Thought Required; Pants Optional.

Tag: Writing

  • The Struggle Is Where the Life Is: On Creativity and Generative AI

    The Struggle Is Where the Life Is: On Creativity and Generative AI

    Last night my wife and I watched the hour-long PBS documentary Huz: Drawn to Life, about the life and work of Ron Husband, the first Black animator for Disney Studios who did work on such Disney classics as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.[1] It’s fascinating, and if you are able to watch it where you are I highly recommend it. Even if—like me—you are none too impressed with the cash-bloated IP warehouse that Disney has become, Husband’s story is inspiring as that of a life spent in the pursuit of creativity.

    Huz focuses on Husband’s voluminous sketchbooks, which, we discover, he takes literally everywhere—so much so that his wife, LaVonne, says on camera that she isn’t worried about him taking up with other women because they would have to compete with his sketchbook. Husband is always drawing, always rendering episodes from his life, from his imagination, not as a nervous habit like people who doodle on the margins of their meeting notes but as constant, relentless practice. Husband says, “I look at my sketchbooks as practice, practice, practice. It’s practice won’t make you perfect. Practice just makes you better, and I wanna get better.”

    From Ron Husband’s sketchbooks. Image from PBS.

    It’s worth thinking about that Husband is saying these words as a retired legendary Disney animator. If anyone has the right to rest on their laurels and just go fishing, it’s Ron Husband. But that isn’t how he sees himself or how he lives his life. He is still drawing, still trying to “get better.” Much like Pablo Casals, the world-famous cellist who, when asked at the age of 81 in 1957 why he still practices cello four to five hours a day, responded, “Because I think I am making progress.” Or like the Ukiyo-e master Hokusai, quoted in Huz as saying,

    From the age of 16, I had a mania for drawing all shapes of things.

    When I was 50, I had published a universe of designs, but all I had done before the age of 70 is not even worth bothering about.

    At 75, I have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, of birds, fish, and insects.

    When I am 80, you will see real progress.

    At 90, I shall cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself.

    And at 110, everything I create, a dot, a line will jump to life as never before.[2]

    What is it like to live this way, devoted to a lifetime of practice, not in the futile search for perfection but instead in search of patient improvement? Obviously it’s not for the success and accolades, not really; Husband, Casals, Hokusai had already received all of these things in their old age. Husband gives us a clue to the motivation in another part of Huz:

    There’s a line in Chariots of Fire when Eric’s little sister asked him, you know, “Why do you run?”

    He runs all the time and he says, “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.”

    And when I draw I feel God’s pleasure.

    Ron Husband at work.

    When Husband says that he “feels God’s pleasure” when he draws, I know just a little about what he is talking about. Not that I can draw. Not in the least. For me I “feel God’s pleasure”—that indefinable feeling one gets when one’s lonely mental striving breaks open something important about the world—in the constant struggle with words and ideas. I feel it when I write something especially apt. I feel it when, in my day job, I write a legal argument that is not only convincing and accurately states what the law is, but is also (to my ear) well-put to boot.[3] I feel it when reading also—especially when I am reading a sentence or paragraph in a language other than English (something I challenge myself to do from time to time) and the sense of a passage previously unclear to me snaps into clear focus, illuminating not only what the author is saying but also the language itself.

    I am not as good at what I do as Ron Husband is at drawing and animating. There’s no point in my pretending otherwise. Yet this indescribable feeling of rightness, of sheer pleasure, still drives me and still makes what I do worthwhile to me, regardless of whether anyone reads my writing or whether our firm wins its case.

    Writing and reading are not always sheer pleasure for me, of course. Sometimes they are drudgery; sometimes they are rushed, dashed off in order to meet a deadline, purely utilitarian, put out in a moment and forgotten. Sometimes they are an intensely uncomfortable struggle, like performing hand surgery on yourself with your other, non-dominant hand. But the moments, however rare, of “feeling God’s pleasure” remind me that the struggle is worthwhile. It’s worthwhile even if it yields me no other reward or public acclaim. At those times I know, in a way I know nothing else, that I have wrested words from the mute silence that reigned before the birth of humanity and that which will reign after we are all long dead, and in doing so, I have, however infinitesimally, pushed back the horizons of ignorance and hatred. I suspect that a similar knowledge drives other creative types also.

    Others have written about the creative process more memorably than I have. Nothing I am saying is particularly original. I write about it here because, in watching Huz, I was overwhelmed by the thought: Husband’s life of creativity, of devotion to the struggle with a recalcitrant, never-to-be-mastered practice, is what our AI tech overlords want to take away from us.

    The “promise” of generative AI—if “promise” is even the right word here—is that anyone with a decent internet connection can, by writing a quick prompt or series of prompts, generate an essay or image—possibly even a novel, or a whole film. Of course, it manages this feat by ransacking the near-entirety of the written word and large swaths of digitally available images and video without the consent of, or compensation to, its creators, and runs it through massive computer arrays that devour electricity and (ever-scarcening) water. But hey, content, in mere seconds!

    There are so many legitimate criticisms of generative AI that I won’t even try to rehearse them all here. I will just limit myself to this one point: generative AI’s advocates look at a life like Ron Husband’s and seem to be saying, what a waste of time and energy! Wouldn’t it have been better to let computers do all of that drawing, in a mere fraction of the time, so that humans like Ron Husband could have spent their time doing something else?

    I can’t speak for Ron Husband, but I can say for myself that even the implication that the creative part of my life is just a time sink that keeps me from lavishing attention on “something else” bespeaks an utterly impoverished view of what makes my being alive worthwhile. If anything, the truth of the matter is that things are exactly the other way around: those moments of creativity justify, for me, the dismal drudgery of commuting, paying bills, and feeding the meat puppet I inhabit three times a day in a way that doesn’t make daily life even harder than it already is.

    Rainer Maria Rilke knew a thing or two about the creative life. Read his Letters to a Young Poet sometime if you haven’t already.

