Book review: 'Reading Literature Today'

Book: Reading Literature Today
Author: Tabish Khair and Sébastien Doubinsky
Publisher: Sage Publications
Pages: 166
Price: Rs295

Reading Literature Today, by Tabish Khair and Sébastien Doubinsky, both academics and novelists, is exactly what the title suggests. Comprised of “two complementary essays and a conversation,” this book examines the experience of the reader at a time when, as Khair describes, “publishing companies suffer from a strange combination of the democratic values of the Left and the market ethos of the Right,” when books are valued and judged by the numbers they sell.

Literature, Khair contends, is that which pushes up against the limits of language and expresses meaning in gaps and silences. Literature, for the authors of this book, struggles to communicate where language fails; what words cannot directly say. Yet many of the novels produced today, and those that are perceived as the most successful, no longer strive to engage and challenge the reader but instead aim to provide a “feel-good experience.” Yann Martel’s Life Of Pi and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Khair asserts, are such novels — products of a time that privilege the first world reader.

The multiculturalism these books assert is deeply troubling in its blandness, historical inaccuracies and failure to engage with those inaccuracies, and such novels have bred a generation of lazy readers. Khair looks to older novels — Heart Of Darkness, Kim and Passage To India — products of a colonial era, and finds in these novels the literature he seeks — for Kipling, despite his imperial prejudices and  racist and colonialist mentality that Khair believes Conrad betrays in his novel, these works still struggle to evoke a truth that transcends such distinctions.

Fiction when read, Doubinsky writes, citing recent scientific studies, is assimilated by the brain as ‘real experience’ and is akin to memory — and Doubinsky uses this as a springing point to embark on an exploration of Proust, Baudelaire, Rimbaud. He parallels the process of reading and of the interaction between reader and text to Quantum physics — “Reading is an action that has to be considered as a relative action...like in quantum physics when particles are subjects to different systems at the same time, particle physics and wave physics...

The position of the reader is therefore essential for reading theory. One has to admit that the position of the reader will in one way, or another, determine the nature of the text, but that the text in itself is indeterminable.”

Reading Literature Today concludes with a transcript of a conversation between the authors that strives to bridge their conceptions and recap their arguments. This book suggests that the prevailing state of literature is degenerative and stagnant due to the concerns of commercial mass market publishing, and hence Reading Literature Today appears as a manifesto for what is wrong and needs to be remedied with the state of contemporary literature.

But, it strikes me that if Khair and Doubinsky had looked further afield, they might have found the resistant, demanding literature they sought in the genre-fiction — and surprisingly, this literature sells too. To provide a case in point Doubinsky invokes the Bouroughisian notion of ‘language as a virus’ in his essays — and Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash and Geoff Ryman’s The Child Garden both experiment very differently with this idea. I suspect Khair’s ideal contemporary novel is the one he has already written: The Thing About Thugs. And although it is a fine novel, Khair’s understanding of literature reads like a manifesto, and leaves no space for reading as an escape or aesthetic pleasure, or adventure.