Refusing to Read: A Hunger Strike of the Soul, a Vow of Intellectual Celibacy

In a recent Freshman Composition course, a student had a question about our first reading assignment, a short 8–9 page essay in our class text, The Best 2022 American Magazine Writing. I assumed she would ask where to buy the book (since the bookstore might be temporarily out of them), or what page it was on, or even what the title of the essay was (it was in the syllabus — but who reads those, right?). Instead, she asked me if she could find summaries of the readings on line. I explained that no, since this was an article that had been published in a magazine only last year (like all of our readings) it would probably be difficult to find a Spark Notes-type summary. However, as it was short and relatively easy to read, it would be far better to simply read the article so we could discuss it in class and she could write about it later.

The student made a disgruntled face and responded, “oh, I don’t do reading. Ever. Can I just get the audio book?” Sadly, since this was a magazine article, and not an entire novel, finding an audio version of the story was very unlikely. And while I’m not against audio books in theory, I think there’s something to be said for reading through the work yourself, underlining the words you’re unfamiliar with, seeing how the words add up to an individual style, and trying to make them all ‘sound’ in your own head. The student didn’t like this response, either, and said, “well, I’ll just ask someone else what it was about later.”

That comment enlightened me far more than the student ever intended, and in a sense, she was the teacher that day and I the willing, if baffled, student. Over the past twenty-odd years of teaching undergraduates in college, I’ve noticed that many students approach reading in a dramatically different way than I do. To these students, all readings are the same, be they novels, magazine articles, poems, short stories, plays, memoirs: it’s all “stories” to them, and they’re all just “about something.” In other words, books and articles are just a long-winded way to say something that could be expressed in a single sentence or two, which is its “meaning” or “summary.” The work itself has no meaning beyond what it boils down to, or what can comfortably fit into one of the four options (A-D) of a standardized test. And you can probably imagine why they’ve come to this conclusion after 12 years of ‘standardized’ schooling…

On another occasion, this time in a literature class for English majors, a student informed me that he doesn’t read the books in class because he was “aliterate,” meaning, he explained, “that I choose to get my information from alternative methods.” Again, the idea that each book we read offered nothing more than he could find in any other type of media, we were just going about it in the least comfortable, or most impractical way. I opened this up to the class, and we discussed why we read particular books, especially ones that are read over and over again across the centuries. What is the purpose of reading a book rather than simply reading about it? If the ‘summary’ of Romeo and Juliet is “kids: don’t fall in love too early,” or maybe “don’t take the advice of strange monks,” why read five acts of tragedy written in archaic iambic pentameter? After all, couldn’t we read any number of advice columns and glean the same basic moral?

What many of the student pointed out is what I truly believe myself, which is that reading (as its best) is not merely information. It’s not facts, it’s not data, and it’s not summaries and paraphrases. Cleanth Brooks, the great scholar of English Romantic poetry, wrote an extremely influential book called The Well-Wrought Urn in 1947. The book argues (as I do), that any work of art, but particular a poem, cannot be reduced to some sense of what it does, or what it means universally, for every reader. Rather, the experience of a poem, etc., is in the mind of each reader as they grapple with the text itself, and its unique combination of words, symbols, metaphors, and ideas. To summarize a poem is to remove what makes it art, and in effect, to write a work based on the poem in question, which is no longer the poem at all.

You could think about this with the example of Mona Lisa: we see her image everywhere, but it’s not really her…it’s coffee mug, t-shirt, and mouse pad reproductions of the painting. To truly understand the painting, and what makes it tick, we have to encounter it individually, say, in an art book, or even more ideally, in the flesh (but good luck getting to close to it in the Louvre). The reproduction (or summary) of da Vinci’s art gives us a fleeting impression of the whole, but is not what the artist painted, and might understandably make us shrug our shoulders at the painting and think, “what’s so big about that?” In truth, we’ll never know if we content ourselves with a paraphrase of the original work, which alone contains the mysterious combination of fact and fiction that makes it art.

As Brooks writes in Chapter 11 of his book, “The Heresy of Paraphase”, “the reader well may ask: is not not possible to frame a proposition, a statement, which will adequately represent the total meaning of a poem…Could not the poet, if he had chosen, have framed such a proposition? Cannot we as readers and critics frame such a proposition? The answer must be that the poet himself obviously did not — else he would not have had to write his poem” (206). In other words, if it’s so easy for us to reduce a poem to “what it means,” why didn’t the author himself provide the same service? The answer must be that they could have, if that’s all they intended to say. The better answer is that a poem or any work of art is more complex and mult-faceted than any one summary or paraphrase can boast. The point of reading, then, is to find new and less obvious meanings by reading carefully, actively, and attentively. In short, reading doesn’t yield a single answer that makes the book obsolete. On the contrary, the more we read, the less sure we are of what we’ve read, which makes us want to read it again, and makes the work (as a work of art) a brand new experience each time.

