'I Check My Goods at the Door'

We all know the sort of party guest – or neighbor, or reader, or spouse – who talks solely in order to argue the obvious superiority of his own opinions. This breed is tiresome, and our instinct is to slip away -- politely, if possible. How often do we encounter someone who talks – or writes – not because he has an opinion to spout but because he wishes to learn something, to relieve his ignorance and begin to understand, who ponders and questions? 

In its Spring1993 issue, The Threepenny Review published a symposium devoted to the widely misunderstood notion of disinterestedness, especially in regard to reading. Disinterested is often used casually to mean “uninterested” or even “bored” rather than “impartial.” In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson defines the adjective as “superior to regard of private advantage; not influenced by private profit” and “without any concern in an affair; without fear or hope.” Seven writers responded to the journal’s prompt, including Thom Gunn, who begins: “The disinterested reader exists in the same way as the just judge and the faithful spouse.” Then he gets serious:

 

“I read to understand something I didn’t understand before, by this perhaps to learn, by this perhaps to change, however slightly; and therefore I can read best by forgetting the self in the presence of a more active imagination than my own. . . . As I enter a book, I check my goods at the door, to claim them again when I leave. Then I can test my opinions, my preconceptions, my ‘interests’ against anything I have found out; then I can evaluate.”

 

Reading, as Gunn sees it, is a sort of surrender, an agreement to withhold judgment, to play by the writer’s rules, at least temporarily. He would agree with Guy Davenport in his essay “On Reading”, where he says of his childhood (and adult) taste in books: “What I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” Many, I suspect, if they read at all do so to confirm what they already think they know. Davenport said he wrote not for critics but for “people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”

 

It’s not a matter of suppressing the self but forgetting it. We already spend enough time in solipsistic infatuation. Why not throw back the curtains and illuminate the gloom.

 

“If you can't lose the self as completely in a poem as in a horror-movie,” Gunn writes, “I don’t see why you bother to read, as it must be a very boring exercise indeed. Of course the disinterest is not absolute, nothing is absolute. Reading is a process, isn’t it? . . . The reader aspires to the disinterest of the ideal scholar. . . . We find on the page what it has to give us, but we can only find it because we woo it, because we are ready to be its Romeo or its Juliet, because we are ready to bypass the self.”

 

[The Guy Davenport passages can be found in The Hunter Gracchus: And Other Papers on Literature and Art, 1996).