    After all, what is this “something else” upon which I am supposed to be lavishing all of this extra time? Buying and eating yet another new flavor of Oreo cookies? Watching one of the eighty-seven new shows Netflix dropped last week?[4] At best, I guess the answer is “spending time with loved ones,” but then, what are we supposed to spend our quality time doing? If, with each passing day, I shrink a little bit more into something resembling a null (and hence fungible) site of sheer consumption, what do I have to offer my loved ones in this “quality time” anyway? I think of family gatherings friends have told me about where all anyone has to talk about are the shows they are watching or how much the things they have bought cost.

    Of course, the real answer to the question “what should you be doing with the time AI saves you?” that the billionaire overlords have in mind is “creating more economic value for us, your billionaire overlords.” It used to take you a week to write a meaningless report for your seven managers—now you can do a couple of those in a day, leaving you more time to make… more such reports, as many as you can before you are replaced by someone who will make the same reports for less pay. (Or the machine you used to make all those reports learns how to make them itself, so your superiors don’t have to pay anyone anymore.) Take your pay, use it to get credit, then spend more than you earn on consumer goods and housing, creating even more economic value for investors. (Because for decades now, the U.S. economy, and the value of its dollar as the world’s reserve currency, have been propped up, not by making anything, but instead by creating more household debt.) And while you run around, your electronic devices and those around you surveil you and your consumer choices, creating yet another market for your surveillance data.

    It’s hard to live in our current world without contributing to the vast upward-wealth-transfer machine our current economic reality has created. I won’t offer you any easy escape route here.[5] What I can say, though, is that you can reclaim the humanity of a life like Ron Husband’s—one in which you struggle with something larger than you are. Set aside some time. Steal it if you have to. Pick up a pencil and a sketchbook. Practice a musical instrument. Start learning a foreign language, or improve one you already know a little bit. Read a book you think will be difficult to understand. Or something else entirely. It will be frustrating, even painful, at times. You will feel stupid, bewildered, and confused. That’s fine. Stick with it. And if it feels like it is coming too easily—slow down! You will probably not achieve mastery, but as the masterful artists I have referenced here teach us, complete mastery is illusory. Each achievement, each “level unlocked,” just opens up new horizons you have not yet reached and may ultimately never reach.

    Again: this is fine. More than fine, actually: this is what feels like to be alive as a human on Earth. Trust that, somewhere in the struggle, there will be moments where you make or do something that surprises you, or where something makes sense in a way it didn’t before. When this happens, savor it; this is why you are doing any of it. This is why you are here. Share what you do with people—share it on the Internet, even!—but do not expect for a moment that any satisfaction you get from others’ reception of it will ever exceed that flash of satisfaction you feel when things fall into place. Because that is what “feeling God’s pleasure” is like.

    [1] Full disclosure: we were directed to this documentary because we are friends with Yehudah Husband, Ron Husband’s son, who also appears in it speaking about his father.

    [2] I am unable to verify the actual provenance or accuracy of this quote, which comes directly from the transcript of Huz. Similar versions of this float around the Internet, some with different ages listed. As the Quote Investigator site has (or should have) taught us all, quotations and their attribution have a mysterious life of their own.

    [3] In my day job I work as a paralegal and office manager for a consumer advocate attorney. I draft all sorts of legal pleadings that the attorney then revises and files. Once in a great while my writing makes it into the public record of a lawsuit largely unaltered, but never with my name attached to it. It provides a constant lesson in humility.

    [4] I need to clarify here that I love Oreo cookies and watch my fair share of television. Life can and should afford a certain quantum of passive consumption, mindless or otherwise. But a good life cannot just be that.

    [5] Generally, anyone trying to sell you on such an escape route—especially Internet “influencers”—is trying to grift you, anyway.

  • In a Bad Romance: Gustav Mahler and Psychoanalytic Biography

    In a Bad Romance: Gustav Mahler and Psychoanalytic Biography

    Feder, Stuart. Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

    Gustav Mahler’s music has left subsequent generations grasping for handles to grab in order to understand it. It abounds in contradictions—lush sensuousness alongside loud cacophony, vast symphonic themes punctuated by cow bells and musical kitsch (klezmer, military band music). It is extraordinarily dramatic and unique, with a sound that borrows widely from late Romantics such as Bruckner and Wagner and at the same time little resembles anyone who came before him.

    It is unsurprising, then, that many have looked to Mahler’s biography to gain traction on the immensity of the music. The biographical route yields a great deal of information; Mahler spent a long career in public life as an orchestra conductor, and both his professional and private lives are well documented. Memoirs of those who knew Mahler at varying periods of his life also abound, and in recent years Henry Louis de la Grange wrote a massive, all-encompassing multivolume academic biography.

    Faced with the sheer profusion of biographical work on Mahler that already exists, other biographers are faced with the choice of reinventing the wheel or organizing a biographical study around a specific focus. Stuart Feder’s Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis follows the latter course. Feder ostensibly organizes his biography around certain “crises” in Mahler’s life. Feder’s real aim, however, is to apply Freudian psychoanalysis to Mahler and his work, and especially to Mahler’s marriage to Alma (Schindler) Mahler-Werfel, as well as to examine the (tenuous) relationship between Mahler and Freud himself.

    The results of Feder’s study are convincing enough, given the purposes that animate it. Feder doesn’t, however, provide much insight into Mahler’s artwork, with a few exceptions (more on that below). In order to get to his real area of biographical interest—Mahler’s courtship of, and marriage to, Alma, in the last eleven years of his life—Feder is obligated to pass over the first four decades of Mahler’s life and career in spectacularly cursory fashion. Bare numbers of pages tell the tale. The book, exclusive of acknowledgements, indices, and the like, is 315 pages. It treats Mahler’s entire life prior to meeting Alma—years in which he wrote the Wunderhorn songs and his first four symphonies—in the first 91 pages. Many of those 91 pages are spent stage-setting Mahler’s first meeting Alma.

