Five And A Half Years Later, Bernstein Bites Back

Dear Ms. Laura Miller—

About five and a half years ago today, I read an article of yours in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Unlike the usual stuff of newspapers, which people read on Monday and by Sunday have moved on from, your article has had unusual staying power. In fact, it has remained with me, it has haunted me, until today—for six years of my total of 20, about a third of my lifetime! But today, today, I am going to exorcise your ghostly grip.

You see, in the article that you wrote so many years ago, you put forth a claim that has bothered me, a self-identifying reader (and sometimes, in my more self-indulgent and pompous moments, a self-proclaimed bibliophile), ever since. If I recall rightly, in that notorious article, you declare, “solitary pleasure is...the only real reason for reading.”

You eviscerate the straw men who expound reading’s defense in such terms as Daniel Adler’s high-handedly repulsive “we can learn only from our ‘betters’” (the authors of the great books of literature), or Arnold Weinstein’s laughably reductive “the bookshelf is as basic a resource for body and mind, especially the body and the mind in pain, as the medicine shelf.”

You tear down those scarecrows with good reason; no one in their right mind would stand up to defend the arguments as you present them.

But to write that pleasure is the only reason to read literature? That there is, ultimately, no social good to be derived from it? That Harold Bloom’s cantankerous—I think you use the word “imperious”—nature, that he is a grumpy old man, proves that the routine of reading does not make one a better person? To thus write off the whole endeavor as merely a pleasurable exercise seems wholly precipitous, even ignorant. (Though, of course, the fact that I’m writing you rather indignantly, and perhaps rather imperiously myself, having nurtured this grudge against your article for a third of my life, does seem to support your argument that, despite all of the books I’ve consumed for pleasure and, slightly less pleasurably, for my classes in high school and college, my basic character has not been done much good).

However, I want to say that my reading has, in fact, benefited society, or at least it has benefited you. I’m writing to you. I haven’t shown up at your house to duke it out, to resolve this difference between us with fist, or knife, or gun. I want to discuss this matter.

And perhaps it is this circumstance that offers a faint idea of the social good that reading does. It acculturates an individual to discourse. To read fiction is to be exposed to a polyphony of voices, to engage with a multitude of perspectives, to imaginatively interact with places and people beyond one’s lived experience. In short (to put it reductively and to make a reductive argument in response to what I see as your own), reading equips its practitioner with the tools of democracy: a sense of curiosity, an ability to imagine beyond one’s own isolated experience, and a respect for language and communication.

And I’m not alone in these crazy thoughts! The historian Benedict Anderson postulates that it was the shared sense of the world inspired by the common reading of newspapers that led to the social units that became the various American nations. And Richard Rorty, that intellectual juggernaut, makes a compelling, if slightly idealistic, case that novels, in eliciting sympathy from their readers for protagonists, play a key role in training individuals to exercise the sympathy necessary for solidarity in modern heterogeneous society.

Another of your compatriots at the Times wrote an article with a similar take away point about how novels and social rationales don’t mix, how they’re like oil and water, called “You Read Your Book and I’ll Read Mine.” Well, you can read your book and I can read mine, but I’ll be reading with the world. Ultimately, I don’t think you can read by yourself or that you can read just for pleasure. When you read, you’re engaging with the world whether you like it or not. Simply to enjoy a book you have to translate the words on the page into a world of your own. And, as certain people like to write, language is always social, a structure that man is forever bound up within. To read you have to enter a world of intersubjectivity, where your understanding and the novelist’s mix and meld. Even when you make your way through a literary land as fantastically removed as Middle Earth or Tlön, you’re still walking in the middle of social discourse. So, Ms. Miller, I don’t know how you can really read solitarily, but you can try if you like.

— Sanders Bernstein

—This column was a response to the column “The Great Books Workout” by Laura Miller, which appeared in the September 7, 2003 edition of the New York Times Sunday Book Review.

—Staff writer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu.