- In chapter 32 of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré tells the story of a man who had been a political prisoner in a distant country for three years, and who knew that he might be killed whenever the captors felt like it. Once in a while they'd toss some old paperback book into the cell, and he'd read it over and over as an antidote to a certain portion of his fear and suffering.#
- When le Carré met this man, he knew none of this, and he didn't know that one of the books that the captors tossed into his cell was le Carré's own bleak novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. These occasional books offered the prisoner a feeling of joyous liberation of a certain kind.#
- Later the man wrote The Dark Room at Longwood, a biography of the years in which the former French emperor Napoleon had been exiled and imprisoned. If anyone could evoke the feelings of imprisonment, le Carré notes, it might be this author, Jean-Paul Kauffmann. #
- Near the end of chapter, le Carré establishes contact with Kauffmann after many years to ask about his experience as a reader in prison. In a return email, Kauffmann speaks again of the immense joy that certain books brought him in his captivity. But he notes something very interesting about le Carré's book, which he had read before. le Carré's novel was now for him transformed.#
- "...here was a writer I admired . . . I had read all of your books including The Spy but in my new circumstances it was not the same book. It didn't even seem to have anything to do with my memory of it. Everything had changed. Each line was fraught with meaning."#
- So, for one thing, a thing schools tend not to mention*, the circumstance of the reader creates many of the opportunities for thinking and feeling. It's not the book alone, but who I am when I come to the book, that creates the experience of reading. The urgency of a book is not generic--it is the urgency we manage to find in it for us as readers. It can't matter unless it matters to you.#
- But that's not all Kauffmann says. If he had stopped there, reading a particular book would be at risk of being whatever a particular reader said it was. It would have no particular character.#
- Kauffmann goes on to say that the particularity of the author's voice mattered greatly. Even as le Carré described a bleak world in his novel, he demonstrated a joyous thing: the ability of a person to make and share a vision of the world. This, wrote Kauffmann, is a power shared by writer with reader. Even in his cell, another human being was sharing this human power with him. He said:#
- "You feel it almost physically. Someone is talking to you, you are no longer alone. In my jail, I was no longer abandoned."#
- For these reasons, he felt he would survive. The presence another's spirit in something like conversation, and the freedom to respond from the heart of his own experience and perspective, changed everything, at least for a time, for Kauffmann.#
- The text looks like it's the thing that matters, but that's too simple. The language powers of the writer, firing on all cylinders, poured into the form of the book, received there by another fully functioning language engine, the reader, also firing well. The text occasions that joy, even if the book tells a grim story.#
- It's not just schools that practice a reductive model of language and literacy. Journalists often do. Religious leaders and politicians often do. Some PR representatives hardly know language has any other power that grim deception. People who love dogma are bad actors in this realm.#
- People who love a good story to one degree or another probably know better.#
- _____#
- *Schools tend to teach a testable version of reading, which requires a teacher to hold up as the ideal a generic understanding of the book at hand. Kauffmann's experience suggests that the power of a fine book is not generic, not canonical, but negotiated in the moment by a human being. That's too much for most schools to handle. That door remains closed in most school reading, unless a particular student already knows how to open it.#
- In chapter 32 of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré tells the story of a man who had been a political prisoner in a distant country for three years, and who knew that he might be killed whenever the captors felt like it. Once in a while they'd toss some old paperback book into the cell, and he'd read it over and over as an antidote to a certain portion of his fear and suffering.#
- When le Carré met this man, he knew none of this, and he didn't know that one of the books that the captors tossed into his cell was le Carré's own bleak novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. These occasional books offered the prisoner a feeling of joyous liberation of a certain kind.#
- Later the man wrote The Dark Room at Longwood, a biography of the years in which the former French emperor Napoleon had been exiled and imprisoned. If anyone could evoke the feelings of imprisonment, le Carré notes, it might be this author, Jean-Paul Kauffmann. #
- Near the end of chapter, le Carré establishes contact with Kauffmann after many years to ask about his experience as a reader in prison. In a return email, Kauffmann speaks again of the immense joy that certain books brought him in his captivity. But he notes something very interesting about le Carré's book, which he had read before. le Carré's novel was now for him transformed.#
- "...here was a writer I admired . . . I had read all of your books including The Spy but in my new circumstances it was not the same book. It didn't even seem to have anything to do with my memory of it. Everything had changed. Each line was fraught with meaning."#
- So, for one thing, a thing schools tend not to mention*, the circumstance of the reader creates many of the opportunities for thinking and feeling. It's not the book alone, but who I am when I come to the book, that creates the experience of reading. The urgency of a book is not generic--it is the urgency we manage to find in it for us as readers. It can't matter unless it matters to you.#
- But that's not all Kauffmann says. If he had stopped there, reading a particular book would be at risk of being whatever a particular reader said it was. It would have no particular character.#
- Kauffmann goes on to say that the particularity of the author's voice mattered greatly. Even as le Carré described a bleak world in his novel, he demonstrated a joyous thing: the ability of a person to make and share a vision of the world. This, wrote Kauffmann, is a power shared by writer with reader. Even in his cell, another human being was sharing this human power with him. He said:#
- "You feel it almost physically. Someone is talking to you, you are no longer alone. In my jail, I was no longer abandoned."#
- For these reasons, he felt he would survive. The presence another's spirit in something like conversation, and the freedom to respond from the heart of his own experience and perspective, changed everything, at least for a time, for Kauffmann.#
- The text looks like it's the thing that matters, but that's too simple. The language powers of the writer, firing on all cylinders, poured into the form of the book, received there by another fully functioning language engine, the reader, also firing well. The text occasions that joy, even if the book tells a grim story.#
- It's not just schools that practice a reductive model of language and literacy. Journalists often do. Religious leaders and politicians often do. Some PR representatives hardly know language has any other power that grim deception. People who love dogma are bad actors in this realm.#
- People who love a good story to one degree or another probably know better.#
- _____#
- *Schools tend to teach a testable version of reading, which requires a teacher to hold up as the ideal a generic understanding of the book at hand. Kauffmann's experience suggests that the power of a fine book is not generic, not canonical, but negotiated in the moment by a human being. That's too much for most schools to handle. That door remains closed in most school reading, unless a particular student already knows how to open it.#