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How to enjoy reading
Dan Rolle gets hot under the collar as he contemplates his relationship with Literature
Posted 3rd June 2009 | Author: Dan Rolle
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IIf you get off the Parisian Metro at Châtelet and walk down Rue St Denis, you will witness a spectacle that is integral to any understanding of literature today. As you exit the Metro through the subway, you emerge surrounded by the magnificent Napoleonic structures of authority; vast six or seven storey buildings which furnish the environs of the arrondissement with an ambience of prosperity, of strength, investing you with a feeling of trust in the Republic. You stroll down Rue St Denis with a strange sense of pride: you are a stranger in this country; yet all the same the surroundings make you proud of the part of the world in which we live; despite your leftist pretensions, you are at one with the West – ‘Yes, we did just bomb the fuck out of that hideously undeveloped country, but look at that façade!’
And so with a love for the facades, the gilded statues and fabulous gated centres of administration, you carry on. Soon, however, you will witness a change. Yes, still the same excellent architecture – ‘look at that bust!’ – but the boutiques underneath are changing. Longchamp has long gone; Nicolas is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the Other Industry becomes increasingly prevalent; the Fraternité of the maxim, and the red of the Tricolore are heightened in their importance. Lurid signs adorn the windows: ‘Salle 1: Sado! Salle 2: Gay! Salle 3: Peep!’; there is a strange array of what could, with some imagination, become underwear. Horse bits and whips are proudly displayed in a sale. And all this goes off right underneath the wonderful Napoleonic structures. It is more like an erotic fun fair than the dark hubbub of the seedy Parisian sex industry; bizarrely, the boutiques seem to fit with the facades. And what is this, emerging on your right hand side? A crowd of men, aging from forty to sixty and a flashing sign dominating the bottom floor: ‘Caresse speciale jusqu’a plaisir! €30!’. Could this mean what you think it does? Really?
Yes, it does. Yes, you can get a handjob in the 1st arrondissement for about twenty-five quid. And there’s no shame about it. Let’s stick a huge sign in the window and let everyone know. Hey, Sarko might come along!
It is this creation of facades and of displacing meaning that is central to the modern literary experience. The Napoleonic grandeur surrounding Châtelet is simply grandeur; go inside the buildings and you will find cubicle after cubicle of workers, trudging through paperwork; the social security form(s) I submitted last week has no doubt been defaced up by a thousand stamps, and parched by the neon light of a hundred desk lamps.
And, in a funny way, the garish light advertising the ‘caresse speciale’ is even more illuminating. What emerges here is a desire to create between the viewer of the sign, and the sign itself, a kind of relationship that almost creates the ‘plaisir’ without the alluded ‘act’ having even taken place. The feeling you get when you exit the subway, or when you discover the hidden meaning behind the ‘caresse’ is exactly the same one felt when you enjoy a text. The pleasure of the text is not, therefore an experience of a ‘writerly’ text, a la Barthes, but rather ideology, the West (and for French readers, Sarko) giving you a ‘caresse speciale’; but, this time, charging £7.99 for a Penguin paperback, rather than £25.
But please don’t be fooled or over-excited by this prospect; no, Marcel Proust is not going to jump off the shelf and give you one in Blackwell’s. However, if you have the patience and time, a reading of his mammoth work might give you that lovely warm feeling of togetherness that you seek. Snuggle up with a cup of tea and a madeleine, go in search of lost time one snowy Sunday afternoon, and all those wonderful memories of a terribly middle class childhood will come flooding back (save the Uncle Monty-like figure who threatens to bugger you). Hawthorne bushes will take on an angelic, if not slightly pedantic, appeal; church steeples will fade in and out of sight, like the Sunday school classes your parents made you take to get you into the local C of E school.
Oh isn’t reading wonderful! Look at all those big words, complex sentences and the fabulous amount of semi-colons! It makes you want to pack it all in, move to the country and live in post-War English splendour; it’s annual jam competitions, the vicar round for tea and VE day all rolled into one! Alain de Botton is so right! Proust really can change your life!
