Reading Stories vs. Studying Literature

Or, How Teaching Literature Ruins Reading

Lisa Libes’ recent essay, The Strange Death of Literary Women, made a very valid critique of the growing predominance of smut in the fiction written for women. (Men are spared only in the sense that they prefer their smut in the form of pictures rather than words.) But Libes' suggestion that women should look further afield to works like The Bell Jar and Anna Karenina misses the mark, not simply for its excess of ambition, but because it fails to take into account the difference between reading stories and studying literature.

Libes, of course, is a student of literature. I am too, and so are most of the people likely to comment on this issue. But I think it is essential for those of us who study literature, and particularly those of us who try to write it, to understand that most people do not want to study literature, they just want to read a story.

Several of the people commenting on Libes’ post recommended reading the classics as the alternative to contemporary smut. But much as I admire the classics, they are not the cure to what ails literature today because, to one degree or another, you cannot read the classics as stories anymore; you can only study them as literature.

To read a story is to be immersed in an experience. Stories create those immersive experiences by using allusions to call things from our memories. This is how a writer can paint a whole scene with a few well chosen words. Most of it is in our heads already. It has only to be called forth and assembled by the right combination of words. Authors also make assumptions about what their readers know and think and believe. This works fine for a writer addressing readers of their own time and culture. Their assumptions are correct and writer and readers both have memories stocked with the same allusions, impressions, and stories. Making these assumptions and allusions is not even a conscious choice for the writer. It is just how language works.

But when writer and reader come from different times and different cultures, many of the assumptions and allusions that the writer made no longer match the assumptions of their readers or the allusions they recognize. There are other issues too, such as literary styles and conventions and changes in vocabulary, but it is the drift in assumptions an allusions over time that create the biggest barrier to easy immersion in a story. The further the reader is from the writer in time, space, and culture, the more difficult it will be for the reader to immerse themselves in the experience of the story.

Most readers can tolerate a few missed assumptions and allusions, and good writers take care to build in a certain redundancy in their storytelling to reduce the chance of the reader getting lost. But if there are too many misses, the reader can no longer immerse themselves in the experience and they will either put the book down or ask, “What does this mean?” But as soon as they ask that question, they are no longer reading a story. The are no longer immersed in an experience. They are now studying literature.

There’s nothing wrong with studying literature if that is what lights your fire. But most people don’t want to be students of literature. We are never going to build a thriving literary culture by trying to turn the general public into students of literature. A thriving literary culture will only come about when we have a broad base of people who just want to read good stories, and writers writing lots of good stories for them to read.

You might be tempted to argue that what I am calling “studying literature” is simply reading with more depth, but that is not the case. Studying literature is cognitively different from reading a story. When we read a story we are in the mode of experience. When we study literature we are in the mode of inquiry. Both modes are good. Without experience there would be nothing to inquire into. But they are still fundamentally different activities, and not everyone wants to inquire into every experience they enjoy.

To get some flavor of the difference we can look at two things: the difference between a natural allusion and a studied allusion, and the way details function in the mode of experience versus the mode of inquiry.

When a group of Germanic warriors sat around the fire in the mead hall and listened to the Beowulf Poet recite the adventures of Beowulf, they were listening to a story, a story whose values and experiences they shared. They shared its assumptions and its allusions came directly from their experience and culture. Thus they received Beowulf as a story, as an experience, without ever having ask themselves what it meant.

No one living today can receive Beowulf in the same way that those warriors did. We are too far distant from them in time, language, culture, and experience to simply read Beowulf as a story. We can study its assumptions and allusions and grasp them intellectually, but when we read the text we will be pulling those assumptions and allusions from a very different part of memory. Even a scholar of Anglo-Saxon history and literature is not going to have an experience remotely like the warriors in the mead hall who first heard Beowulf recited in the glow of the fire while the wind whistled outside the walls. That scholar, after all, will never have feasted in a mead hall or stood in a shield wall to meet the charge of a horde of angry Vikings. Their grasp of the culture of Beowulf, however technically sound and complete, is in their heads, not in their sinews and their bones.

A writer wanting to tell a story about Anglo-Saxon warriors today will not produce a work anything like Beowulf. They will produce something more like Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom which creates a simulacrum of the Anglo-Saxon warrior experience using assumptions and allusions, styles and vocabulary, that work for the modern reader. How close that simulacrum would be to the experience of a real Anglo-Saxon warrior is unknowable. We don’t have any Anglo-Saxon warriors to ask.

The Anglo-Saxon scholar’s studied knowledge of the assumptions and allusions in Beowulf is also much more granular than the tacit intuitive knowledge of the warriors in the mead hall. The scholar knows the details as separate bits of learned information, not as an integrated experience of life. A recent note from Adam Walker gives a flavor of what the study of literature is like in this regard.