Or consider this scenario: when you feel like crap and just want to hide from the world, most of us have a go-to movie or show, one we’ve seen a dozen times; we curl up on the couch or in bed and watch the scenes unfold in a predictable and consoling manner. But why in the world should this be consoling? If you’ve seen a movie once, and know the plot, the characters, the outcome, why ever watch it again? What new information is there to be gleaned from such an exercise? The answer, of course, is that you’re no longer watching it for the plot. You don’t care about what happens because you already know. You’re watching it for the little details: the jokes, the character interactions, the music, the way the story reaches is satisfying conclusion. In short, re-watching becomes more about the story than the plot, and yes, there is a difference. Reading solely for information is reading for plot, and sadly, that’s as far as most people get when they rely on internet summaries via Spark Notes. Reading for story is something quite differently, and is really why we write books — and read books — rather than simply asking a classmate, “what’s it about?”

Jonathan Culler, in his succinct work about all things literary, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, explains that “Unlike poetry, which gets lost in translation, plot can be preserved in translation from one language or one medium to another: a silent film or a comic strip can have the same plot as a short story” (84). Plot, in essence, is how things come together, for example, a character travels to France and accidentally meets his long-lost brother, who coincidentally is up for the same job as he is. No matter how you tell (or draw) this plot, it has to follow the same basic beats. These are ‘facts’ of the story and cannot be removed or re-translated.

So how does plot contrast with story? As Culler continues, “plot is what gets shaped by narratives, as they present the same ‘story’ in different ways…The plot with three characters can be presented in narrative from the point of view of the suffering heroine, or the angry father, or the young man, or the external observer puzzled by these events, or an omniscient narrator who can describe each character’s innermost feelings…From this angle, the plot or story is the given and the discourse is the varied presentations of it” (85). So while you can summarize what happens, it’s much harder to summarize how it happens through character, narration, language, symbol, and style. The story, or discourse, is what makes a book worth reading, since plots by themselves are rarely all that interesting. Look at Shakespeare: he takes some of the silliest plots imaginable and makes them worth staging and reading ad infinitum. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about pairs of lovers who get lost in the woods and have a prank played on them by fairies so that they misplace their affections with one another. Oh — and a bad actor named ‘Bottom’ gets transformed into a donkey.

Why should we watch this play over and over again, and why do actors enjoy taking part in it when they already know the story? Quite simply, it’s how Shakespeare tells this story through his beautiful, comic, and sometimes intractable language. It’s how the characters respond to this ridiculous situation, and how they become human in spite of the cartoon scenario. A better example might be a stand-up comic who tells a joke that makes you die laughing when you hear them tell it, but when you try to tell it again, in your own words, and your own mannerisms, it falls utterly flat. So what was funny: the joke, or the performer? There’s a reason that we love certain comics even when we can’t entirely remember what they said on-stage. We just remember how much fun we had listening to them say it (whatever it was).

This leads directly back to my experience as a teacher, trying to persuade students majoring in, say, Nursing or Business, that reading books is an acceptable use of their time. Many of them will tell me, quite confidently despite their nineteen years of age, that “I’ll never use this stuff in real life,” or “this has zero relevance to my major.” But wouldn’t that be the same as telling someone you’ve met for the first time, “why bother shaking your hand, I’ll never even remember you in twenty years?” After all, why meet anyone if they’re not going to further your career or make you money? Even casual sex is just a tired old stereotype, a summary of a thousand other casual encounters, so why bother?

The answer, of course, is that someone you randomly meet could be your best friend for life, or even just an important person for this stage of your life. And sex…well, even a one-time fling might have enough ‘art’ in it to make you remember it for the rest of your life. The same as a book that you read for a class; it could change the way you think about yourself, the world, and your place in it. And who among us is such a prophet that we can see the future without having lived it, especially at nineteen?

We read books in college, especially in humanities courses, not just for information or answers on a test. The goal of reading is to make you encounter a text on its own terms and translate it into your own. Every generation reads old books for the first time, and that means that the book is brand new, offering a new perspective for a new audience in a time that has literally never existed. Reading Frankenstein in 2024 is a remarkably different experience than reading it in 1994, or even 1818, when it was first published. Not better, not worse, and certainly not negligible; with the benefit of hindsight, we can see what people too close to the literature couldn’t notice, and we have so many other readers to respond to as we read the book. Of course, this can also get in the way of reading a book — too many voices can sometimes tell us what to see, which veers close to paraphrase — but it also allows us to peer behind many doors we may have assumed were locked.

