Reading matters

Reading can help you to live longer. And I don’t mean reading all those bogus ads about colon cleansing, magnetic therapy, reflexology, herbal treatments, and so on: in fact, if you’re dumb enough to read only such crap, reading will confer absolutely no benefits upon you. What I’m talking about is the strong correlation researchers have found between a person’s level of education and how well they age. Neurologist David Snowdon, in his book Aging with Grace, says there is a “clear link between higher education and healthy function in later life… the protective effects of education seemed to start early and last throughout life.” If this is true, then reading my columns might actually help you stay healthy. (You can send your cheques in the mail.)

Snowdon’s team found that a key factor in growing old gracefully had to do with “idea density,” which they measured by their subjects’ vocabulary and reading comprehension. Since their subjects were all nuns, a group chosen so as to limit environmental variables, Snowdon notes that “this was further evidence that the connection to growing old gracefully could not simply be attributed to differences in health-related behaviours, income, or access to health care.” And, of course, the best way to develop vocabulary and reading comprehension in children is to read to them. JK Rowling and her Harry Potter books may thus have brought great health benefits, as well as great pleasure, to kids around the world. And the lesson there is that, if we want to get young people to read, we have to use storybooks and novels. Neuropsychologist Antonio Damasio, in his book The Feeling of What Happens, writes, “A natural preverbal occurrence of storytelling may well be the reason why we ended up creating drama and eventually books, and why a good part of humanity is currently hooked on movie theatres and television screens.”

I also have this theory that people who read fiction can, in a certain sense, live more fully than those who don’t. This is because reading fiction allows you to live many lives in the span of one lifetime; and this process can broaden your sympathies and so help make you a more civilised human being. Damasio also describes discoveries about how language functions in particular areas of the brain. “The creative ‘languaged’ mind is prone to indulge in fiction. Perhaps the most important revelation in human split-brain research is precisely this: that the left cerebral hemisphere of humans is prone to fabricating verbal narratives that do not necessarily accord with the truth.” It is the right hemisphere which prevents this process from spinning out of control, by detecting inconsistencies: interestingly, this hemisphere also controls more subtle aspects of language, such as metaphor, allegory, and ambiguity.

In my view, this resolves a central paradox of fiction-writing: why real writers must always be stern disciples of truth. Creating fiction in a formal structure trains you to seek truth. In Beyond Belief, VS Naipaul writes, “Good or valuable writing is more than a technical skill; it depends on a certain moral wholeness in the writer. The writer who lines up with any big public cause like communism or Islam, with its pronounced taboos, has very soon to falsify. The writer who lies is betraying his calling; only the second-rate do that.” This, I think, is why there are no great — or even good — writers who are religious fundamentalists, political fanatics, or militant feminists. The literary critic Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, makes a related point about the greatest writer of all: “Part of the secret of Shakespeare’s canonical centrality is his disinterestedness; despite all the flailings of New Historicists and other Resenters, Shakespeare is almost as free of ideology as are his heroic wits: Hamlet, Rosalind, Falstaff. He has no theology, no metaphysics, no ethics, and rather less political theory than is brought to him by his current critics.”

Let me emphasise, though, that none of this means that every avid reader is necessarily more truthful or less self-absorbed than a non-reader: as literature professor Selwyn Cudjoe and newspaper columnist Jaye-Q Baptiste demonstrate. But a society in which reading is culturally approved is almost certainly going to be superior to a society where reading books for pleasure is considered mooksy. But, in trying to get young — and even old — people to read, we collide with this paradox: the most effective way to promote a love of reading is through fiction, but the powers-that-be  never really want people absorbing the ideas of good writers. In The Death of Literature, humanities scholar Alvin Kernan writes, “Only the societies of the modern Western world have been wealthy, confident and tolerant enough to support institutions like literature whose raison d’?tre has been to criticise the established social order and its central values. In more traditional societies, all institutions function strictly as legitimators of the existing order, and even in modern Western societies other institutions, like religion, the media and the law, that to some degree criticise the establishment, always end as the stoutest defenders of the status quo, revealing weakness only to preserve strength.”

A recent statement about reading by the Education Wife-of-the-Prime Minister, Hazel Manning, reflects the typically utilitarian view of politicians. Speaking on a plan to have a Master Teacher in Reading in every school, Mrs Manning said that this would “drastically reduce and eventually nullify the effects of reading failure that pose a threat to the well-being of our national community…” I wonder, though: if our political leaders had to choose between illiteracy or implementing the ideas of Naipaul, CLR James and Derek Walcott, which would they consider the greater threat to the nation’s well-being? I offer two points: first, it was Patrick Manning who refused to give the Trinidad Theatre Workshop a home after Walcott won the Nobel Prize in 1992; and, two, Mrs Manning falls into that category of reader disparaged by Mark Twain: “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t.”

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
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