Differing Responses
Dear Reader,
I’ve long thought that intellectual problems are best found by reflection upon every day life. Not in an armchair philosophy sense—though that’s fine so far as it goes—but rather from a serious engagement with the world in front of us.
For example, one really starts to care about good argumentation because one has either encountered poor arguments before or noted how good arguments improve understanding (and relationships). One really starts to care about ethics when one has made several “ethical” decisions and wonders what ethical thinking actually led to such decisions—were they really ethical or just an inherited, cultural memory of certain moral mores?
Today’s topic isn’t quite so deep as those. And it’s a rather ticklish one, not least because I still haven’t written about recommending reads to others—among other reasons because I can’t decide if recommending reads to others should be a one-part or ten-part topic. (Among the difficulties: I have a reputation for being good at the recommendation game, but I also fail miserably at it like everyone else, for reasons of poor focus, hubris, and sheer human folly. My reputation is, I think, earned, but human frailty is undefeated in terms of error. Even skilled recommenders flail about on occasion—though I think inattention, however triggered, is the root cause of their failings.)
Ticklish or not, I’m pressing forward with today’s topic. It’s on the matter of having a different response to a read than your friend. Perhaps it’s one you recommended to them; perhaps it’s one that a mutual friend recommended to you both; perhaps it’s a classic that you agreed to read together, for motivation.
Whatever the reason the reading is in the other person’s hands, you find yourselves appreciating it differently.
Now, I was inspired to write today’s piece by a tweet from a Dominican friar, Innocent Smith OP:
“I think it’s interesting how we often want to try to convince people that something we love is good, without trusting that its beauty has an attractive and convicting power of its own.”
As I noted to him, it’s often hard to get people to even try that “something we love,” so some of that worry about convincing may stem from that. And I must admit that I am personally suspicious of all lavish recommendations.
Still, there’s something else in that quote beyond the recommendation difficulty, and that’s what inspired today’s piece: why do we so unyieldingly attempt to convince people of the goodness of something they’ve read when they haven’t found the same magic we did?
I’ll be blunt: I don’t think that we should. I don’t think it’s convincing. We probably further convince ourselves, but I don’t think we actually convince our friends. If anything, we further convince them that they don’t love it.
To use an analogous situation, a friend and I have quite similar tastes in movies and literature, departing here and there, but sharing more than not sharing. And together we watched The Man Who Knew Too Little—that is not a typo, aspiring film buffs—a movie I grew up adoring and one she’d never seen. We watched it in different states, which is mostly good because then she wasn’t faced with the pressure of my constant “isn’t this movie great?” (For the record, at least one prominent film critic has it listed in her top ten films of all time, and I will not quibble with this designation.) When we’d finished it, my friend said, “Well, I like it, but not as much as you do.” She wasn’t upset, as she had been entertained, but she also isn’t planning on watching it once a year, which I obviously am. And that’s totally fine. Instead of my trying to explain to her why it was the greatest film ever—I wouldn’t actually go that far, but it’s a joy—I acknowledged why I enjoyed it and we moved on to other films and conversations.
So that’s all well and good, but sometimes people don’t get a read because they’ve missed some essential background piece of information. Filling in such background information is, in fact, the exact territory of the teacher, and it’s occasionally the territory of a friend, though with friends it’s much trickier to navigate.
The problem with needing to fill in background information: it typically works about as well as explaining a joke. In fact, sometimes you have to fill in background knowledge to literally explain the joke, the wicked humor in the story or essay. As we all know, if you have to explain the joke…
Yet developing readers do require that explanation. And sometimes our friends or colleagues need it, at least so they don’t consider us completely batty. Teaching, yes, has a slightly different aspect to it, but there’s some overlap between the scenarios—just don’t assume the overlap is that you need to “learn” your friends and colleagues. The overlap is otherwise, and most definitely not that.
Where the overlap most importantly exists is the manner in which we approach explaining what we found beautiful, what we found good, what we found true. We can either tell others, “this is what I found of significance,” which is perfectly idiosyncratic and—unless you have really bad friends—totally acceptable, or hector others with “I can’t believe you missed the treasure in this and let me tell you why you’re wrong,” which makes you the bad friend.
Now, I realize there’s friendly banter over taste and so on. Banter away. Just remember where the line is between bantering and hectoring, especially when you’re mid-banter.
When you’re working with students, however, and when you actually want to get into “the convicting power of beauty” with those of your acquaintance, then the bantering and hectoring don’t work. What works, and is also in good taste, is to tell your friends what specifically you found of such truth or beauty in what you read.
While truth and beauty might be universal, that’s probably only in the Platonic sense of the Forms. Maybe we encounter a few universals in the here and now, but I think most of our experience of good things is personal. Yes, taste can be developed and so on and so forth, but it’s actually okay if people don’t appreciate everything I appreciate. (I’m forced to maintain this stance not least to remain consistent with my refusal to try out The Great Gatsby.)
All of that said, it does matter why someone dislikes something. Not in the accusatory sense, but sometimes people “miss the joke” or can’t appreciate the read because they just need some help seeing what you saw. (Or they may have no sense of humor, as is the case of a certain four teens from last summer who most churlishly couldn’t appreciate the genius of Jack Handey’s Deep Thoughts.)
