The pleasure principle
It’s the first semester of another school year, which means I am trying to get my students to read. And just as in previous years, getting them to enjoy reading feels like engaging in something like Mortal Kombat.
By the time they arrive in my classroom these teenagers (mostly 17-year-olds) have been forced to read literature the whole time they’ve been in school, more than 10 years for most. They’ve become quite familiar with the pressure to read “serious” and “important” things, have been made to read many so-called classics (or exemplars of “high” literature), have been forced to read stories and poems and plays on serious and lofty subjects. Many of them have come to resent this. At the start of the semester I asked them if there’s a difference between what they choose to read on their own and what they are made to read in school. The answer this time was the same one I always get: the two are dramatically different.
I dwell on the experience of reading in school because I suspect many of us form our most important impressions of books and reading in our school days. If we remember the experience of reading with fondness, chances are we become enthusiastic life-long readers. (A handful of students are even crazy enough to become lit teachers.) If our memories of it are tinged with distaste, we probably won’t read much beyond light and entertaining fare.
Why the divergence between what students are assigned to read and what they choose for themselves? An obvious culprit is school itself. Something in the very nature of the school as a learning institution seems to work against the nurturing of pleasure in the reading experience. For one thing, students are forced to read what the school makes them, and how many of us attend to requirements with the same enthusiasm we do to things we do on our own? Too often students go to their books with glum resignation, not glee. Second, students know they will be tested on their reading; the eventual exam or paper hovers on the horizon of their minds, tingeing their reading with the real possibility of failure. Third, students often are made to read things they would not choose for themselves, readings probably more difficult than what they are used to.
The “classics” still form a large part of literature curriculums across the land, and the experience of knocking heads with Shakespeare or Balagtas, James Joyce or Nick Joaquin can be a frustrating one. If students have the added misfortune of having a disagreeable teacher who makes reading feel like drudgery, their fates as future non-readers are sealed. No wonder they turn elsewhere for pleasure.
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. I think one thing we teachers of reading have neglected to do is make the encounter with the written word a pleasurable one. We emphasize learning, we train them in textual analysis, and we reinforce this with testing. Well and good. Except understanding a text is not the same as enjoying it. In the extreme, we may actually foster the former by sacrificing the latter. The fact of grades compounds the problem: at the end of the day we need to hand out numbers or letters, our appraisal of student performance.
Grades are measures, and what can we measure? Understanding, yes; analysis, yes; enjoyment, no. Reading comprehension can be measured, but appreciation of a book’s beauty and depth of insight can’t. Grades are a necessary evil that can get in the way. And if students learn that grades are the be-all and end-all of education, then what will they care how beautiful a book is?
It’s hard enough getting students to enjoy reading in school without outside distractions; what makes things worse is that the array of pleasures available to today’s student — and today’s adult, for that matter — are multifarious to a degree never seen before. The quick thrills easily available to them, accessed through increasingly sophisticated technological devices, make the act of sitting still with a book seem awfully dull. A friend who goes to Boracay every New Year’s told me that five years ago, many people would lounge around with a book; this year they toted laptops and other gadgets and spent their time on Facebook.
Beyond school and the seductive glitter of entertainment technology lies a third, and perhaps most insidious, culprit: a culture that does not value intellectual work. The culture that produces and nurtures our children is one that looks down on work requiring any degree of intellectual engagement. Celebrity is valorized, but intelligence is not. We gaze at the beautiful, listen to the glib; we don’t care for the thoughtful or profound. Our movie stars and pop singers become famous, but our thinkers, those commentators and artists with astute insights into political or cultural matters, do not. Everywhere our young look they find that surface sheen, not substance, is prized and rewarded. They take their cue.
What do we do then about the problem of reading? One thing we — teachers, parents, and everyone else concerned about reading — need to do is put pleasure back into the reading experience. Or rather, we need to validate it. We need to tell our students, children, each other, ourselves, that it’s fine to read primarily for pleasure. I know my students already do.
“Read for pleasure” is advice I don’t need to give them because they already believe it. One of the common gripes we teachers of literature make about our students is that they don’t read, but I’ve found that it’s not true.
At the start of every school year I give out, in all my first-year lit classes, a survey sheet in which I ask what they like to read. I’ve found that they do read. It’s just that their tastes tend to be narrow. Some read only light fantasy. Others read only chick lit. Still others read only manga (Japanese illustrated fiction, very much like comic books). This year the Twilight books were a frequent answer. They don’t need me to tell them to read for pleasure. What they need from me is to say it’s okay to admit it.
What they also need from me — and this is more important — is to expand their definition of pleasure. The problem is not that we value pleasure so much, it’s that we define it too narrowly. Most perniciously, we think that pleasure should come easily. If something is supposed to be fun, it shouldn’t have to make us work. It definitely shouldn’t have to make us think. And because we get our pleasures so easily now, we demand that they always be easy.
But pleasure comes in degrees and in wide varieties. There is the pleasure of figuring out whodunit (as any reader of Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler knows). There is the pleasure of trying to solve puzzles (as Dan Brown fans do). There is the giddiness of a romance novel, the fright of horror.
But how about the pleasures we overlook? The pleasure of beauty, in language and in craft. The pleasure of characters rendered as if they were real people, of places vividly evoked. The pleasure of plumbing singular experiences, even sad and painful ones, of sharing the lives of the sorrowful, the lonely, the damned. There is the pleasure of insight, of ideas. The pleasure of contemplating the unfathomable evil and goodness in the human heart. But these pleasures often take some experience to arrive at, and some effort too.
Maybe that’s the most important thing I can do as a literature teacher: expand the sphere of pleasure. Get my students to try new works, new authors, new genres — new being what they would never choose for themselves. And if they make the discovery that beyond their previously narrow roads are many things wonderful and extraordinary, within reach if they would only take the time and effort, then perhaps they may turn into lifelong readers who aren’t content to return again and again to familiar ground but who seek out new realms in which to venture.
“The poem refreshes the world,” Wallace Stevens said. The book does, too — its pleasures both common and sublime available to those able and willing to enter it.
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