    As the book’s narrative proceeds, the focus on Mahler’s marriage—and the now-infamous role Alma played in it—becomes virtually exclusive. In some of the best researched and most vivid sections of the book, Feder dissects Alma’s famous affair with Walter Gropius and its effects on Mahler, documenting how, contrary to Alma’s later vagueness on the subject, the affair continued for the remainder of Mahler’s life and after his death with the active support and assistance of Alma’s mother, Anna Moll. Indeed, in the last quarter of the book Mahler himself, ailing and heartbroken, recedes largely into the background as Feder takes obvious jouissance in detailing the perfidy of Alma and of Anna Moll. In Feder’s account Anna is especially treacherous, living vicariously through Alma’s sexual exploits while at the same time hiding them from Mahler and acting as a maternal figure to him. (Anna and her husband Carl, the Epilogue tells us, become raving antisemites; Carl, a supporter of Hitler and National Socialism, committed suicide in April 1945 as the Red Army neared Vienna.)[1]

    The obvious climax of the book is Mahler’s one and only four-hour-long walking conversation with Sigmund Freud in 1910. The book foreshadows this meeting at some length, and yet as a narrative climax it is underwhelming. Mahler, himself skeptical of psychoanalysis, only agreed to talk to Freud during the personal crisis induced by the Alma-Gropius affair. As it turns out, very little is known about the substance of their conversation in this meeting or of its ultimate effect on Mahler, but if you want a fairly comprehensive inventory of what is known about it, this book has it. There are no known notes from Freud of this conversation, and he only alluded to it briefly on a couple of occasions long after Mahler’s death. It is far too much to say that Freud “psychoanalyzed” Mahler in the strict sense; that isn’t something one does in a single four-hour walk around town, not even if one happens to be Freud. In effect, Feder’s book is an attempt to reconstruct what Freud might have concluded about Mahler had Freud had the chance to analyze him at proper length. Despite the paucity of the evidence, Feder nevertheless claims that Freud’s one meeting with Mahler yielded him significant therapeutic benefits—a claim I sincerely doubt.

    Regardless of whether psychoanalysis benefited Mahler in the last year of his life or not, Feder’s psychoanalytic reconstruction provides only scant insight into Mahler the artist. A lot of people endure, as Mahler did, a great deal of childhood trauma only to end up in bad marriages. Not all of them achieve fame in their own lifetime and leave behind a wildly idiosyncratic and hugely influential legacy of artworks. Feder does have very interesting observations about Mahler’s youthful work Das klagende Lied, and the pages he devotes to Das Lied von der Erde, especially to the conclusion of the final song, “Der Abschied,” are possibly the best part of the book. Feder does discuss Mahler’s incomplete sketches of the Tenth Symphony at some length, drafted as they were at the height of his marital crisis, but he is as much, if not more, interested in them for Mahler’s marginalia about Alma and his own state of mind as he is in their music. The remainder of Mahler’s music gets only brief and relatively superficial discussion. The premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910, happening as it did at the height of the Alma-Gropius crisis, gets far shorter shrift than it deserves, given the role it played in Mahler’s career as a public figure as well as that symphony’s role in the social and political life of pre-World-War-I Central Europe. That story is told better elsewhere.[2]

    The effect of Feder’s chosen focus on Mahler’s family life becomes almost stifling as the book nears its end. No doubt as Mahler’s life ended he was, personally, reduced to a pathetic, almost childlike state by his ill health and the unresolved tension of his marriage. How to square this reality with Mahler’s artworks and his public-facing life is hard to resolve, and this book doesn’t really accomplish it. If anything, I came away from this book feeling like I knew less about how the various aspects of Mahler hang together, if in fact they hang together at all. Perhaps this book reminds us that there are simply limits to what biography can teach us about artistic creation.[3]

    If you want an account of the marriage of Gustav and Alma Mahler that puts it into the context of their broader family life, this is your book. In fact, this could be the best single study of that subject available. If you have a wider interest in Mahler’s life in the light of his art and its significance, though, this book is bound to be disappointing.

    [1] Feder is remarkably unsympathetic, in my opinion, to Alma Mahler-Werfel in this book. Granted, she comes off badly in the detailed account of her affair with Gropius. In her defense, she married Mahler when she was twenty (he was forty), and what person makes their best decisions in their twenties? Despite Feder’s best efforts, I see the Alma that emerges from his pages as someone who was trying to live life on her own terms in an era when women had vanishingly narrow options other than just finding a man to marry and having his children. Her relationship with Mahler, and with his legacy after his death, was, to put it generously, complicated, but on the whole Alma deserves better than simple high-minded opprobrium. For a feminist reclamation of Alma’s life, see Haste, Cate, Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler (New York: Basic Books, 2019).

    By contrast, Anna Moll sounds pretty terrible no matter how you slice it.

    [2] Karen Painter’s work on the Eighth Symphony is especially enlightening; see her “The Aesthetics of Mass Culture: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and Its Legacy,” 127-157 of Painter, Karen, ed., Mahler and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

    [3] The most famous single discussion of Mahler’s music that largely brackets the details of his biography has to be Theodor Adorno’s 1960 Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Edmund Jephcott, English translation, University of Chicago Press, 1996). Interestingly, Feder’s book is the only one on Mahler I know of written after 1996 in English that doesn’t at least mention Adorno or his book even once.

  • Of Copies and Exemplars

    Of Copies and Exemplars

    I am currently feeling under the weather in a way that has me waking up at 3 am feeling slightly feverish. Sometimes my febrile state bubbles long-standing thoughts up to the surface. At 3 am this morning, it was this:

    English seems to be an outlier in the European languages in the way it refers to a physically reproduced impression of a book.

    The common word for an individual impression of a book in English is “copy”: “The book sold one million copies”; “I bought two copies of the book, one for me and one for a friend”; and so on. 

    Many European languages, though, use a different word for an individual instance of a book. For instance:

    French: exemplaire

    German: Exemplar

    Spanish: ejemplar

    Portuguese: exemplar

    Now, all of these languages also have a word for “copy” (Fr. “copie”; Gr. “Kopie”; Sp. “copia”; Pr. “”cópia”). It’s just that the word is not used, or exclusively used, to refer to printed books. The dictionary of the Real Academia Española attests to the use of “copia” to refer to individual printed books (although it’s only the ninth of ten definitions!) and I think Italian may use its word “copia” this way also. But French and German, to my knowledge, almost never refer to a printed book as a “copie” or “Kopie” and almost always as an “exemplaire” or “Exemplar.”

