The Whole Thing?

I'm currently directing a senior thesis on Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick (1851). Have you read it? The whole thing?

My uncle Steve thinks that anyone who says she's read the whole thing is lying. He doesn’t even believe me, and I've read the it twice: once last summer and once--in a real welcome-to-graduate-school experience--during a two-week span of time that also included my reading of Dickens's 900-page novel Bleak House and most of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. Needless to say, I skipped a lot during those two weeks. 

In fact, it's during those two weeks that my friend Steve (yes, uncle Steve and now friend Steve) and I had a serious talk, at a place called the Rose and Crown (Omaha, Nebraska’s version of Melville's Spouter Inn) about whether it mattered if one read "the whole thing" or not. I was anxious about the habit I was developing of skipping while reading, a habit I developed as a response to the insane demands of grad school.

Though it's been twelve years since Steve and I had that conversation, I still remember what he said:

(1) "Reading the whole thing is overrated" and

(2) "So let's say you read all of Moby-Dick; hell, let's say you write Moby-Dick. Then what? There’s still Jupiter and it’s still bigger than anything you've got."

Now, Steve was likely three sheets to the wind when he said that second thing. (That’s right. I just used a euphemism for drunkenness that originates in nineteenth-century nautical terminology. That was for you, Melville.) I’ll translate. Here’s what Steve actually said:

(1) “The point of reading is not simply to consume a book. One must interact with it, respond to it. And one can genuinely respond to a book even if he hasn't read the whole thing. Furthermore, reading the whole thing does not automatically entitle one to claim that he has had a meaningful experience with a book.”

This first point prompted me to forward Steve this now classic bit of fake journalism.

(2) "What kind of accomplishment is it to have read (or even written) a great novel, when that accomplishment is placed in a context of creation that includes such unthinkable wonders as the planet Jupiter?" 

Now that question knocked me out. It still does.

In the intervening years, I’ve become an avid read-the-whole-thinger. I kind of always was one, but I also always knew that reading the whole thing is never enough, and that those who think it is enough are either smug or callow. They either think (a) reading is way more like bird watching than it actually is or (b) reading the whole thing is as valuable an activity as having a genuine interaction with the text.

Maybe what we call “literacy” is really just pre-literacy. Maybe reading a book is the least thing that we can do with the book, not the only thing. Maybe literate individuals read because they have to, because reading is the prerequisite to doing the thing that they really want to do, which is create, interact, comingle their ideas with those of the author.

For me, reading has always been means to an end, never an end in itself. Books are the things I go through to get to people. 

Reading in public

My new favorite blog is Underground New York Public Library. It's a lot like my wife's favorite blog, Sartorialist, but instead of being about people wearing stylish clothes, it's about people reading books in public.

Here's a typical example from each:


Sometimes, it's hard to tell which blog is which ...
 

... especially when everyone's reading. 

Is there some correlation between stylish people and people who read? Maybe.

But I think the more important correlation is that both kinds of people are interesting in some way--both kinds stick out in a crowd, both invite (intentionally or not) the kind of attention that earns them a place on someone's flickr feed. Both kinds of people are assertively themselves, wholly contextualized into their environments (i.e., looking natural) while at the same time doing their own thing. That's pretty cool. In fact, it might be a useable definition of that illusive trait of "cool."

Anyway, this interest in photos of people reading in public carries over into the classroom. In my Literature and Cinema class, the first film we watched this semester was Adaptation, a movie about one screenwriter's near failed attempt to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. 

The movie's about how hard it is to make something as public as a movie out of something as private experience of reading a beautiful book about flowers.

I started the semester with this movie because it's a way of starting a conversation about what it means to write and read stories. Writing a story involves deciding how to translate an experience into a coherent narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. And reading a story involves interacting with those decisions, projecting in your mind the world, people, and actions that the writer's decisions convey in her story.

Adaptation includes a lot of scenes of people reading:

Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) reading about Orchids.

Susan Orlean having a sublime experience while reading. 

Notice the private setting--the home office--and the private rapture.

Compare that to this:

Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage) reading Orlean's book. 

Kaufman is digging into the text not for pleasure but because he has to make something out of it. Specifically, he has to make a movie. He starts obsession over the book, specifically over its unadaptability. Can one make a page of beautiful words into a screen of entertaining sights and sounds? That is a question I will be asking my students a lot this semester.

Kaufman fails to interact with Orlean's text. He simply loves her book. (He may even love Orlean.) But he can't offer either thing anything in return.

In other words, Charlie is bad at being in public. At a diner, when a nice server shows some interest in the book he's reading and in doing the job of being a nice server ...

Charlie "misreads" her kindness and (very awkwardly) asks her out. 

She gets scared and tells her boss. The message: Reading less dangerous than socializing, and the former is likely to make the latter more difficult.

Now, cognitive scientists have discovered that the opposite is the case, that reading--especially reading literature--enhances one's ability to navigate the complexities of social interaction, to more fully inhabit the moments in which they interact with other people.

And that's a long-term hope of mine: That the stereotype of the socially-awkward bookworm will die out and be replaced by, well, this guy.