The Pleasures of Aimless Reading

This is what we like to call a “metaphor in a box”. Just add water and poof instant thematic resonance.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m spending a the biggest chunk of my summer “research time” working on a small chapter (or, to be fancy, an “interchapter”) on the Anglo-Irish Philosopher/Novelist Iris Murdoch, for inclusion in my dissertation-cum-book on Kierkegaard and British literature. Unlike a lot of the other work I have to do to get the manuscript ready to submit to presses, this interchapter is not revision or polishing, but a fresh start in largely unknown territory. While I have more familiarity with Iris Murdoch’s work than, say, 99% of the population of the world, I need to bump that up to a nice, round 99.99% before I actually sit down to write.

So far I have actually done the most important work for the chapter, which is reading the Murdoch novel that I knew would be most critical for making my case: The Black Prince, about which I’m absolutely ecstatic. It’s the sort of book that reminds me why I got into this crazy game in the first place (takes long drag on cigarette). Next comes the rather longer and, to be frank, less pleasurable process of trawling through critical apparati to find what other scholars have said about Murdoch, especially in regard to the things I want to talk about. There’s very little on Murdoch and Kierkegaard (which is good for me), but lots on her approach to art, the philosophical novel, her interest in other thinkers (especially Plato) and more that I have to wade through to make sure I’m making the best, most nuanced argument possible.

On occasion I like reading critical writing on authors I study — on very rare occasions I even find it revelatory — but there’s another task I have before me that will almost certainly prove more useful and personally rewarding: the task of making my way, in a mostly aimless way, through more of Murdoch’s novels. Now, I won’t read all of her novels. She wrote 26, after all, and unlike the other acerbic British woman novelist in my dissertation, Muriel Spark, whose books rarely clock in over 200 pages, Murdoch’s tend to be in the 300-400 page range (a quick brag: I have read all 22 of Spark’s novels, and you should too). If I had but world enough and time, I surely would, but for now I’ll have to make do with a sampling.

I call this stage aimless reading because I’ll do it largely at whim and at the mercy of my institution’s library and Interlibrary Loan. I knew heading into this process that The Black Prince was a must read for what I’m trying to say about Murdoch’s relation to Kierkegaard, but having done that bit of targeted, intentional close reading (I have 8 full pages in a Word document that’s filled solely with quotes I pulled from the book as potentially important), it’s time for me to be a bit more aimless. That means I likely won’t take notes from any of the novels I read, unless I stumble across something so critical that my chapter would be complete without it.

So what am I “aiming” to accomplish with this “aimless reading”? I’m not looking for fodder for the chapter, though as I said I’ll collect any Pearls of Great Price I stumble over along the way. I do aimless reading specifically to combat a great temptation that faces many scholars, and certainly me: the desire to hammer away at texts to make them yield what we want them to yield. This transactional approach to literature rubs me the wrong way, because it suggests that Murdoch’s value to me lies in how well her writing conforms to my preconceived notions about her work. Such an approach, which is sadly all too common, is, at the very least, an unethical way to approach reading, especially when the reading involves an author as vibrant and variegated in her thoughts and words as Murdoch. To read a great writer’s books is to come upon a vast breathing thing, or perhaps an underground fungal network spread across miles and miles.

So I’ll read these novels of Murdoch’s, whichever I pick up (I do have one or two asterisked as especially relevant for reasons of theme and composition date, but beyond these I just plan to graze widely), with an eye to gaining texture, nothing more. The more I read of an author, the better I understand where she comes from, what matters to her, and how she develops over the course of her career. Whether or not I find quotes to mine, ideas to probe, or characters to taxonomize for my actual research, I’ll approach that research, when I do, better equipped to give a fair, nuanced accounting of Murdoch.

A theme I’ve unintentionally developed as I’ve started blogging about thoughts and thinking is that of unintended consequences. When we set out to form and forge ideas, often the small incidentals we carry with us have an outsized impact on the final product. In research, sometimes phrases I pick up from one author, who has no explicit connection to the topic at hand, bounce around and give critical insight into what I am writing about. Sometimes it is those apparently fallow moments — showering, playing with my children, washing dishes — that yield the most vibrant thoughts. The impact of unintentional elements applies in a big way to aimless reading. When we approach a text simply to experience it, not to strip mine it, we have an openness that allows us to experience surprise.

I’ve focused on the research benefits of aimless reading here, naturally. But there are also personal benefits. Sometimes, when I’ve felt burned out on literature as a discipline, I’ve found myself revived not by some grand towering novel of flawless aesthetic merit, but by a breezed through detective novel, or even a work of history that illuminates some new-to-me period or experience (I’ll never forget the exhilarating feeling of reading The Farthest Shore, about the colonization of my homeland of Australia, or Parting the Waters, the first volume in Taylor Branch’s epic history of the Civil Rights struggle). Aimless reading, picked up on a whim and followed without prejudice wherever it leads, brings me back again and again to literature’s deep, abiding attractions.