    In all of these languages, the cognates for “copy” connote an object that endeavors to reproduce as faithfully as possible all of the visible properties of an object. So, for instance, a copy of a painting in French would be a “copie.” Copies made by a Xerox machine would in German be a “Photokopie.” And so on. The implication is, I suppose, that typeset books aren’t “copies” of an author’s original manuscript in this sense; they don’t exactly reproduce the manuscript’s pagination, handwriting or typeface, etc. The word for “copy” in these languages also carries the negative connotations that “copy” in English sometimes carries, implying something fake, phony, knocked off, not as good as the genuine article. 

    The “exemplar” words in these languages do not, however, carry any of these negative connotations of phoniness. Their semantic range is limited to describing individuals of a  similar or like kind. Individual copies of a printed book are obviously as nearly identical to one another as can be achieved, and so the individuals are “exemplaires,” “Exemplare,” etc. These words are also used to describe individuals in a species of animals, which obviously differ among themselves but have common species-related characteristics. In English, we tend to use the word “specimen” for this, if we use a specific word at all. 

    As far as I can tell, the European languages refer to manually produced (not printed) instances of a book or other writing as “copies.” So books produced before the advent of the printing press, copied by hand by scribes, could be referred to as “copies,” although modern usage may also refer to them as “exemplars.” Manuscript copies of a book or writing done by an author would definitely be referred to as “copies,” as they would be in English. Referring to the individual instances of a book as “exemplars” appears to postdate the advent of the printing press in Europe. 

    Printing press, 19th-century illustration. The printing press changed the course of history–did it also change the course of how Europeans talk about books?

    In English, however, these distinctions which European languages use different words to track all get subsumed under the wide semantic umbrella of the single word “copy.” Manuscripts of ancient books are “copies”; forged artworks are “copies”; individual bound volumes of Dan Brown novels for sale at the airport are “copies.”

    English of course has its own word “exemplar,” but it’s extremely rare or odd to hear it applied to individual books. In common parlance it is most often applied to people, not animals or things. It means something more like “ideal,” “paragon,” or “role model”: not just a copy, not even just an example, but an instance of something or someone so characteristic, so perfect in its kind, that it takes on a special status. An exemplary status! To my knowledge, the European languages don’t commonly use any cognate of “exemplar” to describe such a thing or person. (Littré’s major dictionary of French usage cites 16th- and 17th-century uses of “exemplaire” as a noun in this sense. Le Dictionnaire Robert gives this sense as a second separate meaning of “exemplaire” as an adjective with meanings similar to “exemplary” in English, but includes no substantival use of “exemplaire” in this sense.)

    Littré’s first definition of “exemplaire”: “Model to follow.” As Louis-Ferdinand Céline once said, “Littre said it, and he is never mistaken.” (Céline’s remark is ironic, of course, but he has forgotten more about 17th-century French usage than I will ever know.)

    There is one minor, but telling, exception to this. In Spanish and Italian, and possibly in some other languages, their cognate word for “exemplar” can be used to refer to a story or other example which conveys a moral or a warning to the reader or hearer. The Novelas ejemplares of Miguel de Cervantes use “ejemplar” in this sense. English has its own word for this, “exemplum,” which is quite rare and is derived directly from Latin. We do have shades of this meaning from other words and expressions in English: “exemplary punishment,” “making an example of someone.” From the 17th century onwards German used the word “Exempel” for this, although my understanding is that over the centuries this meaning, to the extent that it is still there, has become mostly absorbed into the more common German word for “example,” “Beispiel.”

    Fra Angelico, The Crucifixion. In the Roman world, crucifixion would have been a common form of exemplary punishment. The Latin term “exemplum” sometimes carries the sense of “warning” or “punishment,” although most often it means a “sample,” “imitation,” or “image.”

    “Exemplar” in English also has a long-standing technical meaning in philosophy and theology to refer to an “idea” or “ideal object.” “Exemplarism” refers to a conception in medieval Christian philosophy whereby God creates and manages the world by means of eternal archetypal ideas in the divine intellect—exemplars—that are part of the divine nature. It’s also sometimes used to describe the theory of atonement from Peter Abelard through Protestantism in which Christ is sent to the world as an example to humankind, rather than as a substitutionary sacrifice. In the current philosophical world, dominated by work in the English language and only dimly aware of history, exemplarism is used by Linda Zagzebski and others to describe a moral theory in which the following of moral examples and imitation of exemplary persons can furnish a complete ethical theory. Since philosophy and theology are relatively transnational (and also somewhat insular) pursuits, this use of “exemplar” and “exemplarism” persists in philosophy, theology, and history written in the European languages. But this usage is only tangentially related to the wider usages  of “exemplar” and its cognates to refer to books and moral examples. 

    André de Muralt’s book in which he recasts Husserlian phenomenology along the lines of Hegelian dialectic. He reads Husserl as advocating for a sort of “exemplarism,” as the subtitle makes clear.

    What does all this linguistic and conceptual history mean? I haven’t been able to do the really deep dive into etymology required to tease out all of the relevant history. But at a glance it appears to me that sometime around the advent of mechanical reproduction of books in Europe, the languages on the continent responded to an unspecified pressure to distinguish printed books from “copies.” Perhaps it was to avoid the negative connotations of phoniness or untrustworthiness inherent in mere “copies.” For whatever reason, English did not respond to this linguistic pressure. The usage and development of its word “exemplar” trotted off in its own direction largely unknown on the continent, only intersecting occasionally in technical usage in the recondite precincts of international philosophy and theology. 

    I don’t know all of the European languages, and I don’t know the ones I know as well as I would like! If you know and speak a language of European origin and have read this far, what is your experience with this cluster of words for talking about books? Do you know any of the etymological and historical links missing from my account? Have I misstated relevant facts? Let me know in the comments!

