Read, Read, Read as You Would But Try to Read the Best

I have another reason to like Virginia Woolf, certainly no reason to fear her, now that I have read The Idiosyncratic School of Reading And the guiding muse of Whim by Richard Hughes Gibson. Some highlights:

Woolf objected not just to the regulations, protocols, and lifetime reading plans that are the hallmarks of the Vigilant tradition. She rejected its fundamental assumption: that lay readers are a pitiable lot. Such readers, Vigilant treatises tell us, digest their reading poorly. Amid the profusion of print, they are at risk of feasting on trash without knowing that more wholesome classics are available. They are prone to wander off into their own thoughts when they really ought to be paying attention to the author’s. They skip around among books, often abandoning them when boredom sets in! (This scandalous practice had its own name in the Victorian period: “desultory reading.”) Lay readers, in short, desperately need professional guidance. Unsurprisingly, few vigilantes entertain the possibility that lay readers have habits or tastes worth preserving—or, even less, that they might have some lessons to offer the “pros.” 

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For Woolf, as for her father, reading should be a self-directed exercise, governed by our own tastes and filtered through our distinctive imaginations and life experiences. Our “loves” and “hates,” as she says toward the close of the essay, are inescapable aspects of our reaction to a work. We should not pretend otherwise. “[W]e cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy,” she writes, “without impoverishing it.” As the critic Maria DiBattista has argued, in these sentences Woolf comes as close to an “unqualified libertarian line […] as she ever does in insisting that no law or authority must be permitted to fetter freedom of reading.” 

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 Talk of “not squandering our powers” but “training them, exactly and powerfully” may have the ring of Vigilance, I recognize. Yet the actual exercises she recommends are not driven by hard and fast rules, as in Vigilant treatises. She urges her fellow readers to do some creative writing themselves to sharpen their attention to the techniques of masterful writers (“turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist—Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery”). She encourages her audience to think comparatively about authors writing in the same genre and authors working in different ones. (“The impact of poetry is so hard and direct for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself. What profound depths we visit then—how sudden and complete is our immersion.… The illusion of fiction [by contast] is gradual; its effects are prepared.”) What she describes are exercises in appreciation. She makes no promises that by doing such things we will sound more cultured at dinner parties, increase our reading speed, fix our character defects, or accomplish more at work. Rather, the goal is simply to “get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read.”