Isn’t it more exciting to read Frankenstein, with all its grotesque mother imagery (Victor has a dream where he’s embracing his mother’s corpse, for God’s sake!) in a post-Freudian world? Not that we have to read it on the therapist’s couch, but it’s a useful starting point that Mary Shelley’s initial readers didn’t have access to. On the same hand, it’s also convenient to place Frankenstein in the context of so many science fiction novels and films that were clearly inspired by it. Many stories have taken the ‘plot’ of Frankenstein and transformed it into new and exciting ‘stories.’ This would be like when an artist takes the general impression of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and transforms it into their own work, something that doesn’t aim to reproduce, but to reinterpret. After all, why just slap the same image on a coffee mug when (a poor summary) when you can make us see and experience the image (which we’ll never completely see for ourselves) in a new and exciting way?

At its best, reading is a mirror to the self. It’s not just about reading someone else’s words and regurgitating someone else’s story. It’s about finding your own words and your own story in someone else’s art. After all, none of us are nearly as unique as we claim, which is why things like books and movies work in the first place. Can’t we relate to the experiences of other human beings, especially when filtered through the artistic medium of story? Isn’t that why we read in the first place, to get lost in someone else’s experience?

But even the idea of escapism is a misnomer, since we never really lose ourselves; rather, we find ourselves by forgetting the shallow trappings of ego. When we really identify with a story or character, we’re merely recognizing some part of ourselves in that story, either through an ideal, an aspiration, or maybe even through a sense of disgust or disappointment. Your favorite works aren’t opportunities to climb into someone else’s mind and body; they’re a chance for you to reinterpret your own identity through someone else’s story and voice. Maybe the greatest works, then, are the ones that are easiest to climb into and run around in…or maybe they offer us the slimmest, best-lit mirrors so we can appreciate the sum total of who we are, and not just in bite-sized pieces?

So when students complain about reading, or tell me it’s not what they signed up for in college, I ask them to think about all the people alive at this moment in time (forget all that have ever lived!). Think of all those experiences and perspectives, in so many different countries, suffering so many vicissitudes of pain and joy and wonder. How can you be a single person and experience even the smallest fraction of that multitude? Our ‘I’ experience, rich as it is, is hopelessly narrow compared to the eyes and ears of our teeming humanity. So how can we approximate that experience if we can only live one life, as one person, constrained with all our fears, beliefs, and biases? The simple answer is art — and in this case, books. Through a book, you can live hundreds and thousands of lives, past and present, and glean the experiences and wisdom of so many different genders, and races, and professions. If you’re in college, where your goal is ostensibly to become more educated/enlightened, how could you pass this up? Especially when it’s dirt cheap, and indeed, basically free if you know where to look (ahem — your university library!).

While many students tell me they prefer to experience real life than read about it in “dead words,” I think that’s a false dichotomy. Who says you have to do one or the other? Indeed, the more you read, the better you can appreciate what you see in the outside world, since you’re looking through larger eyes than your own. Is it wrong to take a book along with you on your travels, so you can learn as two — or three, or ten — people? Similarly, if you read a book about China does this make travel to China obsolete? Of course not, you can’t possibly read enough about a country to experience what a single day there might illuminate. However, it’s also possible that a little context might help you see and experience things you might have ignored or misunderstood. Reading, then, is not just about wisdom but humility. If we think we’re all we need in the world, then yes, who needs books? But then who needs travel, relationships, love, or even money? Why not just gaze at our exalted image in the empty mirror like a modern-day Narcissus (too late — enter the internet!).

So this is my plea not to be scared of reading, or intimidated by how many books there are to read, how long some of them are, and all the different languages (and styles) they’re written in. Remember, they’re all written by human beings, of which you are one, and with a small amount of time and effort, you can learn to see yourself and your humanity in each one of them (even the ones you don’t like). Reading shouldn’t be a hobby or a vocation, any more than eating or laughing or falling love. It’s one of the essential and enriching aspects of life and the very basis of human civilization. Refusing to read is like taking a vow of celibacy and going on a hunger strike for no other reason than you once had a bad experience with food or love. Sure, you might occasionally meet an asshole on the road to love, and you will undoubtedly get an upset stomach now and then, but in the face of finding your soul mate or eating the perfect slice of pizza, these quibbles seem laughably small. Reading offers us even greater rewards and riches, and denying yourself this veritable feast of knowledge and companionship is almost an act of cruelty. Do yourself a favor, find a book and read the hell out of it…especially the ones your professor assigns you in class!