I don’t doubt that many people will enjoy reading Sense and Sensibility this way, line by line, detail by detail. But can you imagine the young ladies in the drawing room of the author’s time reading the latest Miss Austen novel this way? I can’t. This is like studying a painting by looking at the brush strokes. It is not reading a story; it is studying literature.

To illustrate the difference in how details work in the modes of experience and inquiry, consider these images:

Here we have an autumn wood:

The image is full of detail (far more detail than this small version of the photo reveals) Looking at it creates a striking impression of a woodland in autumn. When we look at it, we don’t attend to the details individually, so you might think that the details don’t matter to the overall impression of the picture. Let’s test this by looking at a painting that deliberately blurs out the details:

This image has a beauty of its own, but it is not the same experience as the first, more detailed image. The photograph looks like a place. We react to it as a place. The painting looks like a painting. We react to it as a painting. Those details that we did not attend to individually in the photograph nevertheless contributed hugely to the feeling of reality, fullness, and depth of the image.

But if we start to attend to the details individually, as we do in the close reading of a text, then the overall impression gets lost as we focus all of our attention on a particular detail, such as these mushrooms:

This is also a beautiful image, but it is fundamentally different from the first image, despite being a detail that might be found in the same location. You can start to look closely at the individual details of a scene and examine them one by one, but when you do so, your focus narrows and the eye no longer takes in the image of the whole. Taking in the details individually creates a fundamentally different impression from taking the detailed image in as a whole, even though the details profoundly affect the experience of the whole.

Or think of a garden full of flowers. The profusion of blooms is an essential part of the impression of the garden as a whole, even though you are not attending to every petal of every flower individually. But if you do focus your attention on one particular flower, you will lose the impression of the whole. You are no longer looking at a garden but at a flower. Try as you might, you can’t do both at once. Our brains just don’t work like that. And yet the impression of the whole depends absolutely on the presence of all the details you are not attending to individually when you look at the scene whole. Attention to individual detail in the mode of inquiry deprives one of the impression created by the totality of details which is essential to the experience of the whole in the mode of experience.

So it is also with a work of literature. Close reading of a text amounts to the same thing as focusing on the details of a picture. You can go on like this, taking several weeks to do a close reading of an entire novel, and you might enjoy that experience very much and learn a lot from it. But you will not have had the same experience as someone who simply sat down and read the book through without stopping to admire every petal of every flower.

There is nothing wrong with either of these ways of enjoying a story. The problem comes when we start to tell people that studying literature is somehow deeper or better or more correct than simply reading the story as an experience.

There are plenty of people who will tell you that if you are not doing a close reading, you are missing the details. This is incorrect. You are not missing the details in an immersive read-through, you are just processing them differently to produce a different effect. And in most cases, the effect that the details produce in an immersive reading is the effect that the author intended when they wrote the work. They did not write their story be be examined minutely and in pieces, but to be taken in as a whole experience. The details were designed to give depth and verisimilitude to the whole, not to be analyzed and dissected individually. Studying literature is not “serious reading.” Serious reading is reading a substantial worthwhile story immersively for the sake of the experience.

Unfortunately, the drift in assumptions and allusions that come with the passage of time means that the classics become less accessible to the ordinary reader. This fact alone justifies the study of literature. The classics are worth reading in this way, even if we can never receive them the way their original audiences did. But we can’t expect that the general reading public is going to be interested in reading this way, and we should not get snobbish and pretend they are not serious readers if they don’t.

This is where I quarrel with Adam Walker, above, when he writes “Last night on Versed we began our eight-week journey into Sense and Sensibility, and I came away reminded just how much serious reading asks of us and how much it gives back.” His use of the term “serious reading” implies that the kind of reading he describes is somehow superior to reading for experience. But I will say again: reading as an immersive experience was the kind of reading that the author envisioned, the kind of experience they meant to create. Reading stories for experience is not less serious than studying literature. Reading stories for experience is what stories are for. It is what serves the biological purpose of stories, which is to make us wise and brave.

“Anyone can follow a plot,” Walker writes, “but it takes attention, sensitivity, a careful ear, and a love of language to appreciate the subtle art of Austen’s prose.” But this is to confuse two fundamentally different things. An immersed reader is doing far more than following the plot, though the veiled contempt for plotting is telling here. They are receiving the work as a whole and as an experience, as it was intended to be received. They are appreciating the subtle art of Austen’s prose in the sense that they are receiving the effect of that art as a story experience, not in the sense that they are analyzing it as a piece of literary technique.

