Rules of Reading

I’ve just finished Philip Roth’s extraordinary novel, The Human Stain. What a book! What a fabulous, generous, seething, weapon of a book. It’s not just a story, it’s an instrument of mass destruction aimed at the bulky mass of recalcitrant stupidity at the heart of contemporary Western culture, and a clever and subtle meditation on the unknowability of the human heart that seems to make stupidity our default option. But I’m not going to review this novel right now – I’ll do that tomorrow. Right now I want to extract just one theme running through the narrative and consider its implications.

The narrative focuses on a disgraced university professor who has spent his illustrious career teaching the classics. He’s done it with verve and intelligence and grace, and as what might be termed a humanist. That’s to say he takes a fairly straight line on the narrative. Here’s a bit of him describing the Greek God Achilles so you can see what he does:

‘Adrenal Achilles: the most highly flammable of explosive wildmen any writer has ever enjoyed portraying; especially where his prestige and his appetite are concerned, the most hypersensitive killing machine in the history of warfare. Celebrated Achilles: alienated and estranged by a slight to his honour. Great heroic Achilles who, through the strength of his rage at an insult – the insult of not getting the girl – isolates himself, positions himself defiantly outside the very society whose glorious protector he is and whose need of him is enormous.’

He’s got a nice line in rhetoric, right? And does just what a good literary critic should do: draws out all the interest packed implicitly into the character of Achilles and expresses it in the kind of evocative, powerful phrases that will stick in a reader’s mind. Now, this man – Coleman Silk, to give him his name – meets his nemesis, both personal and professional in the form of Delphine Roux, a young Frenchwoman whose excellent qualifications on paper and her ravenous ambition have placed her prematurely in the position of head of school. As is so often the case with contemporary academic novels, Delphine is given the kiss of death in the narrative by her over enthusiastic espousal of complicated literary theory. Well, that’s to say she’s not sure that it’s the way she really wants to talk about texts, but it’s the way that anyone who’s anyone is talking about them and she is infatuated by the clever-clever literary speak. She is also, it transpires, a bit of a maniac on the quiet, and she will commit a couple of acts of pretty stunning virulence against Coleman Silk for no better reason than she thinks he doesn’t approve of her.

She’s right; he doesn’t approve. They fall out in particular over one student who wants to do a feminist appreciation of two plays by Euripedes. Coleman Silk is dead set against this approach and won’t have anything to do with it. Delphine blames Colman for a kind of intellectual dinosaur’s resistance to what’s new, and to a student’s desire to experiment and push herself. But Coleman has this to say:

‘our students are abysmally ignorant. They’ve been incredibly badly educated. Their lives are intellectually barren. They arrive knowing nothing and most of them leave knowing nothing. Least of all do they know, when they show up in my class, how to read classical drama. Teaching at Athena, particularly in the 1990s, teaching what is far and away the dumbest generation in American history, is the same as walking up Broadway in Manhattan talking to yourself, except instead of the eighteen people who hear you in the street talking to yourself, they’re all in the room. They know, like, nothing. After nearly forty years of dealing with such students – and Miss Mitnick is merely typical – I can tell you that a feminist perspective on Euripides is what they least need. Providing the most naïve of readers with a feminist perspective on Euripides is one of the best ways you could devise to close down their thinking before it’s even had a chance to begin to demolish a single one of their brainless ‘likes.’’

Now there, in a nutshell, is the problem of reading literature today. I find this a fascinating summary of the good sense and the depressing pessimism that abounds in relation to what we might or might not want to do with a reading of a story that goes beyond the immediately obvious. Coleman is right that no reader can run before they walk, but he’s wrong to abandon theoretical perspectives on the grounds of student stupidity. No matter what stage a student is at in his or her education, not knowing things cannot be the reason why the difficult is not attempted; it simply compounds the problem. Nor is it necessarily the case that using feminist theory on a play will immediately provide a substitute for thought or prevent any originality from surfacing. The whole point of teaching literature must surely be to show any reader how the obvious reading can be troubled and subverted by less obvious ones, and how those unusual approaches to a story have to be grounded in good old common sense.

The problems with literature are curiously extended (as far as I can see) into the problems with contemporary American culture as Roth portrays it. At the very heart of this story is an angry and pertinent enquiry into the ability of everyday folk to read each other, to make sense of another person’s behaviour, to read them within the context of their lives, their previous acts and the general sense of what’s plausible. This ability, Roth is suggesting, is what we have thrown away in the modern world, in favour of a prurient, crazy, voyeuristic, sanctimonious ability to believe absolutely anything of absolutely anyone, with no pause in our gullibility for accessing the touchstone of credulity. Just as students who have no basic grounding in literary reading will apply any pre-processed soundbites of theory to a story without engaging their brains, so the public at large slap convenient labels on other people’s acts, willfully misreading them.

And so the problem of how to read stories, and how to read the stories that get applied to people, as well as the ones they actually live, seems to have a direct bearing on the way that we learn to read stories at all, and the relationship we have, culturally, to the act of interpretation. Reading is not about slapping any old meaning onto a tale, just because it might be possible to do. But our reprehensible education fails us in the places where it abandons the notion of discipline and constraint. One of the most sympathetic characters in the book has this to say about where our education is going wrong:

‘In my parents’ day and well into yours and mine, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it’s the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it’s the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can’t learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria… only opinions.’

That’s what the study of literature can teach us, when properly taught; it can show us how careful we have to be with our reckless opinions, and how attentive we ought to be to the basic rules of reading.