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March 8, 2005
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 4
art 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Why We Read
Styles: This calls to mind what Virginia Woolf said in her book, The Second Common Reader. She suggested that if one wishes to get an idea of what it's like for a novelist to write a particular passage about a person, that person should sit down and try himself to write, and that only by learning how to write do we understand truly how to read.
Richard: Oh, I like it.
Styles: So you're suggesting that perhaps the learning how to write is not learned just to communicate with other people, but really to learn how other people have written in this process of exploration and discovering themselves in this world.
Richard: Oh yes, of course, and that is good, but that shouldn't be the end goal, to learn how other people have written, but rather to learn about yourself. Because the more skill you have of this, the more you can learn about yourself, which is your business, and the more you can learn--well, learning about yourself sounds like an egocentric thing. Oh, all of myself, let me explore my wonderful self.
I suppose it is practiced in this way in some sense, but that's not what I mean by it. After all, the ultimate business of our lives is making judgments, is determining what is worthy and what is unworthy. It is in effect choosing between good and evil.
Now, we can do this on the basis of all that has been suggested to us, as I did with the word "purely," when I wrote "purely theoretical considerations." Or we can do it--we hope, we imagine, we have been told--from within.
We can do it by making a series of judgments of our own, by asking the right questions, which is partly also phrasing the right questions. This is linguistic, by answering the questions, by phrasing the questions that arise from the answers, and therefore making judgments.
I forget who said it, Andre Gide, one of those French novelists: "We have this choice; we can either"?well, I think he puts it perhaps this way: "If we do not live as we think, then we are required to think as we live." And we live in a random and disorderly way. We live as responders, reactors to stimuli. So unless we take hold and make thinking the first thing, we are going to have to think in the very same way. And it seems to me that there is a kind of important human fulfillment in living in the first way.
You know, I've had students ask me, actually ask me--and by the way I think it's a very good sign when they do when we study matters like this, say perhaps as a result of reading an essay by Emerson--"Yes, I can see that it would be perhaps possible to get hold of your mind and to work it in an orderly fashion, and to think for yourself, and to decide whether or not judgments are yours or imposed upon you; I can see that you might do that, but what would be the point of it?"
They think quite honestly what would be the point of it. They say, "Look, I'm going to be an electrical engineer and I intend to work for such and such a firm, and I intend to have a house on the beach, and what would really be the point of this frankly quite onerous process? The end result of literacy? The process by which we learn to think for ourselves?"
I never answer the question. I always say, "I don't know. It's just an interesting possibility, isn't it?" Because I am confident that the person who asks the question will find some point in it sooner or later. But they are few and far between, and I think by and large our students don't even think to ask what that point is, because they are taught and we teach them, and this is through our pretense at literacy that we teach them this, that literacy is entirely pragmatic, that you read so that you can do something.
You read so that you can have some knowledge that you didn't have before. You read so that you will get on in your job. You read for any number of aims, which is why, for instance, all reading is measured by what is called "comprehension tests"--from my way of thinking, an absolutely irrelevant criterion.
Since Emerson is in mind, I've had an experience recently with a bunch of students reading Emerson.
Styles: What essay were they reading?
Richard: This was Self-Reliance, and they had never read it before. And furthermore, they had never read anything like it before, because it's a terribly dense piece. Now, there's no padding, there's no coasting, there's no description, there's no resting place. Every sentence follows, somehow, inexorably on every other, and the same is true of the paragraph.
However, we did read it very closely, and with great attention. And frankly, they were terribly impressed by it in some ways. But they admitted that it was hard to understand, very hard for them to understand, and so I admitted that it was hard to understand. That I had first read it 25 years ago and I found it hard to understand, and I read it again a year later and found it hard to understand, and I read it this year and I found it hard to understand.
I found it differently hard to understand, and if I should ever come to comprehension, if I could get in the 99 percentile on my comprehension of Emerson's essay, I would be terribly surprised indeed. Because a thoughtful piece of writing is endless; it continuously provokes. It is not my comprehension just now that is at issue; that is not its business.
Its business is something quite different from that. I will never understand it; furthermore, if I had waited, you see, as our schools traditionally do, if I had waited to reach the right reading level, then I would still be waiting and I will wait a long, long time. I see nothing wrong with young people, children, being baffled by a piece of reading; nothing wrong with it at all?fine.
Styles: Before we began, you suggested that when you read, you read things that you've read before. And you've just said that you have read and reread again and again Emerson's essay on Self-Reliance. You still do not comprehend it. It is my impression that you are going to read it again, and you're going to read it again and again and again. Why do you come back to it? What is it in his writing that would induce rereading, and why would anyone really want to reread it?
Richard: Well, I have to use a strange word, but I'm going to use it: joy. There is again and again in reading, say, something like Self-Reliance, that moment when suddenly you understand something that you never understood before. You see something in a way in which you've never seen it before, and there is joy in that.
You know, I'm convinced that?I think it's Aristotle in this case. I get those old Greeks mixed up, and you can be convinced that it was he who said that all men--he would have said "all people" if women had been invented in his time, but women are recent inventions--that all men by nature desire to know.
Now, it's very easy to look at the world around us and say, "Forget it, Aristotle, we see no sign of that." But I think any school teacher can see why Aristotle was right. Because I have seen it, you have seen it, in that moment in aclass--you don't know when it's going to happen, or maybe after class--when a student suddenly understands, but more than understands, knows that he understands something that he did not understand before.
There was a fresh unimaginable rush of joy that goes with this. And it is not only a pleasure--sometimes perhaps it's the pleasure, and I believe Aristotle was right.
Now in order to prevent people from wanting to know, we have to do a lot of things to them. To do them, I think, it is the business of our schools to inhibit this desire to know, partly because our schools are agencies of the government, and in the deepest sense, it's not really useful for our government.
And so we do tell each other and our students, "Look, this is all you need to know. You learn a little bit of this and learn a little bit of that, and learn these facts. Facts are very, very cheap and anybody can know them, so go ahead and know them, in order to prevent that kind of rush of joy which is in the long run subversive."
Richard Mitchell Interview, Pt. 5
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Posted by witnit at March 8, 2005 4:14 PM
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