(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Ngũgĩ was a Kenyan author and academic.
Born in an outpost of the British Empire, Ngũgĩ was particularly concerned with colonialism. He came to see language as playing a crucial role in continuing colonial impact long after Kenya declared independence from British rule (1991, 9):
The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.
As readers, we shouldn’t see language as merely a tool of communication but a “carrier of culture”, history, and values (p. 13). The language in which we read colours our reading, particularly when we read works from other cultures.
One way he attempted to address this issue was to change from writing in English to his native languages of Gĩkũyũ and Kiswahili (p. xiv). Ideally, his readers would read him in these languages, but he also translated his works to English. That is, by writing in his native languages then translating he was able to express himself more clearly without the presence of colonial influences, yet still reach a wide audience. He suggested that (Fung 2021):
if you know all the languages of the world, and you don’t know your mother tongue, that’s enslavement, mental enslavement. But if you know your mother tongue, and add other languages, that is empowerment.
An implication being that even if we are fortunate to read in our native languages, we benefit from learning other languages so that we can read authors in their native language. In a similar vein, as a professor at the University of Nairobi, Ngũgĩ argued that its English department be abolished, and instead African literature, written and oral, should be taught (2012, 9). In the traditional Gĩkũyũ oral culture the oral performance was a dynamic, communal event, involving performer and audience without an arbitrary division between the two (p. 801). Reading and interpretation are enriched by both shared context but also collective discussion. The Western model of the solitary reader pouring over a book is questioned.
Ngũgĩ’s philosophy of reading is rooted in the belief that education is never neutral, but either helps liberate or further domesticates. Our choice of texts, and our approach to them, can inculcate us further into narrow belief systems, or help broaden our horizons. Even if we read only in English, we can still read outside our milieu. To liberate literature from a colonial hold, Ngũgĩ coined the term globalectics—a portmanteau “derived from the shape of the globe” (p. 8):
On its surface, there is no one center; any point is equally a center. As for the internal center of the globe, all points on the surface are equidistant to it—like the spokes of a bicycle wheel that meet at the hub. Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually affecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation and region. The global is that which humans in spaceships or on the international space station see: the dialectical is the internal dynamics that they do not see. Globalectics embraces wholeness, interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension, and motion. It is a way of thinking and relating to the world…
He believes that this approach will help decolonise the mind. It involves conceptual methods for critically reading European and English literature from a post-colonial perspective, which requires reading relationally: thinking about how texts, cultures, and languages are interconnected through themes and ideas. Colonial control privileges certain modes of knowledge, purposefully concealing other forms. To read in a globalectic fashion means to look for these connections in a way that exposes these hidden forms, revealing how power and knowledge are intertwined. For example (p. 31):
in the paradigm of master and slave, the master will have a view of philosophy, religion, history, human nature, education, and organization of knowledge that conflicts fundamentally with that of the adversarial opposite
The master’s conception of history will emphasise that “there reigned ignorance before his arrival, or that there had always been masters and bondsmen”, “that people are born masters and bondsmen”, human nature is unchanging, that the current system is an expression of divine will, and justify the slave’s suffering by reference to an afterlife (ibid.). Literature, even seemingly innocuous texts, is shot through with these kind of power relations, and Ngũgĩ wants us to notice what we otherwise take for granted.
He’s not interested in heavily ornamental, dense theory, however. Globalectics is “poor theory” in that it’s “maximizing the possibilities inherent in the minimum” (p. 2). The first theories were conveyed in fables, myths, and storytelling: “Confronted with an environment that they could not always understand, the human invented stories to explain it” (p. 15). Theory communicated through fiction remains accessible, helping clarify these interconnections and their impact for everyday people. It has the potential to integrate social life within a larger symbolic imagination (ibid.). It can transform lived experience “into a kind of universality in which readers of different ages, climes, and gender can see themselves and the world in which they live, differently” (p. 16). Ngũgĩ’ credited fiction with helping him reflect upon his own experiences and understand the “inner logic of social processes” such as colonialism and neo-colonialism (p. 19).
Globalectics also constuites a rejection of the “aesthetic feudalism” which assumes a hierarchy of languages and cultures and places non-Western instances near the base (pp. 60–1). Why should English be the prestigious, de facto language of literature? Why should European assumptions about literature continue to hold? By extension, why should “orature”—oral literature—be placed below written literature in this hierarchy? Instead of thinking in terms of hierarchies, we should think in terms of global networks to “free the richness of the aesthetic, oral or literary” (p. 85).
To approach a text globalectically is to see it conversation with both classical and contemporary works, allowing it to “speak to our own cultural present even as we speak to it from our own cultural present” (p. 60). This reading “should bring into mutual impact and comprehension the local and the global, the here and there, the national and the world” (ibid.). We can read “with a narrow, short, or wide angle of view…a concave or convex lens” (p. 58). Shakespeare, for example, “can be read as a racial, national, or imperial export or as a mirror of class and national power struggle” (ibid.).