Why dislike has emerged is particularly important for developing readers, when considered in the context of instruction. In fact, for developing readers “dislike” is often the wrong term; even more common is plain old ambivalence, but it’s ambivalence caused by a genuine lack of understanding.
The key thing is, again, that you explain what you found of significance, instead of universalizing your own experience to everyone. Not everyone enjoys Harry Potter. Very well. When you explain why you enjoy Harry Potter, you’ll be describing what you found of significance, because, even if Harry Potter is universally to be lauded (I think that’s an excessive conditional, personally), your experience of it is not.
Aside from the inspiring tweet from Friar Smith, this topic specifically came to mind in two contexts. The first context was working with students last week.
One student’s experience of “Pay Attention!” had been an ambivalent one, which, to be fair, wasn’t much weaker than my first read of it. Given that I’d assigned the essay primarily to develop her familiarity with pop science, we needed to go through the essay regardless. But which lens I chose to analyze the essay mattered. I wasn’t hoping to persuade that it was the greatest essay ever, even if many of my students have had that reaction. My task was merely to demonstrate some of the interesting rhetorical things it does, ones I appreciate, certainly, but ones that are there irrespective of my own appreciation.
As I’ve written, “Pay Attention!” is a piece that benefits from the re-read. It doesn’t need to be re-read, by any stretch, but it’s one you can re-read as a writer and one you can read for pure fun. (I’ll note that there aren’t too many reads that even I consider pure fun.) In discussing it with my student, I wasn’t attempting to convince her that the piece is world class: I simply highlighted the necessary instructional bits and noted that they were why I consider it to be world class. And I did not ask her whether she now found it world class herself, post our discussion. That wasn’t our purpose in exploring it.
Of course, I had a similar experience with several students last week involving the punchline of an older short story, “The Law.” The story has a comical premise at its core, but the comedy involves an error of reasoning and mathematics that most students don’t immediately recognize. (While perhaps not intended as a fable with a moral, “The Law” definitely hits those notes.)
Once students recognized the outlandish premise, they could appreciate the story. Before they understood that one little piece of information, which is the sole reason the story works, they had all found the story ambivalent. (So they told me. I think it more likely that they were completely bored by it. I certainly would have been.)
Teachers of any stripe definitely have a tough job, but confusing their appreciation of a text with a universal appreciation for that text is among the reasons that reluctant readers exist. Once students (or friends…) realize that another person’s experience doesn’t translate to their experience, they can tune out and also think that reading isn’t for them. Telling others why you appreciate a text is good; telling others they should also appreciate that text (and essentially for the same reasons…) is ineffective in practice and also ill-mannered.
The other context in which this theme came up is on the matter of book reviews. If you recall, I’ve written in this space that I don’t read like a book critic. And I don’t write book reviews.
Well, I still don’t read like a book critic, but I’ve had a book review requested of me. It appears that Stephen Booth’s Precious Nonsense will be re-released.
In a different setting, I made the mistake of commenting on how much I’ve appreciated that book. An editor of Plough Quarterly promptly requested I write a review of it. And I don’t know how.
I don’t know how because it’s one of my favorite books, but it’s one of my favorites for an odd list of reasons that won’t really help anyone else, particularly if they don’t know me.
And I frequently teach that book because of what it does for students, not because they’ll find themselves loving it. Most don’t. A few find themselves liking it. Maybe one has loved it.
All of that is fine. As my students know, I assign the book for reasons that we discuss together, and those reasons aren’t “I love this book so you must love this book.” And almost all of them end up respecting the read for its technical aspects (I suspect one or two will despise it until they die, though those students would detest anything I put in front of them, so I’m perfectly unperturbed by their distaste.)
My difficulty in writing a review is that I can perfectly well explain to students why a book is beneficial even if they don’t love it; I can perfectly well explain why I love the book; I can’t quite fathom how to write about my own love for the book in a book review. If you recall from above, I’m suspicious myself of lavish recommendations.
If I pull off the review, however, it’ll be only because I’ve figured out how to talk about why I appreciate Precious Nonsense without reaching the demanding cultish vibe of “You all must join me!” That is, my review must allow for them to have a different response to Booth’s scholarship than my own. (That said, I’ve coerced several in that journal’s orbit into a reading group for Precious Nonsense, starting with the preface upon its January release. If I’m stuck writing a review, they have to read the book. Fair’s fair.)
So, aside from the fact that all of you can now quite gleefully hold me accountable to what I’ve written above, the important consideration from this piece is how you approach the conversation post-read—when your friends, co-workers, or students don’t love the read like you do.
When we find that someone we’re talking with doesn’t like a particular read as much as we did, we can explain why we enjoyed it. Our own joy isn’t coercive. And that matters when we find our reading experiences inspire differing responses.
Happy reading and conversing,
Kreigh
P.S. Yes, this was later in the week than I wanted. I’ll have a shorter one out tomorrow, one that was already planned as this week’s second. Today’s piece isn’t quite right, but it would require another month to figure out what’s structurally amiss, and I already have several in that group to wrestle with…