by 9:00 am Monday morning. Your two-week vacation must be pre-approved three months in advance. Your afternoon break is precisely 10 minutes; lunch for 25 minutes. Otium, rest, is tolerated, but only under the conditions of negotium. Even our domestic lives, governed by the demands of family member schedules, leaves precious little common time for families as families. We are ever-rushed and ever-working as best we can to manage that rush.

At the same time, the book world falls to shorter and shorter PR cycles. Seasonal titles became monthly titles are now becoming weekly or even daily news about what is out there that must must must be read. So many readers rotate their lives around the current best-seller lists or GoodReads recommendations or BookTok hits. Far from the doom predictions that social media would destroy reading, book sales (mind you, I’m speaking of sales) are up. 

And so when I speak of a kind of Friction of Deceleration, I’m suggesting that, at the very least, our reading speed slows down in response. After all, so much literature is about putting us in different, unexpected, even unsettling spaces. A favorite fantasy world by Book 16 of the series may be quite familiar by now, but it is also different from the world beyond it. 

Slow down for what? Well, in the broadest terms, to enjoy it. And that enjoyment often means thinking about why we do. What is here that compels us back to the next chapter? Personally, I know that I am drawn to the fantasy worlds of Thomas Covenant, of Frodo Baggins, of Camber of Culdi, of Essen and Alabaster more than those of Sam Vimes, Kelsier, Allanon, Harry Potter, Jon Snow, or Rand al’Thor. It’s probably not really important, though: a preference like that really isn’t worth fighting over (uberfans of any). My suspicion is that most of these choices come from who we are or were when we met the text, that a character or condition spoke to us in those moments, and we held on. And still do, nostalgically if we’re older, fanatically if we’re embracing them now. 

Beyond that, though, we might talk about the favorite emotion of BookTok and BookTubers, empathy. Which books make us cry? Books which are so well-written to our moment that the tragedies the characters experience mirror our own or those we might meet in our own world. We identify with them. In other words, we have carried our world experience and emotional make-up into the book in order to identify with it. Empathy. Excellent. 

Now, in this Journey I have made some detailed and explicit description of the suffering we’ve encountered. When you read Le Guin’s story, does the shock of the child suffering in the closet make you cry out, even internally? What about all those clones in the Ishiguro novel Never Let Me Go? Did Ishiguro’s work (not my summary of it) cause you to tear up some? No surprise, if so: these stories have done exactly this for millions. We have empathy with the characters because they are in some ways like us, or we can imagine them to be, and that we identify with them.

Can we slow down just a bit here to investigate that feeling, though? I want to do something which Hannah Arendt, she who warned us about giving up our control to evil governments, describes as the difference between thinking and knowing. We can know that there is a suffering child in a basement closet somewhere, might even feel bad for it; but that’s merely a fact, and we can accept it passively. Thinking requires our closer consideration, the asking of questions, the examination of concepts, slowing down.  

So we slow down here, think and consider this feeling of empathy. And I’m not explicitly trying to ruin our emotional experience, but I want to ask about the nature of it. I’m not here asking about the text we read exactly, but our experience reading it. 

Suzanne Keen, in her book Empathy and the Novel (2007) asks us about something she calls the “Empathy Trap.”  That is, she asks us what the function of these tears or welling of emotion is actually about. After the reading and outcry, do we feel better? Like we’ve released some pent-up emotion or energy? Basically, what I’m asking is, is part of our enjoyment of reading, as social media seems to tell us, cathartic? We’ve brought our outside feelings and burdens into the book and attached them to these characters, and then we are finally allowed to let them loose in a kind of vicarious grief. Let’s make sure we follow this: we have decided that the difficult feelings we have in the “real world” are not allowed full expression, and so we bring them to the book world for release, for escape.

On its own, we might call this therapeutic. Many do. Rage Rooms are out there to rent for as low as $25, and that’s cheaper than most nights drinking and less hangover. Readers find reading therapeutic because we can expel some of our suppressed emotions there. Same reason we cry at movies. 

But you know this is coming now, so here it is. Once that emotion is released, what do we do? Why, we close the book or leave the theater and go back to work Monday and experience the world again for another cycle of this. Keen’s “empathy trap” is right here. This cycle, this use of reading for catharsis, can create a kind of moral laziness. The books act as a pressure-release valve that makes us feel like good people while costing us nothing;  it effectively becomes a substitute for actual political or social or domestic action. 

What’s going on here? And, to rub this possibility in just a little deeper, consider who we’re feeling empathy for. Who was the subject of pity and tears in your latest read or latest film? Was it someone persecuted? marginalized? Someone disabled? A minority? A domestic victim? Someone unjustly prosecuted?  Well, if so, good good. It’s okay. This shows that we are good people; we’ve sided morally with the right characters and expressed empathy. But if that reading was merely for pleasure, then we’ve taken no real action about it, have we?

Oh, and it gets worse, I’m afraid. One of my favorite questions to ask while we’re slowing down for this frictional consideration is: “Who benefits from this particular situation?” Well, literally billions of dollars are spent in media for us all to have exactly this response: to cry, to expend cathartically, but not to act. Keen puts it this way. First, we have turned the marginalized and victimized into a kind of “catharsis commodity;” we paid for the experience of making ourselves feel morally good at their narrated expense. Their continued suffering is the cost for our inaction. Our empathy without action is just another part of the extraction economy, the rushing world of media consumption doesn’t want us to pause overmuch to think about what and how it profits.

Now that all sounds pretty miserable, and I just know that if you’re listening right now, you’re working hard to reject this idea. I know I am. Fortunately for me, there isn’t a lot to empathize with in that Horror Express movie, though I admit I identify heavily in the experience of its protagonists. 

So, since we’ve slowed down to think about our reading pleasure in empathy and catharsis,  let’s find a different way to think about this. 

 

 

Empathy Traps Undone

 

As you know by now, much of what I taught in schools was literature. And I remember fondly the argument that we English teachers so often depended: reading fiction increases empathy. I see PSA’s today that tell us this.

And fairly famously, Martha Nussbaum’s 1990 Love’s Knowledge did the same.  Let’s think of her as Seneca on the shore, resting but still thinking about his public duty engagements back in Rome, the principles and morals he will defend. For Seneca, otium was strategic, was Cicero’s otium honestum, “honest leisure.” So in response to Keen’s horrible suspicions, Nussbaum offers a Roman-era rejoinder. 

Let’s think of literature this way. Reading for pleasure (or even, if we’re good at it, reading for a classroom) is a kind of “laboratory” for our own moral and ethical development. There’s nothing wrong with catharsis at all; it’s a necessary emotional and psychological exercise. Suppression just sucks; let it out. So, what we’re doing by this pleasure-reading where we cry and feel empathy is actually a kind of rehearsal; we’re learning about our own emotional vocabulary, about how we might contribute to real-world care for the persecuted. 

Nussbaum capped the 20th century (and perhaps 19th and 18th and even 17th—oh heck, it goes all the way back to Aristotle, okay?)…. Anyway, she capped this belief that reading well-written fiction develops human empathy and respect for diversity. Why, she might ask, do we have to read all this unsettling and defamiliarizing books when we can find better teachers in books of immersion? Of identification? 

And phew! We can now rest easier, can’t we, that Seneca’s idea of otium and our own reading habits are in a good space. I don’t doubt that I argued the same thing a few times in my career while justifying some authors like Morrison and Erdrich, Ellison and Achebe, Kawabata and Garcia, for inclusion. 

Except, you know? Nussbaum’s work is unsurprisingly in Western traditional philosophy back to classic Greece and Rome in divinity and ethics. And Suzanne Keen’s expertise? It’s also literary theory, but combined with psychology and neurology. In other words, Keen is responding to our long-cherished romantic expectation that reading builds empathy by countering it with some pretty hard science. Yes, she might say, reading literature should make us better people, but there’s just no evidence that any empathy we feel there ever translates back to the outside world. We’re passive receivers of the hideous bargain.

Well, damn.

 

Social Action?

 

If we follow Keen’s reasoning, then, we also have to wonder what kinds of books might better support social and moral action: books that we identify with or those which are harder for us to crack, that upset or resist us? 

Now, this is absolutely our choice. (Well, except for teachers: you are all choosing for others, so “choose wisely, grasshoppers.”) But whatever we read, we must and do use our own lived experiences to make meaning with the texts. Good. But let’s also remember the warning of the Three Emperors by Zhuangzi. We really really hate friction, as a rule. We’d far prefer the world continue to be comfortable and match up to our lived experiences. We would rather chisel our own faces onto the poor third emperor rather than let him live his own life. Today, I guess we might call this living in an echo chamber. It’s far more comfortable. Fortunately, not a lot of people do this, else our entire public might be, I don’t know, some bureaucratic herd.

