The pleasure principle

For the Sunday Lifestyle section of the Philippine Star, 20 September 2009.

This was intended for Art & Culture, but my editors decided to run it today in a section devoted to books and reading. The published version features minor paragraphing and stylistic changes. This article is one in a short series on reading I said I would try to write more than a year ago. I've finally managed to finish the first piece. I'll get to the other two, but I can't say when I'll be able to deliver them.

The photo is from book/daddy.

It’s the first semester of another schoolyear, which means I am trying to get my students to read. And just as in previous years, getting them to enjoy reading feels like engaging in something like mortal combat.

By the time they arrive in my classroom these teenagers (mostly 17-year-olds) have been forced to read literature the whole time they’ve been in school, more than ten years for most. They’ve become quite familiar with the pressure to read “serious” and “important” things, have been made to read many so-called classics (or exemplars of “high” literature), have been forced to read stories and poems and plays on serious and lofty subjects. Many of them have come to resent this. At the start of the semester I asked them if there’s a difference between what they choose to read on their own and what they are made to read in school. The answer this time was the same one I always get: the two are dramatically different.

I dwell on the experience of reading in school because I suspect many of us form our most important impressions of books and reading in our school days. If we remember the experience of reading with fondness, chances are we become enthusiastic life-long readers. (A handful are even crazy enough to become lit teachers.) If our memories of it are tinged with distaste, we probably won’t read much beyond light and entertaining fare.

Why the divergence between what students are assigned to read and what they choose for themselves? An obvious culprit is school itself. Something in the very nature of the school as a learning institution seems to work against the nurturing of pleasure in the reading experience. For one thing, students are forced to read what the school makes them, and how many of us attend to requirements with the same enthusiasm we do to things we do on our own? Too often students go to their books with glum resignation, not glee. Second, students know they will be tested on their reading; the eventual exam or paper hovers in the horizon of their minds, tingeing their reading with the real possibility of failure. Third, students often are made to read things they would not choose for themselves, readings probably more difficult than what they are used to. The “classics” still form a large part of literature curriculums across the land, and the experience of knocking heads with Shakespeare or Balagtas, James Joyce or Nick Joaquin can be a frustrating one. If students have the added misfortune of having a disagreeable teacher who makes reading feel like drudgery, their fates as future non-readers are sealed. No wonder they turn elsewhere for pleasure.

Let’s be clear: there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. I think one thing we teachers of reading have neglected to do is make the encounter with the written word a pleasurable one. We emphasize learning, we train them in textual analysis, and we reinforce this with testing. Well and good. Except understanding a text is not the same as enjoying it. In the extreme, we may actually foster the former by sacrificing the latter. The fact of grades compounds the problem: at the end of the day we need to hand out numbers or letters, our appraisal of student performance. Grades are measures, and what can we measure? Understanding, yes; analysis, yes; enjoyment, no. Reading comprehension can be measured, but appreciation of a book’s beauty and depth of insight can’t. Grades are a necessary evil that can get in the way. And if students learn that grades are the be-all and end-all of education, then what will they care how beautiful a book is?

It’s hard enough getting students to enjoy reading in school without outside distractions; what makes things worse is that the array of pleasures available to today’s student — and today’s adult, for that matter — are multifarious to a degree never seen before. The quick thrills easily available to them, accessed through increasingly sophisticated technological devices, make the act of sitting still with a book seem awfully dull. A friend who goes to Boracay every New Year’s told me that five years ago, many people would lounge around with a book; this year they toted laptops and other gadgets and spent their time on Facebook.

Beyond school and the seductive glitter of entertainment technology lies a third, and perhaps most insidious, culprit: a culture that does not value intellectual work. The culture that produces and nurtures our children is one that looks down on work requiring any degree of intellectual engagement. Celebrity is valorized, but intelligence is not. We gaze at the beautiful, listen to the glib; we don’t care for the thoughtful or profound. Our movie stars and pop singers become famous, but our thinkers, those commentators and artists with astute insights into political or cultural matters, do not. Everywhere our young look they find that surface sheen, not substance, is prized and rewarded. They take their cue.

What do we do then about the problem of reading? One thing we — teachers, parents, and everyone else concerned about reading — need to do is put pleasure back in the reading experience. Or rather, we need to validate it. We need to tell our students, children, each other, ourselves, that it’s fine to read primarily for pleasure. I know my students already do. “Read for pleasure” is advice I don’t need to give them, because they already believe it. One of the common gripes we teachers of literature make about our students is that they don’t read, but I’ve found that it’s not true. At the start of every schoolyear I give out, in all my firstyear lit classes, a survey sheet in which I ask what they like to read. I’ve found that they do read. It’s just that their tastes tend to be narrow. Some read only light fantasy. Others read only chick-lit. Still others read only manga (Japanese illustrated fiction, very much like comic books). This year the Twilight books were a frequent answer. They don’t need me to tell them to read for pleasure. What they need from me is to say it’s okay to admit it.

