Sunday, October 05, 2014

Will Self: 'The fate of our literary culture is sealed'

Deep, serious reading – and serious writing – is under threat from the digital revolution. It's not that the web will make our culture more stupid, but it will lead to new forms of understanding

Books on the brain
'The mind cleaves to the page' … Illustration: Philip Partridge

Let's think about reading – about what it's like to read. And after we've thought about reading for a while, let's consider writing – and what it means to write. There are many ways of reading: we scan, we dip, we skip and we speed through texts we know to be intrinsically dull, searching out the nuggets of information we desire as a bent-backed prospector pans for gold. In contradistinction: we are lost, abandoned, absorbed – tossed from wave to wave of language as we relapse into the wordsea. All serious readers of serious literature have had this experience: time, space, and all the workaday contingencies of their identity – sex, age, class, heritage – are forgotten; the mind cleaves to the page, matching it point-for-point; the mind is the text, and in the act of reading it is you who are revealed to the impersonal writer, quite as much as her imaginings and inventions are rendered unto you. In the course of my literary career I've read various accounts of the reading process – ones that analyse it phenomenologically, neurologically and psychologically; ones that site it in a given social or cultural context – but none has captured the peculiar quiddity of reading as I experience it. 

In particular, no forensic or analytic account of reading can do justice to the strange interplay between levels of reality we apprehend when we read deeply. We don't picture a woman in a red dress when we decipher the marks that mean "she wore a red dress" – and, by extension, we do not hold within our mind's eye the floor plan of Mansfield Park or the street map of Dublin when we read the novels of Jane Austen and James Joyce, respectively.
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