Dear bibliopathologist,
everywhere, and even in his column, when we talk about reading we refer to an ideal reader who reads only fiction. Those who like me prefer history or non-fiction seem not to exist! Of course, knowledge is the main motivation for my readings, but knowledge is also a form of pleasure, a pleasure that I have cultivated all my life. Then I happen to integrate a historical essay with some novels of the corresponding period, but all this helps to create my profile as a reader. And it is precisely this profile that we never talk about. Because?
-Cecilia
Dear Cecilia,
you are absolutely right, I too paid my donation to the one we could baptize novel-normativity: the tacit assumption that the canonical reader is the reader of fictional fiction, that a book – unless otherwise specified – is synonymous with a novel, and that the many other forms that the pleasure of reading can take are deviations and deviations from an ideal model , when not really perversions and degenerations. And to say that, with respect to this norm, I have always been a decidedly reader queer!
Our high school teacher of Italian and Latin advised us to distribute the readings according to the golden rule of thirty-three percent: a third narrative, a third poem, a third non-fiction – and the remaining one percent to be assigned to the reading of the newspapers. I cannot say that I have scrupulously respected Professor Campus’s diet but his criterion seems very wise to me, especially when I think of the time I spent in pursuing the minutiae of current events, greatly exceeding the symbolic threshold of one percent. It was also Swann’s regret: “What I reproach the newspapers is for drawing our attention every day to insignificant things, while we read three or four times in our life the books that contain the essential things.”
Beyond the dosages, I like to think that every reader has some kind of literary unit of measure in him, or if you prefer a dominant symbolic form. At the age of twenty, this unit of measurement was poetry for me. Even if I was reading a novel, I was so focused on the music of the sentences, on the choice of individual words or on the happiness of certain images that I lost the plot, the characters, the actions and the motivations along the way: a disaster. Then I became an avid reader of non-fiction, and it was in this currency that I began to convert my other readings: I asked poets and novelists to provide vivid illustrations of dull concepts, exemplifications of profound laws of human behavior, insights to melt into intellectual form. I finally arrived at a full fluidity of genre – in the sense of literary genre – and I read the most disparate things having in mind a rather eccentric book model, which I could not define well but which I tried to write as a prototype a few years ago taking inspiration from a Hitchcock movie.
Your unit of measurement is historical non-fiction, and even novels serve you to make the pleasure of knowing a period you are passionate about more alive. And you have full right, like me and like many other readers who do not conform to the normativity of the novel’s supremacists, to see yourself recognized in a Republic of readers that is as inclusive as possible. Let us make our voices heard, fans of non-fiction books, poetry, travel, cooking, home improvement and more. We are the SPVCB + community.