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The Vice of Reading
3 Aug 06
Wharton, Edith. “The Vice of Reading.” 1903. Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. Ed. Frederick Wegener. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996. 99-106.
Wharton argues that there are two kinds of readers: natural and mechanical. The natural reader engages intuitively with a text, probing, learning, and taking full enjoyment in the complexities and nuances of literature. The mechanical reader, who is the focus of the essay (guilty of the titular vice) reads out of a sense of responsibility, believing that reading alone will in some way improve them. Sadly, mechanical readers require mechanical writers, and as a direct result the publishing industry produces mostly crap. There’s more to her argument, of course; certainly an enjoyable read, and a gold mine of pithy quotes of which my favourite must be:
All forms of art are based on the principle of selection, and where that principle is held of no account in the sum-total of any intellectual production, there can be no genuine criticism. (105)
Others, somewhat at random (and I don’t wish to imply I’m in complete agreement):
That reading trash is a vice is generally conceded; but reading per se—the habit of reading—new as it is, already ranks with such seasoned virtues as thrift, sobriety, early rising and regular exercise. There is, indeed, something peculiarly aggressive in the virtuousness of the sense-of-duty reader. (99)
To read is not a virtue; but to read well is an art, and an art that only the born reader can acquire. The gift of reading is no exception to the rule that all natural gifts need to be cultivated by practice and discipline; but unless the innate aptitude exist the training will be wasted. (100)
Here is a book that every one is talking about; the number of its editions is an almost unanswerable proof of its merit; but to the mechanical reader it is cryptic, and he takes refuge in disapproval. He admits the cleverness, of course; but one of the characters is “not nice”; ergo, the book is not nice; he is surprised that you should have cared to read it. The mechanical reader, after a few such experiences, learns the potency of disapproval as a critical weapon, and it soon becomes his chief defence against the irritating demand to admire what he cannot understand. (102)
Posted by pzed on August 3, 2006 at 4.57pm
Categories: fragments, scripture