  • Two Strategies for Reading Fiction

    Two Strategies for Reading Fiction

    My latest reading project has been completing the fiction of Jane Austen. In order to organize my thoughts about Austen’s works themselves, I found myself needing to clarify, as a sort of preparatory exercise, my thinking on two different, but interrelated, strategies of reading. If you are interested in theory or abstraction, may you find this helpful or at least of mild interest. If you aren’t, expect some writing about Jane Austen in the coming weeks.

    Although it’s probably an oversimplification, I often entertain in my own thinking a distinction between two strategies of reading fiction. This distinction helps me make sense of not only my own reading, but also the proliferation of discussion of it in our times.

    The first such strategy I call reading as a technology of identity consolidation. This strategy of reading centers upon the reader’s wants, desires, wishes, social location, and agency. The questions to which it seeks answers in fiction center partly on satisfaction—Am I enjoying the experience of reading this book? Do I like the characters? Do I identify with them? Do I find them “relatable”? Does the work help me to confront, or perhaps to escape, aspects of my own reality I find oppressive? Do I think the author is someone I might like? Some of what this strategy seeks to get out of fiction, though, can involve personal aspiration or improvement: Does this book provide role models to help me shape and direct my ambitions? Is the author telling a story that, for political or ideological reasons, I think needs to be told to a wider audience? Is the author exploring some aspect of identity that is underrepresented in fiction, and doing so in a way that supports ideals of dignity and increased understanding?

    The common thread running through this diverse set of questions and expectations is, I believe, a singular preoccupation: How can fiction help me be the sort of person I should be, by helping me figure out who I really am, how I should act, what I should do, what I should believe? In other words, its preoccupation is the reader’s sense of their own identity, and the critical touchstone it recommends is the extent to which a book helps or does not help achieve that goal. (Also, by implication, it can evaluate books based on the extent to which the book or its author are compatible with the sorts of political or moral aspirations we should have, which lends this attitude towards a certain censoriousness about books that is no doubt familiar to anyone reading this on the Internet in 2025.)

    I call this sort of reading a technology because, on this view, the work of fiction is a sort of tool or device the reader uses to achieve other goals that go beyond the work of fiction itself. What’s more, reading fiction is not even the sole means to achieve those goals; other people who aren’t devoted to reading achieve them by watching movies or television, chatting up strangers on the Internet, backpacking across the American West, or some other thing. Perhaps reading fiction is the best way to figure out who you are and who you want to be, or at least has certain advantages over other ways[1], but it isn’t the only way.

    Although the most recent public site where this strategy of reading is on full view is undoubtedly #BookTok and its related social media communities, the strategy of reading as a technology of identity consolidation is by no means new. The explosion of the novel as a popular literary form in the 18th century in Europe, and its appeal to young, impressionable people living through the upheavals of the crumbling of absolute monarchy, Sturm und Drang pre-Romanticism in culture, and a general transformation in how the world appeared to intellectuals[2], led to a sense of moral panic not dissimilar to those that swept post-World-War-II America. When novelists of the 19th century incorporated the pitfalls of this kind of subjective investment in reading fiction within fiction itself—Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary are two salient examples—they were already taking place against the backdrop of a social debate with a long history. By the mid-20th century the cultural place of the novel was well cemented, but Vladimir Nabokov, himself no opponent of fiction, was lampooning what he polemically took to be the excesses of “bad reading” (reading aimed at identification with characters, concentrating on the “socio-economic angle,” etc.) among his students and contemporaries.[3]

    While I agree that a singular focus on fiction as a technology of identity consolidation is limiting, I don’t reject it entirely or think that it is an illegitimate way of reading across the board. For what it’s worth, I think that this strategy of reading represents something ineliminable from anyone’s experience of, and interest in, reading fiction. I will return to that point below.

    For now, I will be content to contrast this strategy of reading fiction with another I call reading as an inquiry into cultural artifacts. This strategy of reading tends to bracket the reader’s personal identitarian investment in, or response to, the work of fiction and instead seeks to appreciate the work of fiction as an artifact embedded in its own multilayered context. The implied metaphor of an archaeological dig is deliberate, as the work of fiction’s contexts are numerous, interrelated, and take sometimes dirty work to decipher if one is to do it well. Reading fiction as artifact can, for instance, dwell on the author’s broader aims: Is the author preparing a brief for a moral or political case? If so, what is it, and does the work forward that goal of persuasion? How does the work relate to other work by the author—as a departure, a continuation, a repetition? Does the work reflect the author’s inner state or personal biography, and if so, how? Some of its questions are the familiar territory of academic literary criticism: What are the work’s structural or formal qualities, and how do these qualities relate to other works? What are the inherent aesthetic qualities of the work, and on what standards might we judge its quality? How does the work relate to similar works produced in a historical time, place, or era? Some of the questions this strategy of reading asks veer off into history, philosophy, sociology, economics, and other social sciences: What factual information does the work of fiction tell us about its time (even if “its time” is right now)? What does it convey to us about what it was like to be a subject in its time and place: the characters’ sense of their own agency and choices for action, how they imagined themselves and their world (and sometimes the distance between their imaginations and reality), what sorts of radical options were open to them or foreclosed?  How was the book read (or misread), received or rejected, in ways that illuminate both the work itself and its subsequent history? Does the book illuminate or provide unique traction on a philosophical problem, like free will, the nature of justice, or religious belief?

    Obviously, what I am calling the strategy of reading as an inquiry into cultural artifacts is a wide umbrella over a vast range of diverse interests, questions, and curiosities. It covers the aims of the hack political pundit’s obtuse commentary on contemporary novels, the integrative work of the cultural critic or public intellectual, and the minute, detailed research of the humanities academic. I know full well that many people whose interest in fiction lies in the general direction I am describing would chafe at being associated even loosely with some of the other preoccupations I am grouping together under this umbrella. This strategy is far too broad to be called a “method”; it’s more a general orientation, a tendency.

