The Common Reader

Stray thoughts on reading and readers

By Carl Spitzweg

There has been a lot of hullabaloo about the reading habits of Indians. A piece in a British newspaper offended some people in an Indian magazine, which in turn offended hundred other people while the tally of the originally offended kept soaring. It was all very interesting to follow. In a trendy debate, all parties make grave errors but they are still of great value because they leave room for more. This debate made me think not about whether India reads for pleasure, but who indeed is a common reader today. What are the characteristics of people who read for pleasure?

Since I am not a newspaper, I don’t have to pretend to be objective or bring in some socio-political angle to it. My sample space consists of people I see around myself.

There’s a short essay by an author called Virginia Woolf in which she tries to define the common reader. She must have written it some time in the 1910s. It is titled The Common Reader. After accounting for the inconsistencies of her day-and-age from mine, I found the essay quite useful to define the traits of a common reader for myself. Unsurprisingly, I found that the portrait looked very much like myself. Here is the essay - The Common Reader.

It is the second paragraph of the essay that piqued my interest. I will pick the relevant sentences to try and make sense of what she is trying to say. Every sentence defines the characteristics of the common reader.

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously.

Calling him worse educated is a bit unkind to the common reader who does not have the critical faculty that learned critics or scholars are supposed to have. I’m sure it would not have sounded unkind in her day-and-age. Education and class were more inseparable back then than they are today.

In today’s parlance this would be the reader who is worse educated in literature, which in India sounds more like a compliment. A person who is in a position to read for pleasure is likely to be formally educated in something far more useful than literature. He does not know or care about critical theory and, frankly, he doesn’t need to. All this is academic mumbo-jumbo to him.

The second statement nature has not gifted him so generously should be qualified by saying that nature has not gifted him so generously with circumstances that would compel him to read. For example, he might not have grown up in a household that valued reading. Interest in reading is not something organic. It is cultivated. It takes time. Time that could have been spent, quite justifiably, in securing his financial future instead of reading ‘the great works of literature’.

He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.

In Woolf’s time, the distribution of knowledge would not have been as democratic as it is today. To impart knowledge and correct opinions would have required some rigour and immense amount of luck to get through the gatekeepers. Today, sharing is much easier. Part of the pleasure of reading is to share your opinion with others, to talk about it. Imparting and correcting are strong words but sharing knowledge and shaping opinion is something the common reader today would not shy away from doing. Not out of any academic obligation but out of sheer pleasure.

Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.

To create for himself…some kind of a whole. This statement can directly be transported from Woolf’s day-and-age to mine, without any ifs and buts. It rings true also because it is generic. A reader trying to create some kind of a whole for himself can mean anything.

This can be paraphrased to say that the reader is guided by the instinct to fill some gap in his perception of the world. But what makes this reader believe that reading fills some kind of a gap? What powers this instinct?

To start with, the sheer volume of positive publicity reading has been getting from successful people. Or the people he is supposed to look up to. I have never heard anyone talk negatively about reading. A positively proud non-reader exists only as an exception. Naturally, this leads to the belief that reading is useful in some form. It fills some gaps. But reputation is a fickle thing. It cannot survive the test of time unless it is backed by some evidence.

Which brings me to the second reason for why the common reader believes reading fills some kind of a gap or helps create some kind of a whole — the payoff reading gives is of a different illusive kind. The aha moment when a phrase or a line hits him is much sweeter than what he gets, say, from watching an animal dance on its head in a reel. Probably because there is some effort required to access the payoff from reading.

The common reader is the one who has experienced this payoff; this illusive moment; this, for lack of a better expression, pleasure of comprehension. The pursuit of this hit is what keeps the common reader going. Exactly like an addict.

Virginia Woolf’s attempt at defining some kind of a whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing — is like a smoker saying that he smokes to keep his bowel movements stable. We all know that it’s the nicotine hit, not good shit, that makes him smoke. There is no whole to be defined or gap to be filled.

It should be pointed out that reading is mostly pleasureless work punctuated by these intense payoffs. For example, I am blown away by some piece of text not more than once or twice a week but the hours spent reading to arrive at it feel worthwhile. As is true for most substances, people find roundabout ways to justify their addiction to it.

So, the image of the common reader in today’s age seems to be something like this — he is not formally educated in literature; he is not interested in correcting opinions but doesn’t shy away from exchanging thoughts about things he and others are reading; and he is addicted to the payoff one gets from reading and is likely to go chasing it again and again.

As I mentioned earlier, this reader sounds quite familiar. I might as well be introducing myself instead of taking a roundabout route of defining the common reader. It sounds egoistic but it also absolves me of the crime of generalisation. This is my bowel movement argument. The real reason I wrote this essay is to imagine myself as the subject of a Virginia Woolf essay.

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