The Active Reader: Finding Balance Between Pleasure and Purpose

In “How I Read” for The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks gives advice on reading actively, pen in hand, searching for connections in the text, parsing metaphor and meaning:

I do believe reading is an active skill, an art even, certainly not a question of passive absorption.

His model for this type of reading is one of my favorite writers:

Borges would often remark that he was first and foremost a professional reader, not a writer, and he meant the claim as a boast…

Borges’s work, more than most, encourages a willful intellectual play between reader and text, and in the case of Labyrinths, for example, reading with pen in hand might very well be the best way to go.

However, I find Parks’s approach of reading any novel with a pen–to try to suss out author intent and underline words and passages that correspond with a certain tone or central question–quite at odds with the artistry of writing anf the pleasure of reading.

One writes in large part to bring the reader in to the experience of the text, and not only on an intellectual level. As a novelist, I strive to close the theatre door behind the reader as much as possible: to create an atmosphere so complete that the reader momentarily places the everyday occurrences of the real world in the background, so caught up is she in the “real world” within the novel. I don’t want a reader to think, “Oh, how clever,” because the moment that happens, he is thinking about the mechanics of the book, and is therefore ripped from the tenuous fictional dream.

If the reader is searching for clues to my intent as she reads, I have failed her in an important way (unless, of course, she is reading to learn how to write, intentionally going under the hood to understand the mechanics of the novel–a practice that writers do almost instinctively).

Parks, it seems, takes great pleasure in reading this way: more power to him. But to suggest that “active reading” must always be a kind of detective game with the text ignores what is to me the dual purpose of any work of fiction: to entertain and to enlighten. The dual purposes need not be dueling purposes, but if I hope to do one more than the other, the desire to entertain will always win out. I do not mean a kind of vapid entertainment, but a rich, multi-layered experience in which the reader thinks deeply and feels deeply, and is frequently surprised.

That said, on one point, Parks and I heartily agree:

If there is one thing I dislike…it is the suspicion that the whole construct was put together merely out of opportunism, to write a literary book, to win a literary prize.

I agree that as a writer one should avoid "doing literature" for the wrong reasons: setting out to write not a great book or even a very good book but instead a "literary book," one designed more to win acclaim than to win the hearts and minds of readers.

We each find our own way into reading. For the naturally analytical, that way may include a pen and even, perhaps, some sort of literary spreadsheet. When I was teaching at university, my books were never safe from zealous marking up, their pages smudgy with ink and sticky with miniature Post-its.

When I left teaching behind, however, I found a happier way back into books. Reading sessions these days more often involve a cup of coffee and a few coveted moments of solitude–just me and the book and the sublime pleasure of it, punctuated occasionally by the nagging thought, “Oh, I ought to write that down.”