(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Woolf was an English author and literary critic.
Independence is the reader’s vital quality: “take no advice, … follow your own instincts, … use your own reason, … come to your own conclusions” (Woolf 1960, 234). From Woolf, a Bloomsbury individualist, a feminist denied the university education of her male peers, this defence of the “common reader” is passionate: “literature both past and present must rest in the hands of the people who continue to read it” (Woolf 1979). Our “spirit of freedom” is destroyed by allowing authorities to “tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read” (Woolf 1960, 234). So, in How Should One Read a Book? Woolf eschews dogmatism, and could well be asking this question of herself.
Before we read, she suggests, we should open our minds as wide as can, attempting to banish the preconceptions we have of fiction being true, poetry, false, biography, flattering, etc (p. 235). By criticising too early we deprive ourselves of the “fullest possible value” of what we read (ibid.). Woolf exhorts the reader: “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice” (ibid.).
Reading authors’ biographies and memoirs can help “light up the many windows of the past; we can watch the famous dead in their familiar habits and fancy sometimes that we are very close and can surprise their secrets”, then read their work and ask whether it reads differently (p. 238). But it is up to us to decide how much credence to give to an interpretation of the author, and to what extent we should allow our sympathies and antipathies toward the author to influence our reading (pp. 238–239).
These genres can increase our familiarity with authors, but also exercise our creativity (p. 239). Woolf describes as “rubbish reading” the scavenging of a literature’s rubbish heap—“its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished”—to “find rings and scissors and broken noses buried in the huge past and try to piece them together” (ibid.). These “relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder” can overcome the reader: sentences can suggest vistas, visions, that can absorb us as if written by a great novelist (ibid.). Reading these lesser books, or even “rubbish”, can be absorbing, but is ultimately negligible: we come to tire of it because such authors “lack the artist’s power of mastering and eliminating” (pp. 239–240).
To better understand this power, “what a novelist is doing”, another creative approach to understanding is to experiment with the dangers and difficulties of writing (p. 235). The time to read poetry is when we can almost write it (p. 240).
In the first phase of the reading process we receive impressions with an understanding, open mind: we are sympathetic and friendly to the author (p. 241). But when we read we cannot sympathise or immerse ourselves entirely because “there is always a demon in us who whispers, and we cannot silence him”, and “we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it” (p. 243). Instead, the demon must be educated: we train our taste to develop our critical faculty. This is the second phase of the reading process: we judge severely the impressions which we receive (p. 242).
Continuing “reading without the book before you” helps solidify these fleeting impressions we receive in the first phase (pp. 242–3). It occurs indirectly, after we’ve finished with the book and had chance to reflect (p. 242). This is indirect because (ibid.):
the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in separate phrases. Details now fit themselves into their places. We see the shape from start to finish.
As our taste develops we become better at recognising these shapes. Having lasciviously consumed books of all types, pausing to observe the incongruity of the world, our taste begins to change, becoming less greedy and more reflective (p. 243). It draws our attention to qualities common to certain books: if we listen, we hear it say “what shall we call this” (ibid.)? We learn to judge: to classify, to pinpoint value, to locate where it succeeds and fails (ibid.). We’re led beyond the book we’re reading to more general qualities that group it with others. We give these names and infer rules which order our perceptions, and as our faculty of discrimination becomes keener, we feel pleasure (p. 244).
Criticism is the comparison of “each book with the greatest of its kind” (p. 242). When we do this with new titles, their novelty is only a superficial quality, meaning that we need only slightly alter the standards we derived from the old (ibid.). Making illuminating comparisons requires reading widely and with sufficient understanding: to properly do justice to a book is a complex art involving imagination, insight, and judgement in their rarest form (pp. 243–4).
It may be tempting to allow the professional critic to do this work, to “decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us”, but this is impossible because our relationship to literature is so intimate, so personal (p. 243). The role of the critic is to “light up and solidify the vague ideas that have been tumbling in the misty depths of our minds” (p. 244). We can only understand their judgements that conflict with, and vanquish, our own, which means that we must come to them with questions and notions we developed honestly by reading alone (ibid.). Critics “can do nothing for us if we herd ourselves under their authority and lie down like sheep in the shade of a hedge” (ibid.). Professional criticism, therefore, is useful to the extent that we have already critiqued a book ourselves, compared it with others, and generated questions. We retain our independence as readers, honour our responsibilities, by coming to the critic with our reflections, and using the criticism to develop our taste further.
Opinions of people reading slowly, for the love of it, with both great sympathy and severity, contribute to the standards set for current authors (pp. 244–5). Despite not reading with an end in mind, ordinary readers may nevertheless influence writers to create stronger, richer, and more varied work (p. 245). This is, however, just a fortunate side effect of our reading: ultimately reading is a pursuit of good in itself, a pleasure that is final (ibid.).