    I don’t call the strategy of reading fiction as a cultural artifact a “technology” because, unlike the strategy with which I am contrasting it, the work is not being used as a tool or an implement to achieve an end. However, it does share with that technology of reading, though, a certain tendency to lose focus on what we might call, in an old-fashioned sort of way, the “work itself.” Reading as a technology of identity consolidation tends to view the work as a sort of mirror or lens that is trained squarely upon the reader’s selfhood. The properties of the mirror or lens only matter to the extent that they help the self see itself more clearly. Reading as an inquiry into the book as cultural artifact, though, tends, at its extremes, to dissolve the work itself into a mere set of illuminations of its contexts, as one more data point in the service of a broader thesis about whatever historical, philosophical, or sociological interest the reader brings to the work.[4]

    Fiction writers themselves have perhaps been less worried about the drawbacks of this attitude towards fiction than about the drawbacks of its contrasting attitude. Certain fiction authors and works certainly portray the dissolution of the traditional novel into other discourses and registers, though. The most well-known examples are the works of modernist authors like Joyce or Beckett, but there’s also Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a fictional work (Tolstoy denied it was a “novel”) which shades over its great length into a work of history and philosophy. At the extreme, we have the French nouveau roman as well as Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy, with long passages that consist of literal cut-up and scrambled texts from newspapers and magazines (and which Burroughs also denied were “novels”).

    I must confess that the habits of mind that govern my choice of fiction reading tend more towards the appreciation of fiction works as cultural artifacts than towards identity-consolidation. (Perhaps being a middle-aged man who thinks he is blessed with an adequate degree of self-awareness explains this: I am not looking to fiction as a form of therapy or to figure out who I am, or even to get away from who I am.) But I am not personally above reading fiction that is escapist, or relatable, or blatant wish-fulfillment, or just plain entertaining. In the end I suspect that these two strategies of reading I have identified can scarcely be divorced from one another entirely. For lack of a better terminology, the subjective pole and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, care of the self and concern for the world, can’t be pulled apart neatly. Both sets of motivations and interests confronts all of us when we read fiction to some extent. They are like the charged electrical field in the midst of which we engage with the work of fiction, which then blocks, amplifies, reflects, and redirects those energies into different directions.[5]

    When it comes to talking about fiction and literature, what I abhor is the insistence on a single strategy of reading as the only one that is worthwhile, or else the sheer predominance of a single strategy of reading by the volume of commentary and conversation that exclusively presupposes it. (If you haven’t guessed, I endured maybe ten minutes of browsing on #BookTok before abandoning it in frustration.) I am, generally speaking, a maximalist when it comes to reading, a “let a thousand flowers bloom” sort of person. I sometimes intentionally seek out negative reviews of books I love, and sometimes they even change my mind. When they don’t, I still find them instructive as idiosyncratic readings or misreadings. When people present me with excessively rigid reading methodologies or otherwise seem to have a perpetual blind spot in their critical judgment, I just think, “Hm, OK,” and then keep on reading what I want for whatever reasons interest me.

    With all that in mind, my next post will reflect on the one author whose public and academic reception in modern times best exemplifies both of these strategies of reading at once: Jane Austen.

    [1] Reading novels certainly entails less physical risk than embarking on a career of libertinage among the demi-monde of Paris. To pick an example.

    [2] One of the central theses of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is the transition of episteme he identifies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in the very way that the discourse surrounding knowledge was subtly reorganized and transformed.

    [3] Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Bowers; New York: Harvest, 1980), 3ff.

    [4] Yet another target of Vladimir Nabokov’s critical polemic in “Good Readers and Good Writers” are people who insist on using Jane Austen’s novels as a source of information about “landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor” (p. 2).

    [5] Without getting too far into it, I suspect that the relation between these two strategies of reading is broadly dialectical (though not in a rigidly Hegelian or Marxist sense). What I will say is that, pace certain cultural critics who have dotted the landscape throughout my lifetime, I am not convinced that either strategy is inherently prone to, or exclusively guilty of, the closed-mindedness, epistemic closure, or sheer obtuseness significant swaths of the reading public constantly exhibit. Reading for escapism or sheer entertainment value can teach one things about oneself and the world that one didn’t know before (maybe even things that one doesn’t really want to know at all), or it can simply reinforce one’s existing feelings and prejudices. Reading for aesthetic merit or for cultural significance can lead one to broader insights about the world and one’s own place in it, or it can devolve into a rigid exercise in policing the boundaries of a canon or an interminable collection of grist for one’s preferred mill. What makes for this difference is a more basic personal disposition on the part of the reader, not the strategy of reading they employ.

  • Why I Still Prefer Print Books

    Why I Still Prefer Print Books

    At present I am making my desultory way through a collection of Marcel Proust’s critical writings,[1] the centerpiece of which is a collection of notes for a book-length work of criticism that would have probably borne the title Contre Sainte-Beuve (Against Sainte-Beuve). Proust’s writing abounds in observations on books and literature, but the writing collected in this volume contains his most sustained discussions of reading, particularly the experience of reading.

    For Proust, there is nothing automatic, transparent, or facile about reading. Contre Sainte-Beuve, written in French, deals with French writers in its entirety, and yet he says: “The great books are written in a sort of foreign language.” He goes on to say that “beneath each word [of them] each of us puts our own reading [sens], or at least our image, which is often a misreading [contresens]. But with the great books, all the misreadings one makes are great.” Yet with care and diligence, one reads great works more than once, and one reads more books by the same author. Reading more than one book by the same author is, in fact, essential; in doing so commonalities become salient, habitual turns of phrase or characterizations, all of those things that go into our sense of a writer’s distinctive style, much as we perceive “the same sinuosity of a profile, the same piece of fabric, the same chair in two paintings by the same painter” which shows us “something common to both: the predilection and the essence of the painter’s spirit.”[3] The more we read, the more we realize, in a form of historical consciousness, that “in the same generation spirits of a similar sort, of the same family, of the same culture, of the same inspiration, of the same context, of the same condition, take up the pen to write almost the same thing in the same way,” and yet each “embroiders it in a particular way that is his own, and which makes the same thing completely new.”[4]

    Contre Sainte-Beuve remained unfinished and unpublished at Proust’s death in 1922, so the work is fragmentary in form and undecided as to its overall literary conceit. Proust did seem to consider it at one point as a straightforward work of criticism under his own voice, but the chief conception that comes through in the notes we have is of a dialogue between Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, and his mother. Even then it would have been largely a monologue; the notes we have contain no actual words assigned to Marcel’s mother. Written shortly before Proust began devoting his waning energies chiefly to ISOLT, it is unclear whether it would have been a preface to that work or its final part, its coda. In addition to Proust’s own takes on literature and criticism, we get introduced to preliminary glimpses of Gilberte Swann, Mme de Villeparisis, and the Count and Countess of Guermantes.

