A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York
Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie's essay, "Does
Great Literature Make Us Better?" which asserts that the widely
held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In
response, Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with "Reading Literature
Makes Us Smarter and Nicer." Her argument is that "deep
reading," the kind of reading great literature requires, is a
distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to
empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us "smarter
and nicer," among other things. Yet these essays aren't so much
coming to different conclusions as considering different questions.
To advance her
thesis, Paul cites studies by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York
University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of
cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. Taken together,
their findings suggest that those "who often read fiction appear
to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and
view the world from their perspective." It's the kind of thing
writer Joyce Carol Oates is talking about when she says, "Reading
is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly,
into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
Oatley and Mar's
conclusions are supported, Paul argues, by recent studies in
neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science. This research shows
that "deep reading -- slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail
and emotional and moral complexity -- is a distinctive experience,"
a kind of reading that differs in kind and quality from "the
mere decoding of words" that constitutes a good deal of what
passes for reading today, particularly for too many of our students
in too many of our schools (as I have previously written about here).
Paul concludes her
essay with a reference to the literary critic Frank Kermode, who
famously distinguishes between "carnal reading" --
characterized by the hurried, utilitarian information processing that
constitutes the bulk of our daily reading diet -- and "spiritual
reading," reading done with focused attention for pleasure,
reflection, analysis, and growth. It is in this distinction that we
find the real difference between the warring factions in what might
be a chicken-or-egg scenario: Does great literature make people
better, or are good people drawn to reading great literature?
Currie is asking
whether reading great literature makes readers more moral -- a topic
taken up by Aristotle in Poetics (which makes an ethical apology for
literature). Currie cites as counter-evidence the well-read, highly
cultured Nazis. The problem with this (aside from falling into the
trap of Godwin's Law) is that the Nazis were, in fact, acting in
strict conformity to the dictates of a moral code, albeit the
perverse code of the Third Reich. But Paul examines the connection of
great literature not to our moral selves, but to our spiritual
selves.
Reading is one of
the few distinctively human activities that set us apart from the
rest of the animal kingdom. As many scholars have noted, and Paul too
mentions in her piece, reading, unlike spoken language, does not come
naturally to human beings. It must be taught. Because it goes beyond
mere biology, there is something profoundly spiritual -- however one
understands that word -- about the human ability, and impulse, to
read. In fact, even the various senses in which we use the word
captures this: to "read" means not only to decipher a given
and learned set of symbols in a mechanistic way, but it also suggests
that very human act of finding meaning, of "interpreting"
in the sense of "reading" a person or situation. To read in
this sense might be considered one of the most spiritual of all human
activities.
It is "spiritual
reading" -- not merely decoding -- that unleashes the power that
good literature has to reach into our souls and, in so doing, draw
and connect us to others. This is why the way we read can be even
more important than what we read. In fact, reading good literature
won't make a reader a better person any more than sitting in a
church, synagogue or mosque will. But reading good books well just
might.
As Eugene H.
Peterson explains in Eat this Book, "Reading is an immense gift,
but only if the words are assimilated, taken into the soul -- eaten,
chewed, gnawed, received in unhurried delight." Peterson
describes this ancient art of lectio divina, or spiritual reading, as
"reading that enters our souls as food enters our stomachs,
spreads through our blood, and becomes ... love and wisdom."
More than the books themselves, it is the skills and the desire to
read in this way which comprise the essential gift we must give our
students and ourselves. But this won't happen by way of nature or by
accident.
Maryanne Wolf,
director of the Center for Reading and Language Research and author
of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain,
has studied "deep reading" in the context of the science of
the brain. She describes the fragility of the brain's ability to read
with the kind of sustained attention that allows literature to wield
its shaping power over us:
The act of going
beyond the text to analyze, infer and think new thoughts is the
product of years of formation. It takes time, both in milliseconds
and years, and effort to learn to read with deep, expanding
comprehension and to execute all these processes as an adult expert
reader. ... Because we literally and physiologically can read in
multiple ways, how we read--and what we absorb from our reading --
will be influenced by both the content of our reading and the medium
we use.
The power of
"spiritual reading" is its ability to transcend the
immediacy of the material, the moment, or even the moral choice at
hand. This isn't the sort of phenomenon that lends itself to the
quantifiable data Currie seeks, although Paul demonstrates is
possible, to measure. Even so, such reading doesn't make us better so
much as it makes us human.