You remember Achebe? A few episodes back, I mentioned how he characterized the mindset of the colonizer:

“For centuries Europe has chosen the beastly alternative which automatically has ruled out the possibility of a dialogue. You may talk to a horse but you don’t wait for a reply!”

Frictionless consumption, always falling to that comfort read, is a monologue, talking to the horse, the text, the marginalized, which we conceive to have nothing new to teach us. So is it possible to find a text that is an equal partner in a dialogue, waiting for and wrestling with its reply? Dare we find one?

And I bet you see the conclusion we might recommend here. Our reading choices are absolutely ethical choices. How we read and what we read. We can read books that maintain our own comfortable status quo, offering us characters which we quickly relate to and cry over, and then go back to work the next day. Or we can read books of difference and compel them to mean what we would rather they meant, a psychological act of will, that. Or we can experience some friction: meet, engage, and question something beyond our experience or conception. For the teachers listening, this would translate the trendy “Growth mindset” to, um, “Growth Discourse,” since we’ll also dialogue about our experience, first with the book itself and then with others. Our thinking grows more complex.

Many episodes ago, our fantasy expert Darko Suvin (who forever has the coolest name) told us that speculative fiction creates a kind of estrangement, an unfamiliarity, which does a lot of the work for us. It demands, even a little, more critical rather than passive engagement. This has been the fuel for a lot of my choices of reads this Journey with Le Guin, as well. I chose texts many of us were less familiar with; and those which you may have known well (Metropolis, The Giving Tree, Storm of the Century, Poe), I worked to make a little less familiar. 

Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement” doesn’t allow literature to exist merely as emotional conduit, just unexamined catharsis. The idea is to intellectualize the emotional experience. Some genres (fantasy, science fiction, westerns maybe, historical fictions, and the like) make abstract philosophy more concrete, challenging us to make the connections from the ideal to the active. 

 

Educators and Narrative Complicity

 

And so I confess, as I have from the beginning of the podcast, that I am not about making anyone particularly comfortable. And, as I told my classrooms, my object is to challenge and encourage you to reconsider your beliefs; not to change them necessarily, but to submit them to inquiry. Decades ago, I read a book called Unquiet Pedagogy, and I’ve been practicing it ever since. I’m not choosing books and poems to offer us a “survey course” or a relaxing listen. I’m throwing writers and thinkers together to see where their collisions lead us: Le Guin and Jemisin, Poe and Cavarero. 

But it’s not just me. Go all the way back now, to our talk about the Omelas story itself. It’s a tale that, if consumed for its gimmick, can make us cry out against the injustice and then we put it away and look for the next distraction. But we talked about Le Guin’s narrator. How she sets us all up, panders to us as readers (Imagine it any way you want to! Invent the joys of Omelas as you would!), forcing us to co-author the child’s abuse. It’s a narrative snare, a trap that places us—quite uncomfortably—in that place of complicity. We’re the citizens of Omelas, and so we are not crying cathartically for any child; we’re the ones that put it there. Only the ending, where some people walk away, does Le Guin offer us any escape. It’s the discomfort of the story that agitates us, makes us move. Imagine if the story had instead a narrator who weeped for it all along with us! 

Ah, but the same is true of Literary Nomads.  I am a narrator, too. If you have just passively nodded along with my interpretations for 33 episodes without pushing back, you’ve surrendered a bit of intellectual sovereignty. Well, I know that is not what has happened. In fact, if you’ve been listening this Journey, you have undoubtedly contradicted me in your thinking, or even out loud. You resisted, created a frictional response and re-considered. And in doing so, demonstrated the point I’m making.

You challenged me or my ideas just as you might challenge a narrator you distrust (and to my way of thinking, that should be all of them). You create a friction to the concept of authority, and that can only be good practice. Slow down, challenge, re-consider, question. Friction.