    Proust more than once describes the Count of Guermantes’ love of Balzac and says that he has a full edition of The Human Comedy in his library that he inherited from his father. (This version of the Count of Guermantes, at least, has little patience for the vie mondaine of aristocratic society and hides in his second-floor library whenever the Duchess has guests.) Near the end of the notes on Balzac, the narrator writes:

    I must admit that I understand M. de Guermantes—I who read the same way throughout my whole childhood, I for whom Colomba has been for so long “the volume from which one forbade me to read the Venus d’Ille” (“one,” I say, Mother—it was you!) Those volumes from which one read a work for the first time are like the first dress in which one saw a woman for the first time; they tell us what the book was for us then, what we were for it. Finding those volumes is the only way in which I am a bibliophile. The edition from which I read a book for the first time, the edition in which it gave me its first impression, are the only “first editions,” the only “original editions” in which I have an interest. It is still enough for me to remember those volumes. Their old pages are so porous to my memory that I am nearly afraid that they will also absorb my impressions from today and that I will no longer find in them my impressions from before. Every time I think about them, I want them to open themselves up to the page where I shut them near to the lamp or the wooden bench in the garden, when Papa told me: “Stand up straight.”

    And I wonder sometimes whether the way I read today might still more closely resemble that of Mr. Guermantes than that of contemporary critics. A literary work is still for me a living whole whose acquaintance I make from the very first line, that I listen to with deference, to which I grant all rights as long as I am with it, without choosing or debating. [5]

    For Marcel, the physical form of the book—not only the book’s binding, the look of its pages, but also its insertion into his physical space, its relationship to his body—are indissolubly part of the “living whole” of the book as read, not only part of the experience of reading it but also of the memory of what it says.

    Marcel goes on to say that as he matured he began to extend this sense of the living wholeness of a book to encompass all of the books of an author—just that labor of comparison and noticing of commonalities he elsewhere says is part of the work of reading. In this, he says he has gone beyond the Count of Guermantes, whose sense of reading is so bound up with the physical form of the books in his library that he routinely confuses which author wrote a book because, in his library, books by several authors have the same binding:

    [T]he library, M. de Guermantes’ father’s library, contained all of Balzac, all of Roger de Beauvoir, all of Fenimore Cooper, all of Walter Scott and the complete plays of Alexandre Duval, all bound in the same old-fashioned gold binding. The Count adored these books and re-read them often, and one could talk to him about Balzac without finding him at a loss. … But if one asked the Count [about Balzac’s novel Mademoiselle de Choisy], he would say: “I think Roger de Beauvoir wrote that.” He easily confused all these “charming” books that had the same covers, the same way that people mix up the senna and the morphine because they come in the same white bottle.[6]

    Obviously collapsing the experience of encountering a literary work wholly into that of encountering a specific physical object at a specific place and time can go too far! In reading, we are in some part reading through the visible words to the meaning, which is, at some ideal limit anyway, the same regardless of the physical format in which we encounter the words. But this sensuous, physical aspect of reading—the conscious encounter with a specific copy of a book, published at a specific time, on a specific kind of paper, set in a specific font, read under specific conditions, is for me, as it appears to be for Marcel, an irreducible aspect of reading, the soil out of which all reaching for the ideal meaning of the words towards the “spirit” and music of the author grows.

    This episode from Proust helped bring into focus for me why I have become so disenchanted over time with ebooks. In the 1990s and early 2000s, when ebooks went from public-domain text files without formatting and became formatted documents made available by publishers themselves, I was mildly intrigued. However, when I first bought a tablet in 2012 I was not only a convert to ebooks, but a sort of evangelist. The notion of owning a whole library of books that didn’t weigh anything or take up more physical space and that one could carry around everywhere fascinated me. I even contemplated the possibility of obtaining digital copies of all the books I had in my physical library and then getting rid of the physical library. It added to ebooks’ allure that in 2012 I was in a point in my life in which I had moved on an average once every two years and was very tired of schlepping between 40 and 60 boxes of books every time I got a new apartment.

    Yet once I actually began reading more, ebooks really began to lose their luster. Yes, they are convenient. They are also a relatively inexpensive way to obtain books that in some cases would be difficult to obtain in hard copy. I still do about 25-30% of my book reading digitally. But I still find them unsatisfying, and when I expect that a book will be especially enjoyable or useful or important to me, I obtain a physical copy of it whenever possible.

    What changed for me was intimately related to the experience of reading ebooks. To get at what I am after, think about what it’s like to read a print book. A print book is, before it is anything else, a discrete physical object. You hold it in your hand. It has mass, and the longer it is the more mass it has. The covers and the pages have a texture, a color, a smell, a thickness. In reading it, your body has to make certain accommodations to it: you have to hold it a certain way, at a certain distance, under a certain kind of light for it to be legible, you have to support one side of it more than the other depending on whether you are nearer the beginning than the end, and so forth. It is literally another body situated in space alongside my body, a foreign body one handles, maneuvers, cradles, caresses. And different books, like different bodies, have to be handled differently. The brand-new paperback I bought demands to be treated differently than the tiny, fragile 1804 copy of Ossian’s Poems I bought from a library sale in 1993.