One of the ways this approach protects us from error is seen in how early European thinkers misunderstood Africa. Having no personal experience of the continent and having read no African authors, they “used each other as sources and proofs of their own observations; prejudice thus reinforcing prejudice till it became an accepted truth, an authoritative norm” (p. 33). When we read without prioritising European literature and look to authors from different cultures to learn about them, we avoid becoming so fundamentally mistaken. The dialectic, which helps found globalectics, originated with Hegel, who also brought into these “missionary and explorer narratives” and saw history as bypassing Africa. By approaching Hegel with a globalectic reading, Ngũgĩ was able to extract what was useful from the texts and discard the rest (ibid.).
Ultimately, Ngũgĩ is asking “do we want to free and be freed by the text” (p. 60)? Whether literature is freeing “may depend on our capacity to release the worldliness in the text” by “how we read it, and what baggage we bring to it” (ibid.). By reading from a globalectic standpoint, “the work of art may contain that which makes us look again, critically, at our baggage” (ibid.). ### Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900)
Nietzsche was a German philosopher.
He trained as a philologist—a scholar trained in painstaking analysis of classical texts—and this contributed to his conception of the attributes of a good reader, but also fostered disdain for the scholar.
As he “began to cultivate his own distinct domains for reading…he…ignored disciplinary and linguistic barriers in his attempt to hoover up anything he could find that seemed to fit, or could be made to fit, into his own projects” (Sommer 2019, 43). He “seemed little concerned with the quality of what he read”, often reading compendia, translations, and secondary literature (ibid.). Nietzsche credits his loss of eyesight and ill-health with curing him of this “bookworm behaviour”: forced to lay still and not read he regained the ability to hear his “lowermost self”, to reflect on, rather than react to, texts (Nietzsche 2007, 118–119). When he was able, he spent little time in sedentary study; deeming the thinking he could perform in the open air while walking of much greater benefit (p. 87). Further, he felt it “depraved” to read first thing in the morning at “the dawn of your strength” (p. 96). Reading was for recreation and inspiration, but when working he put his books away because they represented somebody else doing his thinking for him (p. 89).
Having read, walked, and reflected, he recorded his thoughts not as quotations but as aphorisms, which surely benefited his comprehension. By publishing these aphorisms Nietzsche made his work harder to read—due to its content as well as its form—in order to prevent passive reception and force his readers to read actively and respond critically (Nietzsche 2013, 582). His writing demonstrated how we should read. Indeed, he saw reading and writing as virtues that “grow alongside each other and decrease along with each other” (p. 197).
He came to redefine philology as “the art of reading well”: “to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers” (Nietzsche 2005, 5; Nietzsche 2007, 51). A “lento”, ruminative, cautious act; a suspension of judgement in interpretation (Nietzsche 2007, 5, 51). The philologist is a goldsmith who can rework the text with expertise, forging creative meanings while respecting the limits of the material with which they work (Nietzsche 2005, 5).
Interpretation, then, is a process in tension between courageous creativity and the cautious honesty of philological rigour. For Nietzsche, all interpretation is perspectival, valuing more and different perspectives (Nietzsche 2008, 87; Nietzsche 2017, 352). There is no single, correct interpretation, but this is not to say that anything goes. Rather, perspectives should be multiplied to the extent that they are useful, creative, and are honest and just towards the text, without limiting our future interpretations (Nietzsche 2005, 49–50).
It follows that “When his work opens its mouth, the author has to shut his.” (Nietzsche 2013, 60). It is of little value for interpretation, for example, whether a single individual wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, and what he/they intended (Nietzsche 1910, 164). Further, conflating an author’s personality with their work, inhibits the text’s ability to communicate (Nietzsche 2013, 65–66). The author neither determines what their book means nor is the arbiter of its interpretations.
A reader requires an instinct for self-defence, “a taste only for what agrees with him” (Nietzsche 2007, 77). This is a principle of selection: “not seeing much, not hearing much, not letting many things come close”. Continually needing to ward off stimuli squanders our strength (p. 95). We protect our health by defending ourselves against books, adopting an attitude of caution or hostility to new titles—as he aged, Nietzsche preferred to reread books that had proven themselves to him (p. 90).
This cautious attitude also reflected his belief that books could be transformative on the reader who is ripe for them and tend to find the reader by accident rather than recommendation (pp. 90–1). We must have had the right experiences before reading a particular work because “nobody can get more out of things—including books—than they already know” (p. 101).
Another form of self-defence is to “react as infrequently as possible”, avoiding becoming a “simple reagent” who surrenders one’s freedom and initiative in reading (p. 96). This principle is illustrated in the negative figure of the philologist: a scholar who pores over hundreds of books a day, and through their work becomes habituated to only affirming or denying what they read (ibid.). This external stimuli, the thoughts of others, becomes the only material the scholar works with; they don’t think for themselves and become “ruined by reading” (ibid.). Instead, we should react “slowly to all types of stimuli”, scrutinising what comes near, not going to meet it (p. 77).
His reading habits developed over time from the traditional works appropriate to his aspirations of becoming a minister then philologist, to become “highly creative but also highly selective” (Sommer 2019, 38). His training allowed him to “be extremely attentive to detail, but he preferred to look for a bigger picture” (p. 41). He rarely read solely for entertainment: fiction for him was a source of material for philosophical reflection (p. 46).
According to Sommer, “When Nietzsche read, he read in order to think and write. When he did not, he also did so in order to be able to think and write” (p. 47). Nietzsche’s perfect reader is “a monster of courage and curiosity, who is also supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer” (Nietzsche 2007, 103).