Patricia Meyer Spacks, who has taught literature at a number of distinguished colleges and universities over the past half-century — she is now the Edgar Shannon Professor of English Emerita at the University of Virginia — is something of a rarity among those who practice her trade these days: She reads for pure pleasure as well as for professional obligations, and she understands that pleasure is a legitimate, valuable goal in and of itself. Reading fiction has the power to expose one to large truths about human existence, but there is more to it than that:
“It includes also the power of pleasure, an aspect of reading generally neglected in academic discourse and one that nonacademic readers often deprecate. ‘I’m just reading for pleasure’: that sounds frivolous, suggesting that one is reading ‘junk.’ From classic times through at least the eighteenth century, though, major critics agreed that pleasure and instruction define the dual purpose of reading, and both matter. It is noteworthy that Dr. Johnson, moral arbiter as well as literary critic, assesses each of his subjects in his mammoth work ‘Lives of the Poets,’ partly on the basis of the degree of pleasure the poet’s work evokes. Pleasure, in the many varieties that reading can produce, is worth being taken seriously by serious readers.”
Indeed it is, and in my own more than four decades of reviewing I have always included the amount of pleasure each book offers among the standards against which I measure it. A book scarcely needs to be frothy or trashy in order to provide pleasure — in order to be entertaining — as Dr. Johnson understood in attributing the enduring popularity of Shakespeare’s works to the pleasure they provide as well as the wisdom they impart. By the same token it is possible for a book to offer little beyond pleasure pure and simple yet to have genuine and enduring merit. Spacks cites the works of P.G. Wodehouse, and she is right to do so. “Everything that I recently reread by Wodehouse remained absolutely and completely the same as I remembered,” she writes, “and that seemed wonderful. . . . I wanted nothing new. I appear not to have changed at all, although I thought I had left Wodehouse behind with other childish things. Jeeves was entertaining as ever, in precisely the ways he was entertaining before. The prose of the stories offered familiar delights. The plots remained cavalier, unlikely, and fun. How did I get along without these pleasures for so long?”
That is one of the reasons we reread: to recapture, or rediscover, pleasures from our past. Sometimes those pleasures, like those offered by Wodehouse, are the same as they were the first (or second, or fifth, or 10th) time around, sometimes they are both old and new, and sometimes they are completely different. Rereading is, as Spacks puts it, “a treat, a form of escape, a device for getting to sleep or for distracting oneself, a way to evoke memories (not only of the text but of one’s life and of past selves), a reminder of half-forgotten truths, an inlet to new insight.” Memory is important, but in rereading as in everything else it is apt to play tricks on you, at times ones that delight and at other times ones that do not.
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