A Dash of Expectations

Why do you read novels? What do you think about while reading? How does your relationship with a book change over time? These, evidently, are matters of concern to scientists. The study queried 500 academics to help define the traits of characters in 200 Victorian novels. The results of this research indicate that literature both mirrors and shapes a culture’s ideals. Leaving aside a number of flaws in its methodology, I at first thought the study’s conclusion was rather obvious. Then I recalled a number of conversations I’ve had, or overheard, in which it was revealed how little most readers glean from a novel, and how little they want to glean.

photo credit: ttrentham

No marrow-sucker, the typical reader. Who in these harried times can spare the hours necessary to ponder such things as why a character chooses a particular course of action over another? Who, between American Idol and Dancing With The Stars, can string together enough consecutive thoughts on said character to wonder what said choice might mean? And who, indeed, might think, while sitting in traffic between cell phone conversations, how that character’s decision-making process might be brought to bear on some distant choices we will someday make right here in the real world?

Yet Oprah tells us to read. We read also, if we are feeling ambitious, for book clubs. Sometimes we luck out and a novel is adapted into a movie, so we can condense the many hours of reading and of nuanced storytelling into a tight little 2-hour film (3, if we’re feeling epic) for which we don’t even have to turn the pages. We study books in school, where we learn to neatly categorize heroes and villains and to identify irony and phalluses. Even younger, we learn from fairy tales a number of lessons in what is right and what isn’t.

To reconcile these two impulses–the impulse to skim that today’s media teaches us and the impulse to suck just the tiniest morsel of life’s marrow and thereby learn something from a decrepit old book–I suspect the typical reader reaches for the simplest literature available. Hence Harry Potter. Hence John Grisham and Dan Brown. Assuming that most of these oversimplified are simply remixes of better, more powerful stories, I do not begrudge these readers their books. There are other readers. There are better books. To each his own.

It took me some time to realize the long-term repercussions of settling for these diluted stories. I read in another study how a number of classic fairy tales are being censored or downright forgotten by parents. Little Red Riding Hood? Too graphic. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Not politically correct. The same goes for Rapunzel, and Cinderella, and even the tale of the poor, gormandized Gingerbread Man.

photo credit: Coffeelatte

This complicates matters. If we willingly bowdlerize (and thank you, Dr. Bowdler) the novels we read as adults, our tastes and temperaments change over time until what was palatable to us as children becomes far too bitter to pass on to the next generation. Eventually children will see the world from a perspective first blunted, then atrophied into solipsism. I shudder to think what they’ll read their kids at bedtime. If there are still books.

If they are very lucky, these children of the future won’t have any decisions to make, won’t face any challenges. They would be singularly ill-equipped for it. Protecting children from failure is not a model they will find anywhere in the real world, which they will confront long before parents are prepared for it. Exposing a very young person to things he or she won’t understand, fearsome things, even, is the whole point, I would think. So why are the Brothers Grimm no longer permitted their dark-edged tales? If we learn from the start that some things are not to be discussed, not even to be thought of, then how do we ever become capable of challenging ourselves?