(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Oscar Wilde was an Irish author, poet, and playwright.
When he worked as a literary critic he contrasted his approach with that of his peers who were “reduced to be the reporters of the police-court of literature” (Wilde 1997, 47). These “poor reviewers” read merely to report facts and describe details, and they read the whole book (ibid.). This is the conventional approach to reading: to follow a proscribed path through a book, then report on the content—to our self or others. Wilde rejected this conception.
Reading a book fully is a waste of time even for a critic because, once you develop taste and an instinct for form, you can say what a book is worth in ten minutes—half an hour at most (pp. 47–48). But Wilde’s concern isn’t time management or writing reviews. A critic, for him, is an artist who creates their own work in response to another. And to respond to a book we need not read it fully, nor should we, because doing so can impair our creativity. It’s on creativity that Wilde’s philosophy of reading hinges: using literature to fuel our own creations. This is a general principle of how we can engage with a work of art: “as simply a suggestion for a new work” of our own, which needn’t bear any obvious resemblance to the original (p. 70). Criticism is a record of the critic’s soul, concerned only with their moods and passions, and if we read in this spirit we are all critics (p. 63). Merely reporting on, or passively receiving, dull volumes leads one to misanthropy; we owe to history a duty to re-write it (p. 50).
“The world is made by the singer for the dreamer”, and reading as a dreamer is Wilde’s prescription (p. 56). We appreciate these songs because of our temperament, not because we were taught to. Advising people what to read is, therefore, useless or harmful because it won’t engender an appreciation for literature (Wilde 1968, 3). Accordingly, when he suggested dividing books into three classes—those to read, those to reread, and those not to read at all—he focused particularly on the third category, which included “all argumentative books and all books that try to prove anything” (ibid.). He further disliked works that are so literal or intelligible they set definite bounds to the imagination. What use are these to the creative? We should reject works that “have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile” (Wilde 1997, 74–75). We should cast aside dull texts that offer obvious, unambiguous meanings, in favour of those which “posses the subtle quality of suggestion” (p. 73). Art becomes complete in its beauty through its very incompleteness, and so is known through only our aesthetic sense, not our faculties of recognition or reason (pp. 71, 74). The dreamer fills in the blanks with their imagination. Just as they don’t read to report, they don’t read the mere reports of others.
They read, instead, works of imaginative literature because these “make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final” (pp. 74–75). For Wilde, the meaning of a book is as at least as much in the reader as the author (p. 68). The highest criticism “does not confine itself…to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final” (ibid.). To truly understand Shakespeare, for instance, requires the critic to “bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world” (pp. 80–81). This interpretation is necessary, but not in the service of “treating Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed” (p. 82). Rather, we can interpret a book to the extent that we can intensify our personality: the more strongly our personality is expressed, the more real, satisfying, convincing, and true is our criticism (ibid.). Or, “There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies” (p. 85).
Reading and personal identity are closely linked, then: we read to express ourselves, to create ourselves. But to become self cultured we must also practice scholarship (p. 112). This brings us back to the experienced critic being able to judge a work in ten minutes: they develop their faculty of aesthetic judgement. We educate ourselves in this way by seeking “beauty in every age and in each school”, while avoiding limiting our search with prejudice, stereotypes, or custom (p. 125). This means, firstly, remembering that “the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate”: books are neither moral nor immoral; they’re merely written well or poorly (pp. 229, 126). More generally, we limit our growth as readers when we lack sufficient examples with which to compare and contrast what we read. We refine our taste when we read broadly, diversely, with reflective discernment and “disinterested curiosity” (p. 106). We realise a contemplative, creative life in this way because “To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own” (pp. 113, 121–122). To “understand others you must intensify your individualism” and remain “curious of new sensations and fresh points of view” (pp. 83, 125). The beauty of literature is found in how it allows us to understand and express ourselves through its contemplation.
For Wilde, we read as a pretext for writing our autobiography. We may have no desire whatsoever to produce a concrete work of art, but we are already such a work and we are the artist. Our experiences with other artworks can inspire us and stimulate our imaginations, suggesting ways that we can become more self-cultured and complete. If our aesthetic experience affects who we become, however, we must ensure that it is diverse and does not congeal into narrow, stagnant niches. We must read broadly to become well-rounded, and this requires that as we search for beauty we hone our ability to judge what’s worth dreaming about, and what should be confidently rejected. We become more individual, more intense, a better book, when we read in the spirit of writing our own story.