Today, I read two articles shared by friends on Facebook that describe (and justify) two diametrically different approaches to literature as a source of enjoyment.
The first article, posted by Sharon Bakar, justifies the impatient, let's-cut-to-the-chase approach (Robert McCrum, "Are you ashamed of skipping parts of books?", http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/jan/05/skipping-parts-of-books-robert-mccrum). The other, posted by Eric Forbes, defends the leisurely, let's-savour-every-nuance approach (Pico Iyer, "The writing life: the point of the long and winding sentence", http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-pico-iyer-20120108,0,2137466.story).
We may be inclined to think that the preference for short, pithy narratives is a 21st-century phenomenon, the direct result of our technologically enabled habit of consuming (and serving) information in tweets and other small sound bytes. But we would be wrong. According to the sociologist, Leo Lowenthal, the problem of the impatient writer and reader has been around for quite a while. Here's what he wrote in 1967:
Two thinkers as different as John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche have voiced their sorrows over the style of modern life aided and abetted by literary mass production, which seems to leave the public no choice but an almost neurotic gobbling-up of an endless stream of sounds and sights and words--not to be remembered, not to be translated into productive enrichment, and not to be translated into "dreams," that "stuff" of which, according to Shakespeare, our world is made. In an article "Civilization," which appeared in the London and Westminster Review of April, 1836, John Stuart Mill wrote:
The world ... gorges itself with intellectual food, and in order to swallow the more, bolts it. Nothing is now read slowly, or twice over. ... He ... who should and would write a book, and write it in the proper manner of writing a book, now dashes down his first hasty thoughts, or what he mistakes for thoughts, in a periodical. And the public is in the predicament of an indolent man, who cannot bring himself to apply his mind vigorously to his own affairs, and over whom, therefore, not he who speaks most wisely, but he who speaks most frequently, obtains the influence.
And in a similar vein, though in a most different style, Nietzsche wrote in the preface of The Dawn of Day:
I have not been a philologist in vain; perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste, a perverted taste, maybe--to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is in a hurry ... philology is now more desirable that ever before; ... it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of "work": that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is intent upon "getting things done" at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not "get things done" so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.
To sum up what has happened in our day and age: Communication has become part of a consumers' culture in which those who produce and those who receive are hardly distinguishable from each other because they are both the serfs of a life style of conformity and regulation. It is the basic tragedy and paradox of modern civilization and particularly of our own phase that the sermon of individualism has turned into the practice of conformity, that the ideology of education and persuasion through the spoken and printed word has become the reality of insensibility and numbness to meaning, and that the professed belief of the powers that be in all spheres of public life--political or cultural or economic--in the persuasive influence of the worded message is answered by increasing skepticism if not outright disbelief in the world itself.
--Leo Lowenthal, Literature and Mass Culture (1984)--
