Leggere Edith Wharton

So Many Books

The Vice of Reading

by Stefanie in Essays, Nineteenth Century

published in theNorth American Review, October, 1903.
In the essay Wharton differentiates between two kinds of readers, the mechanical reader and the intuitive reader. The intuitive reader is the reader who was “born to read,” the good reader, the one who understands books and learns from books, the one for whom “reading forms a continuous undercurrent to all his other occupations.” For the born reader, reading is not a vice. Wharton has her beef with the mechanical reader.
Mechanical readers are the ones that read the books that everyone else is reading. They are also the ones who read because they think ey ought to and they deliberately undertake reading for the purpose of being able to pass opinions and display how culturally with it they are. These are poor readers because they don’t know how to read and often don’t understand what they read. If these readers just stuck to reading the mediocre trash that they seem to like so well, then everything would be fine. But they don’t and because they don’t they pose a menace to Literature.
Mechanical readers are like tourists “who drive from one ‘sight’ to another without looking at anything that is not set down in Baedeker.” The delights of allusions and turns of phrase are lost on them. For these readers
The menace mechanical readers pose to literature is fourfold:
Because mechanical readers are most satisfied with mediocre writing, they facilitate the careers of mediocre authors. Not only does this allow people who shouldn’t be writing to write, but it keeps those who do have creative talent from being encouraged to reach their full potential.“Secondly, by his passion for “popular” renderings of abstruse and difficult subjects, by confounding the hastiest rechauffe of scientific truisms with the slowly-matured conceptions of the original thinker, he retards true culture and lessens the possible amount of really abiding work.”
The mechanical reader has the habit of confusing moral and intellectual judgments. He cannot separate and grasp the difference between the portrayal of life and incidents in the book from the “author’s sense of their significance.”
The mechanical reader’s “demand for peptonized literature” has created the mechanical critic who simply summarizes the plot and calls it a day instead of doing any kind of thoughtful analysis.
Wharton’s snobbery in the essay is both appalling and amusing. Perhaps I am mistaken, but I get the sense that she doesn’t believe that poor readers can, with practice become good readers. You can either read or you can’t and if you can’t then you shouldn’t. Not very democratic.Read the essay when you have a free 15-20 minutes. I’m pretty sure Wharton meant every word, but part of me wonders if she isn’t writing tongue in cheek. Your thoughts and opinions welcome.