Why Read: Selected Writings 2001 – 2021 by Will Self

Author:Will Self
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

How Should We Read?

How should we read? The S-word makes it sound, like it or not, like a moral injunction – deep, passionate and enthusiastic readers we may well be, there nonetheless remains something about the way we transform marks on a page or screen into images and ideas in the mind that leaves us feeling like failures. Modish neuroscience may provide at least some of the answers: the ability to read and write – unlike speech – isn’t hard-wired into the human mind-brain, but rather, such is our neural plasticity, that we’re constantly changing in our very essence so as to refine these skills. Perhaps this is why reading always feels a little like striving – unless we’ve mastered the facile trick of reading entirely for pleasure, a subject to which I’ll return.

So, there’s always this quality of endeavour about reading – and at the same time, in cognitive terms it’s hard work. When someone reading complex passages of prose – ones, say, that attempt to convey human lives in all their manifold sensuous and intellectual complexity – is placed in an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scanner, we can see on the machine’s visual display that almost all of their brain is lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. Not only that, but the parts of the brain employed when actually talking, walking or making love are illuminated by the very act of reading about talking, walking or making love.

Long before such data was available, the French literary critic René Girard argued that portrayal of characters’ behaviour and motivations in novels was just as valid a study for psychological theorists – now science seems to have borne him out. Fancifully, I imagine a reader in an MRI machine reading about a man reading . . . in an MRI machine – and I wonder how this mise en abyme might appear to the literary technicians of the future, and whether it could turn the ‘is’ into an ‘ought’, thereby telling us – at long last – how we should read. Because I have to confess: I no longer have that sense of security in my own methods that I once did – one which, in retrospect, I based on my empirical study of a single subject: myself.

Raised by bookish but undisciplined parents, I always felt I had just about the best introduction to reading imaginable: my American mother’s modish novels and zeitgeisty works on psychology mingling on the shelves with my English father’s English canonical tastes and his motley collection of philosophic texts (many of which came from my autodidactic grandfather’s own extensive library). And there were plenty of other books as well – acquired by my brothers or me at second-hand stores and flea markets. Nobody was remotely precious about these volumes: they were there to be read, not revered. And since my parents had also decreed – in order to inculcate us with their own bookish tendencies – that we could have no television, reading was pretty

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