Sunday Salon

On Friday, The Reading Ape asked for his Friday Forum question whether there is an ethics of reading, referring first to a post on reading guilt and then to one on reading and diversity.

I had read an earlier Amy Reads post on diversity in the context of BEA with some interest. Thinking at first that the post would be about diversity of books—genre, style, form, large and small publishing houses, the marketable and the less so—I was excited. But I quickly realized the focus was on, as it seems to be for many bloggers, racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of authors (and attendees).

Like Amy, “I think it is important to read diversely,” but I’m not referring to identity politics when I say that. I recoil from the concept, as I do from all identity politics, which imply a collectivism that I find oppressive and disturbing. An identity politics of class would make more sense to me, is what I sometimes lapse into in my own life in general—but I still consider it a lapse. A later post from Amy discusses writing about the “other,” but everyone else is the “other.” As she questions whether a white American woman can write a “true” book (for some unclear definition of “true”) about Rwanda, I can only question whether any Rwandan could have written a book that would be “true” for anyone else but himself anyway—are not his own compatriots “others,” with an inner life utterly inaccessible to anyone, regardless of race, religion, or nationality (except through an ineffable interpersonal transcendence)? I recently read the first chapter of a novel set just a few miles away from where I grew up, and almost every description rang false to me. My immediate thought was that the author—a white woman about my age—had never really been to southwestern Connecticut, and certainly had not grown up there. But she had, again, just miles away from me, at the very same time. I couldn’t possibly finish a book like this myself, so perhaps the Rwandans who read the other book will be too close to the situation and have to abandon it as well. But does that mean the Connecticut novel isn’t going to be “true” for any number of other people, who may find an effective work of art where I found only wrongness?

Amy’s latest post on the subject (the first of hers linked above) closes with this food for thought:

I do think, as Teresa said, that we all have to think about what our passions truly are and what we find important. We have to realize that these books are often white, heterosexual, cisgender, and North American or European. If you only request those books, what message is that sending to the publishers about what sells?

The message I want to send to publishers (from whom, at this point, I request nothing but purchase much) is that I’m interested in good books, interesting books, attractive books, and if possible, books that are all three. That is what my passion is and what I truly find important. Any reading guilt I have comes from reading things that I enjoy but don’t live up to this—and it’s only guilt in the mildest sense of the term. I feel guilty about reading the latest Thursday Next novel not because Jasper Fforde is a white male, but because I know it’s not a very interesting book. Of course, I don’t feel that guilty, because it’s excellent entertainment and I want publishers to publish the kind of trash I like as well as the kind of real books I like.

It’s not directly in any of The Reading Ape’s questions, but there is an undercurrent throughout most of this, and especially in Rachel’s post on reading guilt, about promoting books via blogging, and the responsbility of being someone who has an influence, maybe, on the reading of others. I don’t think much of this blog as “making a difference in the world,” but I do know this: according to Fyrefly’s wonderful book blog search engine and a somewhat superficial Google Blogs search, I appear to be the only blogger to have written anything about Almayer’s Folly or Lucy Church Amiably and one of the few to have done so about The Death of Virgil, Clarel or Mardi, and that’s based just on searching a handful of titles. The world is not lacking for good books that not enough people read, or read about on blogs. Should this not count as “discover[ing] and promot[ing] books that may not get as big of a voice as others” just because all of the above authors are white, and all but one or two are heterosexual? Among this group we have an epic poem in bizarro meter; impenetrable high modernism; a prose-poem-symphony; an early, little-read novel by a master of English literature; and whatever the hell Mardi is. And that strikes me as more meaningfully diverse than, say, reading half a dozen conventional narratives by authors with half a dozen different skin tones. (Of course, in other senses my reading is very homogeneous; there are many, many genres I do not read at all for example.) If publishers get this message from me I will be pleased, I suppose, but I don’t think they will be coming out with the next Clarel anytime soon. At least not most of them.

It would be wrong to imply I don’t understand the motivations behind a lot of this, and in fact, it exposes what I consider to be the real failings and weaknesses of my blogging. Aside from the perpetual attempts to combat “privilege,” the kinds of people who read a bunch and like to blog about it are curious by nature and love to learn. I’m like this too, and I absolutely do enjoy learning about different places, times, and cultures in my reading. I love trivia, I love good aphorisms, and yes, I enjoy reveling in the ideas of authors I find smart and thoughtful. But that’s not really what I want to talk about—I want to talk about how they do it, how fiction works, as it were. This is what I wish I did better.

My readers know that I like to do themed reads and projects, as well, and it might seem like I want to do a Latin American project to understand Latin America, or a Russian project to understand Russia, or what have you. But this would be a mistake: these projects are much more about literary traditions and movements than some kind of cultural diversity requirement. I want to know what people in different places, times, and cultures have decided to attempt to do with literature, and how well they have succeeded, what they have worked novels out to be. Yes, this is also all bound up in what kinds of ideas they are trying to express in literature, what they are depicting, but that’s only a part of the whole, and for me not often the most interesting part.

This is also why I like to do things as projects. I have only the most moderate understanding of English or American literature, and even less for French, German, Italian, Russian, or Japanese. I still feel like I barely have the background to wrap my arms around novels written by people almost like myself, at least as far as all these identities go. If you want to understand a literary tradition, it’s a lot of work. In the past 18 months or so, I have read six volumes of Latin American fiction, which is nothing, just nothing at all, not enough to feel nearly like I know what is going on in all of it. Do bloggers who make a point of “reading diversely” conquer this problem? I’m sure if you decided to read one book a month by a GLBTQ author you would get somewhere in the realm of GLBTQ literature before long. But something about the argument for diversity, maybe because it’s an argument for diversity rather than an argument against monoculture, makes it seem more about superficial, broad-but-shallow reading, a list of pigeonholes to fill. And it so often seems to me that since we can fill those pigeonholes with books that are so alike in all other ways, we are not really getting anywhere. If you’ve decided you want to read a bunch of GLBTQ books because you want to understand how GLBTQ fiction works, because you’re interested in knowing, do it, and write about it and tell me. Explore something, analyze it, figure it out, see how it relates to other traditions, how it innovates. Everyone reads for their own reasons, as they should, but those are the ones that matter to me.