Several readers have quibbled with the late Oscar Mandel’s assertion that “literature exists to make men happy.” Oscar celebrates the “pleasure-giving capacity” of books, as I quoted him writing in Thursday’s post. I knew such statements would provoke certain categories of readers. Many confuse pleasure derived from reading with titillation, escape or distraction, something like the marketing pitch for so-called “beach books,” what my father would have called “a stupid waste of time.” Rudyard Kipling said in his lecture to students, "The Uses of Reading" (1912):
“There is, or there was,
an idea that reading in itself is a virtuous and holy deed. I can’t quite agree
with this, because it seems to me that the mere fact of a man’s being fond of
reading proves nothing one way or the other. He may be constitutionally lazy;
or he may be overstrained, and so take refuge in a book to rest himself. He may
be full of curiosity and wonder about the life on which he is just entering;
and for that reason may plunge into any and every book he can lay hands on, in
order to get information about things that are puzzling him, or frightening
him, or interesting him.”
I understand a priggish suspicion of pure pleasure and pleasure-seeking. Unregulated hedonism is no solid foundation for a life well-lived. Pleasure is complicated. I find varying sorts and degrees of pleasure in books as miscellaneous as Ecclesiastes, Montaigne, Spinoza’s Ethics, Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories, Yeats’ poems and the Parker novels of Donald Westlake. Perhaps a redefinition of pleasure is called for. Walter de la Mare writes in his essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940):
“[O]ne is tempted — though it might be dangerous — to maintain that the best books in the world were written chiefly for pleasure and with an after-hope to please.”
2 comments:
Allow me to invoke Wittgenstein on ordinary language . The way we talk about about pleasure—the ordinary uses of the word— applies to many kinds of reading. “Reading Josephine Tey’s mystery The Daughter of Time was a pleasure.” Reading War and Peace pleases me so much I reread it”. Does The Gulag Archipelago provide reading pleasure ? Nope, but it is worth reading as an instructive book about evil, courage,and morality for starters. If we call many of books or poems we read pleasurable it is using a very peculiar sense of the word pleasure. Am I being “priggish”? You be the judge.
Just two days ago I finished Bank Shot, one of Westlake's novels about the anti-Parker, John Dortmunder, whose criminal capers go as wrong as Parker's but with comic results instead of violent ones. It speaks well of Westlake's virtuosity that he could take a premise and render it in two radically different ways. (The first Dortmunder, The Hot Rock, started as a Parker, but the situation just kept giving Westlake the giggles, so he invented a cast of bumbling, incompetent characters for it.)
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