In reading the comments on Peter Blair's recent column on Jane Austen ("Austen's Power," April 19th), I was struck as I continually am by the difference in the way I read books compared to my peers. Some of those who commented cited the outdated gender roles evident in Austen's novels as a chief reason for why they disliked them. They argued that her books were irrelevant in our present cultural situation. But when students write such things, it seems that they don't enjoy reading at least not in any meaningful sense. If you read for the sake of seeing your own political views reflected back at to you, and not for the sake of enjoying the sublime, the beautiful and the purely entertaining, can you even be said to be reading at all?
Certainly, you have all the symptoms of a reader moving your eyes across the page, a downward glare but you are, in fact, merely dredging up material to verify your own dispositions. You are not reading in the classical sense without letting your own biases affect your apprehension. You are not open or receptive to the author's spell. When you listen to a Beethoven symphony, you presumably are not analyzing it to see if the string section is somehow espousing sexism or imperialism you just enjoy it. Why should books be any different? Obviously, literature is more susceptible to a political critique than music, but I don't believe that critique can supersede our appreciation of literature (although in most English departments it evidently has).
One of the classic flaws in any work of fiction is tendentiousness having too clear of a purpose, be it political or religious in design. A book shouldn't be overtly moralizing or didactic its message should naturally emerge through the progress of events and development of character. But tendentious reading is far more pernicious than tendentious writing, because it destroys our ability to extract the beauty and sublimity that do exist in such hyper-tendentious yet marvelous writers as Dostoevsky and St. Augustine.
I am sympathetic to Blair's argument that part of our affection for Austen is due to our longing for a more formal system of courtship than our present chaos can provide. But Blair is still if only for the purposes of his argument embracing the idea that what makes Austen worthwhile is her traditional values. Based on my admittedly limited acquaintance with her work, I think that what makes Austen valuable is precisely the fact that she portrays characters and situations for their own sake and without any tendentiousness whatsoever. She neither supports nor disavows patriarchy or Georgian manners and mores. She has no clear political design on the reader she simply observes acutely and makes fun of her characters', and mankind's, foibles.
While I recognize her genius, I myself am not a huge Austen fan. I prefer novels that have more to do with exciting external events or the meaning of life and death. This puts Proust and Austen somewhere outside of the penumbra of my attention, and Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy fully within it. But these are questions of taste I have no desire to de-canonize as estimable a writer as Austen, like many zealous feminist firebrands on our comments page evidently would. There is a curious blindness in their attitude, an inability to distinguish their own political preferences from aesthetic judgments. This is perhaps an understandable offense, given the pressing social concerns we face, but it is tragic when it poisons our appreciation of art.
Throughout this column, I've drawn in a spiritual sense on the literary criticism of Harold Bloom. Bloom is often derided and accused of being sexist, racist and what-have-you by those professors who favor replacing reading the best humanity has to offer with mediocre texts, selected purely on the basis of the author's political ideology or membership in an underrepresented group. But as Bloom puts it, we would not accept a chair with legs that fall off, regardless of who made it. And, as Oscar Wilde said, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written, or badly-written. That is all."
It would be refreshing if now and then we could strip away the lens of power relations and social good with which the academic world has distorted our vision and enter that perfectly useless world of pure art, where beauty is truth and truth is beauty. The joy of solitary reading is as innocent and politically inoffensive as a child playing in a sandbox, building castles for his or her own delight. It is freedom.