And while we’re here challenging authorities like teachers and narrators and podcast hosts, let me offer some thoughts from critic Louise Rosenblatt, a favorite of mine. In her book The Reader, The Text, The Poem (1978), she pushes back hard on how meanings are made. It’s a messy process, a dialogue (what she calls transaction) between reader and text. In other words, the meaning isn’t in the text alone, it’s not in the reader alone, but in the frictions built between them, or rather in the frictions the reader builds between them. Neither readers nor podcast listeners are just passive receivers of ideas; that would be my students who try to reject “thought” as a goal in reading. Rosenblatt goes so far as to say that the act of reading is closer to a “performing art” which requires the reader’s sovereign thought. 

Imagine any other act of reading. For instance, one where the community of readers—like a classroom, for instance—all agree with the meaning in any poem or book they read. And then they all dutifully answer “C” on the test question. Find me a classroom like that and I’ll show you a classroom where no reading has been done. Sure, eyes might have glazed over text, but the reader was completely uninvolved in the thoughtful act of meaning-making.

And yes, of course, this means those who read for pleasure and escape, as well. How do we engage in a dialogue with a book which simply mirrors us? I admit, I’ve spoken to the mirror a few times in my life, but to make it a habit or to do it in public is a . . . call for support. Dialogue, which means engaging with difference, means thinking about the differences in texts. 

And, you know what? Meeting new and different people is kind of cool. 

 

Civic Acts

 

Now all this time, you may have been asking, “Steve, are you saying that reading is worthless unless we go out there and fight somebody after doing it?”  Yes.

No, I’m kidding. Well, kinda kidding. What I have said so far is that if we put books in front of our faces too often merely for escapism or emotional support without asking ourselves about that, we are participating in the hideous bargain of extraction economies that would rather we not ask. It’s an otium of luxury, of privilege, which is the celebration in Omelas. Frictional readers slow down and begin asking, and by doing so they discover that there is little which is innocent or neutral about their acts of reading. 

Frictional readers are more likely to choose and make meaning with texts of difference, texts which challenge and defamiliarize, and recognize that such texts demand their thoughtful engagement, their responses, a dialogue which ultimately reshapes them in some way, or at least complicates their understanding. This is what reading is and does.

Now, if you’re with me on these concepts, we can respond to this one you’re anxious about, and I’m going to plant a flag here. If you’ve listened to Literary Nomads for a while, you know what’s next. But I suspect if this argument today is new to you, you can guess. 

Suzanne Keen worries that our empathy will find no traction in the real world beyond the book. That we’ll carry our experiences into the book but we won’t carry our transformation back out. We’re pretty stubborn to change. But not acting makes us mere consumers of the injustices we read and experience.

So my flag: The energy generated by the friction of reading must be used to ideologically, physically, and structurally alter the world.  

It is an unquiet pedagogy. It insists that we recognize that nothing truly is neutral in our lived space, and neither then are our choices of what to read or how to read. All are consequential; all our choices we make. To read for thought or to read for human passivity. To engage in a compassionate and sustained dialogue or to remain silent. To act or not to act.  

When Chinua Achebe talks about our responsibility as storytellers, when Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o tells us that all writing is for or against the emperor, they are speaking of our words in the global spaces. All this time, even today, I have been talking of the reading/book world and the “real world,” as if pretending the two are separate, in opposition, uncrossable. When we know all words and stories exist right here with us. It’s not a binary.

This understanding, and our choices with it, is ethical in nature. Achebe is right: so much of the world speaks at us and doesn’t wait around for a reply. These are the folks who lock children in basements of misery, who extract their luxuries from the survival of others. The reader and writer’s greatest strength is to reply and to do so in public space. It’s to turn the “speak at” to a “speak with,” our dialogue again.  

We assert our intellectual sovereignty. The answer isn’t always C. I often describe this as Writing Back to the World and I’ve spoken of it a few times now. 

“Steve, are you saying that reading is worthless unless we go out there and fight somebody after doing it?”  Yes.  We write and talk back. We listen and engage with more people. We learn about difference. And through these difficult and uncomfortable acts, we grow. 

And the best part? Our reading for growth and meaning-making is reading for pleasure. 

Go try it. Go read something. 

 

Outro

 

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

 

Bibliography

 

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. Doubleday, 1989.

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Kutz, Eleanor, and Hephzibah Roskelly. An Unquiet Pedagogy: Transforming Practice in the English Classroom. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1991.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Writers in Politics: Essays. Heinemann, 1981.

Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1992.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.

Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition.” Strange Horizons, 2014. https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/