Why I write the Common Reader

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Why do I write The Common Reader?

I was asked this question in an interview the other day, and gave rather a weak answer. Let me expand.

tl;dr. Most of us die without writing a great novel, but we can all read Anna Karenina.

The aim is simple: I want to understand great literature, how it works, whence it derives. The same is true of the other topics I write about (talent, genius, education, wisdom, and so on). Literature is the focus, but the principles are general.

I am bored by mediocrity, including my own. I believe philistinism is a moral failure at the social level. This is a project in defiance of mediocrity. Whether or not I succeed is not the point. It is not the point at all. Non-acceptance is the animating spirit of excellence. The best thing I can do is each day to join the discussion about where excellence can be found.

My interest in academic criticism is exploitative. I want to know who came first, who invented, who bubbles at the source of the stream. As Ezra Pound said, without that knowledge you can never sort out what you know or compare the value of books.

Looking through the “Literature” leaderboard on Substack recently, I was struck by how much of it was self-help and writing advice, personal transformation and creative writing—by how much of it was not about that sort of knowledge.

I’m not against all of this. There are many fine writers doing this work. But a lot of what I saw in the “Literature” leaderboard wasn’t about literature. It was about reassurance, community, development, growth, writing, and so on.

This blog is not about any of that. You might find writing advice here, and it might help you as a writer, who knows. You will certainly find some version of self-help, though not of the usual sort. But my principal business here is to to acquire knowledge and to explicate.

I said in my essay about self-help and John Stuart Mill,

Mill’s advice is that we must keep learning, not accept what we are told, take seriously those who we disagree with, and through this process elevate our vision of life. It isn’t a joyless prescription for a puritan life. Instead, Mill is telling you to expand what you pay attention to.

Before there is creating and writing, there is reading and knowledge. You may or may not become a writer, published or otherwise, and even if you do, you may or may not do work to your satisfaction. Most of us die without writing a great novel, but we can all read Anna Karenina. We can all come to better understanding of Shakespeare and the other great writers. We can all make some progress with the best that has been thought and said.

Many people believe that literature is entertainment, a question of personal enjoyment, and they oppose this to the scholarly view of literature. They say that studying a book at school stopped them enjoying it. But that reflects poor schooling, or is the result of being a moody teenager. The more you study literature, the more you will enjoy it.

The true common reader is not the person who reads Jane Austen in the same manner that they read Agatha Christie or watch television. The true reader wants to see great work for themselves, to know what Jane Austen is in the way that the only way to know a river or a mountain is to go to it. The common reader wants to understand, not just experience.

I want to know, not just to enjoy; I believe that knowledge is a much greater form of enjoyment than uncritical reading. As Pound said, we study literature like biologists, and we go outside to learn botany by looking not at engravings but at trees.

This blog is an encouragement that you can be a literary biologist, you can learn to see literature for what it really is, to understand it better. You can learn, though immersion and critical reading, to find the living language in dead old books. You can acquire the historical knowledge and critical acumen to see the techniques of writing, to see the skull beneath the skin.

In fact, I think it is important that you do so. Literature became a very academic enterprise in the twentieth century. And many scholars continue to do great work. Without them, we wouldn’t have so much of the knowledge I write about here.

But it is readers who keep literature alive.

Pound again,—

There is one quality which unites all great and perdurable writers, you don’t NEED schools and colleges to keep ’em alive. Put them out of the curriculum, lay them in the dust of libraries, and once in every so often a chance reader, unsubsidized and unbribed, will dig them up again, put them in the light again, without asking favours.

That is what this blog is all about, unbribed readers who want to put great works into the light and truly see them.