The saddest thing to me about the article in question is that it was published in the
Guardian. In the internet's early days, I used to turn to that paper when news media in the States proved too compromised to offer useful information.
Fourteen years later, the
Guardian is no longer the champion of the working class. These days, they publish pieces like the one we're discussing, which might as well be called "Kindle Readers: N.Q.O.C.D."
And do keep in mind that this article isn't just trashing genre readers but rather all Kindle owners. Besides which, the insults are directed at readers like me as much as they are at readers who prefer romance novels:
Quote:
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Reading has always been a competitive sport. Why else would anyone have read Ulysses? Consider those boys who read ostentatious poetry to pull winsome girls; the girls who read Vanity Fair to let the poetical boys know that they are clever and minxy.
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Apparently, writer Antonia Senior has never met or understood anyone who reads Joyce for the beauty of the language, the depth of the allusions and the brilliantly poetic elisions of the interior narrative, which really starts with certain stories in
Dubliners and develops further in
Portrait of the Artist. Apparently, she's never met people who read challenging poetry because it speaks to them and ignites their linguistic imaginations. Hart Crane's apparent obscurity has energy and is even viscerally exciting to many of us.
Like William Fowler, Senior's convinced that the only reason to know obscure things is to aspire to a higher class, which is not only a doomed strategy, as everyone knows, but fails to explain the work of isolated mathematicians and chemists. What class are they aspiring to, exactly?
Perhaps it is the work that satisfies the reader apart from all class aspirations, and perhaps to ascribe all obscure tastes to social climbing is to confess that you yourself are obsessed with that same imaginary ladder.
Senior does what any middle-class snob with social aspirations might: Disparages working class tastes as beneath her and rarefied tastes as pretentious and grasping. This was precisely Fowler's strategy in
Modern English Usage: Idealize the stylistic lethargy of the ruling class, treat its idiosyncrasies as virtues and ape them fastidiously -- all while ridiculing the taste of anyone who disagrees as either woefully unsophisticated or inefficiently solicitous.
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One thing surprises me: No one has brought up the sheer illogic of Senior's
Guardian piece even if one accepts its premise.
It begins by characterizing the tastes and affect of the typical Kindle-reading bibliophile and the nature of their interests. It then tells us that publishers aren't able to predict trends due to Amazon's secretiveness: their practice of not divulging the numbers.
But if those numbers are so secret, then why does writer Antonia Senior feel confident in imposing her stereotype of the typical Kindle owner? On what data, exactly, are her dismissive portraits of various kinds of readers based?
The writer also makes predictions about readers' tastes based on their first purchases of inexpensive editions of public domain books, which, as we all know, are often premature choices made by newcomers who haven't yet experienced those heartbreakingly bald but superficially reformatted Gutenberg scans and the availability of much better versions of those same books at sites like this.
It's the knowing tone and unsupported assumptions that amaze me about Senior's piece, not any particular agenda the article seems to support.