There is no bright line between the immersible classics and the classics that can only be studied. It is no longer possible to just read Beowulf as a story. It can only be studied as literature. But many people can still read Sense and Sensibility as a story. What is immersible for one may not be for another, and what can only be studied in ones youth (where ones reading is so often compelled by others) may become immersible later in life as one accumulates experiences that make the details of a story viscerally rather than intellectually recognizable. Having a work forced down your throat before you are ready for it may turn you off ever trying to read it, or any other supposed great work, even if you would in time become ready for it.

Which is to say that we teach the wrong books in schools. Adults forget the books they loved as children and try to get their children to love the books they only grew into much later in life. Worse, they try to teach the love of studying literature rather than the love of reading a story.

If our purpose is to encourage immersive reading generally, we are definitely teaching the wrong books. If our aim is to encourage the study of literature among those people with a taste and an aptitude for it — well, we probably still teach the wrong books, but the larger problem may be how many of the people who might have enjoyed immersive reading their whole lives get turned off by the attempt to get them to enjoy the study of literature at an impressionable age.

The tendency of English teachers to ruin reading has been remarked on many times. The English teacher takes the student who loves to read stories immersively and teaches them instead to study literature. It is no longer permissible for the student to simply enjoy the experience of the story. Now they must be made to analyze it and answer questions about it. A few students will take delight in this particular discipline. The rest, though, will learn not to associate their natural love of immersive story with books and novels, but will turn instead to TV and comics, or away from books with any kind of seriousness and depth of vision to works of vicarious sensation, of violence and smut.

Teaching children that a book is not something to be simply enjoyed as an experience but is rather something to be analyzed and be tested on is profoundly damaging. But it gets worse. In many cases, the people who do acquire a love for the study of literature in these classes learn to be contemptuous of those who read for immersion alone. Good readers, they come to believe, analyze the texts that they read, and pull out all the assumptions, allusions, and hidden meanings. Literature, they start to think, is about ideas, and the job of the reader is to discover the ideas that the author has concealed in the text like the sixpence in a mince pie on Christmas day. This is a profoundly wrongheaded idea, and it has tended to divide the world into those who analyze texts the way they would dissect a frog in biology class and those who have learned to hate reading and will never again pick up a book unless, perhaps, one filled with smut.

But the misapplication of the study of literature has done more harm than simply turning generations of students off reading. It has also affected the way people write. I said above that the authors of the classics wrote to be read immersively, not to be analyzed. But since the invention of English studies, and in particular the rise of MFA programs, I think that has changed. I suspect that some writers today believe that the study of literature is the serious kind of reading and that therefore serious literature should be written to be analyzed rather than read immersively, that it is supposed to be obscure and deeply literary rather than clear and transparent, that it is supposed to express grand ideas and take political stands rather than to create an experience. They think that their task as novelists is to hide the sixpence in the mincemeat. They write novels in which the whole point is not to taste the mincemeat but to find the sixpence. The result of this is that, in literary fiction at least, the effect of the whole ceases to matter, stories cease to be coherent or to have anything resembling pace, and they become extremely dull for anyone trying to read them as stories for experience, which is to say, for most people.

There is in this a profound misunderstanding of the nature and function of stories. The study of literature is not the natural or correct way to read a novel, any more than the interpretation of radio-telescope data is the right way to gaze at the glory of the heavens. The right way to read a novel is simply to sit down and immerse yourself in the story. That is what novels are for. They give us the experiences that work to make us wise and brave.

To suggest the study of literature as an alternative for someone who habitually reads bad books is like recommending that someone who habitually eats junk food should study to become a doctor. The correct recommendation would be to eat more vegetables and whole grains. Just as the poor eater needs a nutritionist who can introduce them to healthier foods so the scholar of literature should introduce the poor reader to better contemporary books, and provide guidance around the more accessible classics which would enable them to read them immersively as an experience. Unless someone shows a very specific interest in it, they should not encourage them to leave immersive reading behind and study literature instead.

The responsibility for writers and publishers, similarly, is not to write books for students of literature, books that strive to hide the sixpence, but to write good, substantial, nourishing books that are meant to be read immersively as an experience by people of their own culture. This is exactly what the writers of the classics were doing in their own time, and this is exactly why these works are the classics that they are.

We are not going to break out of our current cultural malaise until we reject the literature of esoteric artfulness, the literature of artfully concealed ideas, and the literature of blatantly preached dogma and get back to a literature of immersive human experience.

The classics can’t fit the bill because most of them are too far from us in time and culture to be read immersively by most people. But the classics were not written to be “literary fiction” in their own time. They were written to be popular novels to be read and enjoyed immersively as an experience that was true to the human condition. What we need today is a revival of serious popular fiction, fiction that is neither literary nor genre but the kind of books that were written in the past which have come down to us as classics.