    Needless to say, ebooks are not like this. Of course, ebooks are physically instantiated; they aren’t utterly non-physical. The machines (computers, smartphones, tablets) we use to read ebooks are also physical. But their physicality is, with respect to the reading experience, negligible and largely indifferent. The machine from which I read an ebook is just a platform that displays to me, now one ebook, now another. The experience of reading one ebook is more or less like reading any other. For that matter, if I am reading the ebook off of a device I use to do other things, the experience of reading the book is functionally the same as all the other things I do on the device—read and receive e-mail, do work, make phone calls, read and post on social media. All of these things happen within the four corners of the same screen on the same device. The computer, phone, or tablet remains the same physical object in the same physical configuration with respect to my body no matter how much or how many books I read on it.

    This fact about computing gives rise to a different sense of the space in which an ebook is located. Computing tasks—all ebook reading is just a kind of computing task, of course—all take place in a space contained within one or more physical screens that depending on the device one is using is called a “desktop” or a “home screen.” (I will just refer to it as a “desktop” from here on out.) The programs one opens—the e-book reader, the web browser, the e-mail client, and so forth—open within and on top of this desktop. The desktop’s height and width mirror those of the physical world our bodies inhabit, but depending on the platform we are using, they may be slightly bigger than what we can see of it through our screen. (On a Windows PC, for instance, one can move a window for an application so that a large portion of it extends off the screen into void, invisible space.) The strange feature of this space, though, is that its depth functions in ways wholly unlike that of physical space. The background image of one’s desktop functions as the ground, the bedrock, over which one can layer as many application windows as the computing power of one’s device will allow. None of them have the slightest thickness; having fifty windows open on one’s screen is spatially the same as having one open, or none.

    One’s relationship with this strange quasi-physical space of computing that resembles, but is not the same as, our own, to which our screens give us a limited window, is, when you think about it, completely indirect. Before the advent of touch screens, manipulating what happened on the screen involved pushing physical buttons (on a keyboard or mouse) and moving tracking devices (the mouse) which would then make something happen in the computing space. Touch screens have not eliminated this indirection; they have only changed it. One still has to tap on the screen in just the same places one had to click on using one’s mouse previously. On completely touch-screen environments like smartphones or tablets, tapping or swiping with one’s fingers does not always yield the results one would get in the physical world. Tapping or swiping the screen in one application does one thing in one application, another thing in another, and sometimes, depending on the device, swiping brings up entire screens related to the operating system that half the time one didn’t even ask for. In other words, rather than mimicking physical manipulation, touch-screen devices convert physical gestures into yet another set of quasi-linguistic commands with a physical “vocabulary” one has to learn in order to use the devices competently, and that one has to re-learn when one switches between platforms with different operating systems.

    When it comes to ebooks, the quasi-physicality of computing space together with the largely arbitrary physical “vocabulary” of gestures used on touch-screen devices utterly deprives the reading experience of its physicality, its resistance, its thickness. It’s like reading a book hermetically sealed under glass, whose pages move at a command but which one can never hold, never touch. It’s actually a little worse than that, because in a physical book, even one in a glass case, the words are fixed on the pages where they are printed. In an ebook one reads off of an e-reader like a Kindle, Nook, or other tablet, the location of the words on the page and what they look like are fluid and fungible. One can change the font, the font size, the margins, even whether the background “page” is white, sepia-toned, or black (if one is reading off of a color device). Make a change to any of these, and the position of the words on the screen of text one is reading move. (Sometimes, depending on the ebook’s formatting, they even move without making any changes when one swipes forward to a later page and then swipes back to find one’s place.)

    Admittedly, the adaptability of text presentation on ebooks is a great advantage for neuroatypical readers or readers with visual issues, since they can make books accessible in ways that most physical books are not for them. I am definitely not glossing over that—nor am I arguing for the abolition of ebooks! (As I said previously, I do at least 25% of my reading off of an e-reader.) It’s just a different experience for me, and one that is impoverished for me in a lot of ways. I have a hard time savoring writing off an e-reader. I tend to read off an e-reader solely for the ideal content of the words, not the sensuousness of what the words say. Most of my e-reading tends to be nonfiction now that I think about it.

    In ebooks I join the author in what she means to say, but the reading doesn’t bring my body along with it. I miss the kinesthetic experience of physical books—of the words I read, the paper they are printed on, the weight of the book, the sense of anticipation I have when holding open the first few pages of a book I just started, the feeling of clearing the halfway point, the lightness in my right hand as I near the end. (Or in my left hand, if I am reading manga!) More subtly, though, I find myself missing the difference between books—the yellowing mass-market paperback of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie from the 1960’s I just read versus the leather-bound, bible-paper elegance of the Pléaide edition of Contre Sainte-Beuve I am currently reading. On my e-reader, all ebooks, even PDFs that give literal scanned images of physical pages, feel somehow interchangeable, like scraps of a single vast ocean of context-free text. (A fact about electronically stored text that large-language AI models have, of course, exploited.)

    Perhaps I am just a cranky old man consumed by nostalgia for his past. Physical books, after all, are themselves a technology that has undergone numerous transformations in history.[7] Holding up one form of the book as somehow sacred is historically blinkered, to say the least. Yet the advent of ebooks has not led to the demise of the physical book, as presaged in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. Print books, at last report, still vastly outsell ebooks. It can’t be the case that all of those physical book buyers are just buying them to show on Instagram or TikTok or to use as interior design accessories. Something endures about the physical book format.

    Or, as Proust puts it, those porous book pages are still soaking up our memories, our impressions, our thoughts, all of the embodied reactions we have when we encounter the words of another in reading.

    [1] Proust, Marcel. Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles. Ed. Pierre Clarac et Yves Sandre (Gallimard (Pléiade), 1971). I identify all citations to this volume as “Sainte-Beuve” followed by a page number. All translations, and hence all translation errors, are entirely my own.

    [2] Sainte-Beuve, p. 304.

    [3] Sainte-Beuve, p. 304.

    [4] Sainte-Beuve, p. 306.

    [5] Sainte-Beuve, p. 295.

    [6] Sainte-Beuve, p. 297.

    [7] Irene Vallejo provides a colorful anecdote-filled account of this history in Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (Knopf, 2022).