Very few of my campesino friends read newspapers – or, actually, much of anything, besides the directions on livestock feed sacks, and medicines for both animals and their families.
“The Country That Stopped Reading,” by David Toscana, an internationally much heralded Mexican (Monterrey) author, appeared recently in The New York Times. “Nowadays, more children (in Mexico) attend school than ever before, but they learn less,” he writes. “How is it that I hand over a child for six hours ever day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?” (Toscana wrote that just as the head of the huge Mexican teachers‘ union, Ester Elba Gordillo, was detained for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars from the union whose members inherit, or purchase or get their jobs from the union, or by performing favors for their superiors.) He speaks of an educational system so corruptly managed that no one knows how many teachers, students, or schools there are in Mexico. But the government and the mainstream media says repeatedly there are 1.5 million members in the union – though that too may be false, besides many of them don’t teach, they are occupied with managing and nourishing the union.
A man whose silent mentors were Uruguayan writer, Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1991), and Jalisco’s greatest writer, Juan Rulfo (1917-1986), who is also considered Mexico’s greatest author, has written a column, ripe with frustration because of the poor education his children – and his country – are receiving. It’s an instructive column written by perceptive man worried about his homeland. And a central part of his message is that Mexico’s educational system “needs to make students read, read, read.”At the same time, certainly in the United States, Canada, Britain, and elsewhere, teachers, critics and others recently have been reminding us about that same phenomenon. Though they are speaking in a learning way that might, at first, seem different, it really isn’t. In 1972, Elmore Leonard’s Hollywood agent called him with an urgent piece of news. The agent said, “George V. Higgins’ ‘Friends of Eddie Coyle.’ This is your kind of stuff ... rush out and get it before you write another word.” “The book set me free,” Leonard says. “I saw, this was how you do it. I learned so much about dialogue and cadence from that book.” Leonard still often begins his day’s writing by rereading a bit of “Eddie Coyle.”
Famed author Vladimir Navokov (1899-1977), having freshly arrived in the United States, paused to write his now classic lectures on Russian and European literature. “(B)efore launching my academic career in America (Wellesley and Cornell), I took the trouble of writing 100 lectures on Russian literature, and later another 100 lectures on great novelists from Jane Austin to James Joyce.” It was in these latter lectures that he famously said: “One cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader ..., an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Thus, you have writers (before and since) not only beginning their writing day by rereading, but some by typing portions of works by authors they find edifying – and often seductive because they are both bold and teasingly difficult.
Just one example: Novelist, Jonathan Lethem, begins each day reading authors whose work he knows very well. Writers such as James Salter who challenge him. “It’s text that has a courage, a leaping-in quality,” that he seeks.
And thus recently we’ve had a series of essays – and books, reviews, interviews and lectures – speaking about the of dizzying experience of finding new riches in books (fiction and nonfiction) that readers have read before. Nabokov, of course was merely repeating what Flaubert said in a letter to his mistress: “What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half dozen books.”
Prompted by David Toscana, one can’t help but refer to Patricia Meyer Spacks‘ text, “On Rereading” (November, 2011). Spacks, one critic notes, “... has taught literature at a number of distinguished colleges and universities ..., she is now the Edgar Shannon Professor of English Emerita at the University of Virginia – something of a rarity among those who practice her trade these days.” She reads (and rereads) “for pure pleasure as well as for professional obligation.” Spacks, happily for us, understands that learning the pleasure of reading challenging texts is a valuable goal in understanding people – and life.
As Nabokov taught his students at Wellesley and Cornell that reading books and short stories is a unique experience. He compared it to looking at a painting. A Van Gogh, perhaps. Most of us do not move our eyes “in a special way ...” “... (E)ven if, like a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development.” He unveils the difference: “In reading a book we have to acquaint ourselves with it. And we have no physical organ with which to do this. The eye, especially on the first reading, moves laboriously from left to right, line after line, page after page.” “Not at all like viewing a painting. But a second, or third, or fourth time we do (begin to) behave toward a book as we do to toward a painting.” (A statement that must have shocked his students at Wellesley and Cornell.)
“However,” he cautioned, “let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is – a work of fiction or of science (the boundary between the two is not as clear as is generally believed – a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.”
Nabokov told his students to pay attention and decipher “the details.” Ross Wetzsteon, the editor in the late ’60s and early ’70s of the hugely popular and influential Village Voice when I wrote for it, fondly remembered Nabokov at Cornall uttering, “Caress the details ... the divine details.” It was a mantra of Nabokov’s classes. For Francine Prose – author of 16 novels, three short story collections and seven nonfiction texts – it is “close reading.”
For all of these people, and millions like them, it is clear that fiction can be as educational as a non-fiction text book. That’s why reading is not skimming. “Skimming just won’t suffice,” says Prose, “if we hope to extract one fraction of what a writer’s words can teach us about the use of language.” And reading quickly “can be a hindrance when, especially in fiction, the crucial revelations are in the spaces between the words.”
Closer to home, the man who would become Mexico’s prose saint, Juan Rulfo, in the early 1950s quit his job as a traveling representative for the Goodrich Tire Company having obtained two consecutive fellowships to the Mexican Center for Writers. This move would change not just his life, but modern Mexican literature. The fellowships were offered to him by the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, a Mexico City pedagogical institution founded by California author and teacher, Margaret Shedd who, through creative persistence, obtained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Shedd, whose efforts nourished a number of Mexican and U.S. writers, was a sympathetic tutor, but one who had learned that teaching writing meant teaching students how to read. She, too, insisted that her classes pay close attention to every word, to note what was happening in the spaces in between them (“details”). Mexican biographers of Rulfo agree that Shedd was, as one put it, “undoubtedly the decisive person in the publishing, in 1953, of Rulfo’s ‘El Llano en Llamas’ (‘The Burning Plain’),” a ground-breaking collection of stories set in Jalisco.
Shedd would have agreed with Toscana when he debated with the secretary of education in his home state, Nuevo Leon, telling him that while, “Yes, students are taught to read, but they don’t read.” “I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing (Mexico’s, the world’s) literary canon.” Like Nabokov, he was talking about instilling the desire to reread. Besides, Toscana has argued, touching the commercial instincts of public officials, it’ll boost state and national GDPs.