I had hoped to avoid addressing the absurd notion of performative reading, but it won’t seem to go away. If the internet is to be believed, you can’t move on the 14A bus for men in purple corduroy reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Last month The New Yorker magazine officially acknowledged the phenomenon with an article headed “The Curious Notoriety of ‘Performative Reading’.” There is a pretty irony here. If one was compiling a list of magazines suited for this dubious activity, The New Yorker would surely land comfortably in the top five. The London Review of Books is too hard to identify from the end of the bus. A person reading Cahiers du Cinéma may just be French. The New Yorker does a better job of broadcasting your high- to middlebrow credentials.
Brady Brickner-Wood’s article has no time for any supposed objection to perusing snooty prose in public places. The phenomenon is another depressing consequence of the decline in reading books as a default activity.
Not too long ago, questionnaires in magazines regularly asked celebrities what book they had “on the go”. What presumption! One might as well ask now what was the last train they spotted or the last butterfly they mounted. Barely a week goes by without newspapers telling us that students at top universities can barely get through two pages of text without slumping into comas. Reading books has been reclassified as a hobby.
So one can understand how cradling a copy of The Brothers Karamazov in a coffee shop came to be seen as pure showing off. No wonder social media became obsessed with shaming such people.
But did it? A fair portion of conversation on this topic is taken up with users ridiculing the whole concept. Not for the first time, there is, online, as much complaining about the presumed complainers as there is base complaint (if you follow).
Over on TikTok – always words to chill the blood – creators are more likely to be acting out satirical performative reading as catching pointy-headed knobs in the genuine act. Here is someone drinking coffee and “reading” Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami upside down. Ha ha!
Here are shots from several angles of a young man failing to attract attention as he leafs through Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. You’re killing me. Here’s a user squinting at George Eliot’s Middlemarch outside a caff. Hilarious. Would that Buster Keaton were alive to see such economically staged silent comedy.
But wait. We have an actual complaint. A young woman is chastising herself (to be fair) for suspecting a subway rider in Brooklyn of performatively reading Infinite Jest. The suspicion is genuinely out there.
[ The cause of the great reading crisis is unknown. But the solution is obviousOpens in new window ]
Articles and social-media posts on this topic keep returning to that famously daunting paving stone. Nothing challenges Wallace’s novel as a key text for the real – and, more often, imagined – performative reader. Not Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Not Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Not Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.
Obviously, size and complexity are factors in this. The book clocks in at more than 1,000 pages. A huge part of the text is taken up with endnotes and footnotes to endnotes. A coherent plot is hiding in there, but it is rendered through mischievous machinery. It is an achievement to finish the bloody thing. Heck, it’s an achievement to carry the bloody thing up a flight of stairs.
There is something else. Infinite Jest, published in 1996, emerged just as a particular male caricature was forming itself in the literary imagination. The lit bro comes to books as his less academic cousin comes to sport. Literature is a way of asserting his superiority. He is prone to mansplaining the virtues of favoured mountainous novels to any woman unlucky enough to fall into his gravitational pull. Supposed performative readers are almost always men. They are rarely seen reading Mansfield Park or The Bell Jar.
All of which is unfair to David Foster Wallace and to anyone attempting the once-unremarkable act of reading anything more challenging than a David Walliams book in a public place.
Last summer I finally got around to War and Peace. (The Anthony Briggs translation is a storming read.) Heavily propagandised by the performative-reading mob, I felt reluctant to take the book out on the train to Belfast, but, as it happened, there was no need to fear ridicule. The young woman on the catering trolley turned out to be of Russian origin. “Tolstoy?” she remarked as she handed me my KitKat. “He is the absolute best.”
If performative readers really do exist, then this is, I guess, what they dream of. Keep at it, folks.