But why is this? Why is it that Proust, like so many celebrated writers, is associated with the pleasure of reading? In those BBC retrospectives which appear once or twice a year, and invariably shown on Sunday evenings (1900, Greenwich Mean Time, is scientifically proven to be the hour of middle class enjoyment: when the stomach ache caused that naughty extra helping of mother’s famous apple crumble has subsided, and father and his eldest son have finally managed to get a jolly good fire going) always hark on about Wilde, Proust, Wordsworth. Isn’t it lovely to go up to the Lake District during October half term and frolic in the rain and autumn leaves, safe in the knowledge that our finest poets did the same? Yes, says Director General of the BBC. And you’d bloody well better Enjoy it.
It is this notion of Enjoyment that is key. Because behind the warm feeling and the ‘caresse speciale’ of the reader-writer relationship is a scary and domineering imperative: Enjoy! Director Generals, Culture Secretaries and hoards of Melvyn Bragg look-a-likes threaten to pull the plug on the Matrix, on your cosy middle-class, Oxbridge educated world, and make you face the Reality of a universe filled with daytime reruns of Frasier, Ricki Lake and Deal or No Deal. Yes, this is the Desert of the Real.
But fret not; this need not take place! Please, sit back down on the sofa and take another book from the shelf. Harry Potter? No problem: New Labour’s favourite donor will stroke away those fretting tears with her magic wand. Because isn’t it a good job that Harry and his friends are around to destroy the Dark Marked Other? Yes, look at all these ridiculously didactic messages throwing themselves at you: totalitarian dictators threatening to use terrorist tactics to destroy Muggles and Magicians alike? House Elves which bear a ridiculous resemblance to Vladimir Putin giving the game away and betraying your secrets? How horrid it would be not to be able to return to Hogwarts, especially with all that lovely grub. Flying chocolate cake? Yes please!
So you’d better not step out of line, Mudblood. Because once you get expelled from Hogwarts, and the Order of the Phoenix takes a disliking to you, there’ll be no more knitted jumpers from Mrs. Weasley to save you from the frosty wind of the Outside.
And such is the nature of this overwhelming imperative. To Enjoy! Means to accept and respect the Big Other – Western Liberal Democracy. And after reading ‘readable’ ‘enjoyable’, ‘loveable’ literature, why wouldn’t you? Just take a look at how fab everything is: we can go shopping and we have great TV; hey, look how hot the girls are! Oh, and we can vote, if we want to.
So the nature of the modern literary experience is intensely tied up with the imperatives we are fed by a widespread consumerist, advertisement-based economy and a political system founded on a mass media. Literature today is based upon a love and enjoyment of western liberal democracy, which in part creates a feeling of togetherness, solidarity and safety on the part of the readership. The most ‘readable’ literature is that which confirms ideological, cultural and class expectations. It flatters, soothes and, above all, caresses.
And whilst all this flattery takes place, vast subjects are masked – chiefly, the hollowing of western democracy and representation. The press call ends, the images are syndicated, and all we are left with is a G8 handshake, or the promise of an economic bailout. Power is becoming increasingly centralized, yet the electorate is left with a feeling of autonomy. Phone-ins, internet polls, and street level surveys conducted by the local MPs, hide the shallow reality of liberal democracy.
Yet this warm feeling prevails. We are told to enjoy it – it is, they say, a feeling that the credit crunch is just a passing storm, that good times are to follow, that we’ll have snow this Christmas! No doubt the stocking fillers this year will be the literary equivalent of those “How to Survive the Worst Case Scenario” postcards which appeared a couple of years ago: this time, ‘How to save your Icelandic shares’, and ‘What to do if you suspect a terrorist has jumped on the commuter train from Gerrard’s Cross to Marylebone’. All will provide a nice way out from the harsher realities of the twenty-first century, and will help sooth that heartburn caused by that naughty extra helping of Granny’s stuffing.
Hopefully sometime in the next few of years, after the Credit Crunch has subsided, we’ll have another media ‘Crunch-time!’ phenomenon: a Culture Crunch. Only this time, we will be made aware of the empty promises held within the lines of the latest Booker winner and the Culture Secretary will have to explain himself to an indignant, educated population.
I look forward to his knee-jerk policy reaction, which will be something along the lines of placing warning stickers on the front of every book published from here on in. With any luck they will read: Literature - Enjoy!
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