The Jane Austen book club is this Sunday. Anyone can attend. **You do not need a paid subscription!** I will post a zoom link over the weekend. We are discussing Mansfield Park.
Whenever I write a short note or tweet about the reasons for reading literature, a number of people pop up to tell me that the main point of reading literature (by which they usually mean fiction) is pleasure or fun. Put aside the fact that not every short post on the internet can make every point. And put aside the fact that I never denied it or excluded it (indeed, I have made that point myself many, many times…), — what do they mean?
There is a weird insistence on the idea that literature is for pleasure, or fun. What’s wrong with it being for other non-exclusive things? Is it mere entertainment? Do we not distinguish between Shakespeare and Gilmour Girls on other grounds than “Shakespeare is more fun”? Surely we have to ask what sort of pleasure literature provides? And surely it is a challenging, intellectual, emotionally involved, persuasive, even spiritual range of pleasures, rather than “fun”? Someone on Twitter told me recently that they read Lolita for the sheer pleasure of it. I assume they meant the sheer pleasure of language. But the whole point of Lolita is that the pleasure of language has a moral purpose! If you cannot see that then in some important way your pleasure is not really about Lolita, or is about some small and shallow part of Lolita.
The heart asks pleasure first, no doubt, but the sort of pleasure literature offers has to be distinct from other pleasures, otherwise we start to wonder if we even have such a thing as literature… at that point, we need to decide what it is that makes literature pleasurable. Many of the answers to that question are, I submit, the sorts of things I say in my notes and tweets. You can read just for fun or just for the story or whatever, and the best writers like Shakespeare and Swift are quite intentionally amenable to those sorts of readings. But even then, you are persistently aware of a special sort of fun, a special sort of story. Something that requires a little more explication. You cannot, in all seriousness, say that you read Borges for the sheer fun of it in the same way that you read Wodehouse for the sheer fun of it.
Literature is for pleasure, but it provides the sorts of pleasure that require a little explanation (you might call that criticism) and the attempt to keep that explanation as mere pleasure or fun is reductive. Literature is fun, but it’s a special sort of fun that has to be described more fully, unless we all know and share in the knowledge that what I am saying here is true, in which case fun no longer really means “fun”.
1) I was not expecting a Gilmore Girls shoutout on The Common Reader.
2) I am far too amused by the fact that you spelled it Gilmour Girls.
3) As far as late 20th century WB dramas go, Gilmore Girls is obviously a minor work in comparison to the true greats, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I suspect people who say they read for pleasure usually just want to cordon their reading off from self-improvement or anything that might smack of duty, practical value, or social advantage. For some, that makes reading a guilty pleasure, and for others, a welcome reprieve. No doubt some have reflected on the matter, found the effort unrewarding-- and who can blame them? "intrinsic value", "the value of the experience afforded by an attentive openess to the text", "confronting greatness", "a non-religious substitute for both the numinous and mystical religious experience", and so on-- and settled on a simple formula of cozy evasion. For certainly it is an evasion, as your comments indirectly make clear. In other words, I don't think they really mean what they say. What they really mean is probably something like "Please, let's not think too much about it." That is not a sentiment I can relate to or respect, but neither is it one I find objectionable. It seems preferable, at any rate, to what is on offer from the ponderous moralist, the political ideologue, or the sort of clever, arid interpreter Susan Sontag rightly railed against.