What they also need from me — and this is more important — is to expand their definition of pleasure. The problem is not that we value pleasure so much, it’s that we define it too narrowly. Most perniciously, we think that pleasure should come easily. If something is supposed to be fun, it shouldn’t have to make us work. It definitely shouldn’t have to make us think. And because we get our pleasures so easily now, we demand that they always be easy.

But pleasure comes in degrees and in wide varieties. There is the pleasure of figuring out “whodunit” (as any reader of Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler knows). There is the pleasure of trying to solve puzzles (as Dan Brown fans do). There is the giddiness of a romance novel, the fright of horror. But how about the pleasures we overlook? The pleasure of beauty, in language and in craft. The pleasure of characters rendered as if they were real people, of places vividly evoked. The pleasure of plumbing singular experiences, even sad and painful ones, of sharing the lives of the sorrowful, the lonely, the damned. There is the pleasure of insight, of ideas. The pleasure of contemplating the unfathomable evil and goodness in the human heart. But these pleasures often take some experience to arrive at, and some effort too.

Maybe that’s the most important thing I can do as a literature teacher: expand the sphere of pleasure. Get my students to try new works, new authors, new genres — new being what they would never choose for themselves. And if they make the discovery that beyond their previously narrow roads are many things wonderful and extraordinary, within reach if they would only take the time and effort, then perhaps they may turn into life-long readers who aren’t content to return again and again to familiar ground but who seek out new realms in which to venture. “The poem refreshes the world,” Wallace Stevens said. The book does too, its pleasures both common and sublime available to those able and willing to enter it.

Excuse me while I pull up my bra

For section ‘M’ of the Philippine Star, 16 September 2009.



This is how it went: I’m sitting in my cubicle with a senior, a girl of twenty-one years who is two months away from graduation. She’s sitting a few feet in front of me. We are having consultations, and the discussion is going well. I tell her how dramatically she, a creative writing major, has improved throughout the year that I have been advising her. As our fifteen-minute conversation is about to end, she does something I haven’t been able to forget since: she raises both hands from her lap, brings them near her blouse’s neckline (which hangs neither too high nor too low on her chest), then takes her thumbs and plunges them behind and beneath the hem of her blouse and, presumably, beneath the cups of her bra. With bra and blouse firmly pinched, she gives them a good tug upward. After it is over — it couldn’t have taken more than a second — she brings her hands back to her lap, then makes a casual gesture here and there to continue our conversation.

I sit there aghast, but she makes no sign that she has done something you don’t do in polite company. I fumble for words, then decide that it’s better not to remark on it at all. (Because, really, what do say after that?) After she is gone I go over to some female colleagues and ask them if what she did — I imitate the girl’s tugging motion — is normal. They smirk and giggle fizzily, like shaken soda bottles. She did that right in front of you? they ask. Yup, I say, just like that, without warning or apology. It was nothing to her. They give a look that says, what do you expect with kids these days? Over at lunch, in the company of other colleagues, I ask the same question, repeat the gesture. They react the same way — with surprise, dismay, and plenty of rueful laughter. Kids these days, they sigh, throwing their hands up.

I wonder: Is this a generational thing? I decide to investigate further. At a family gathering soon afterwards, I approach a cousin in her early twenties. I do what I now call the bra-tug. She shrugs and gives me a look that says, That’s it? What’s the big deal?

There’s another habit that I’ve found annoying: My wife and I are sitting in a theater. We arrived early and got aisle seats. To our left is a group of twentysomethings, one of whom stands and walks in our direction. When he gets right next to us, he hovers above us, gives us an expectant look and a thin smile but says nothing. We turn our legs to the side and let him through. He passes, again without a word. Later, when he returns, he does the same thing: stands wordlessly beside us, expecting us to let him through without a verbal prompt. We let him. I say to my wife, “Whatever happened to ‘Excuse me’?”

But I wonder: is he being rude? Or are my expectations just not aligned with his? Maybe many of his generation do it the way he does. After all, the same thing happens in queues. Someone wants to pass through the line to somewhere else, and they stand there right beside you without saying a word, hoping you move aside so they can walk through. “Excuse me” is passé, except I didn’t get the memo. (Such memos never seem to get to my desk anymore.)

And then there’s something I see in my very own classrooms: yawning. I remember being told growing up that it was rude to yawn in front of others, so if you felt one coming on, you hid your yawn with your hand or turned away. No way would you yawn right in someone’s face. Yet this semester I’ve already seen students sitting in the first row give me big, full-frontal, mouths-wide-open, head-tipped-back yawns while I’m standing in front in the middle of a sentence. I think they’re being rude.

Or am I just being prissy? (And defensive, too — my classes aren’t that boring, are they?) Could I be overreacting, making a mountain out of a mannerly molehill? Or am I on to something real? Have I put my finger on an important characteristic of this younger generation, one they aren’t aware of but which sticks out to me like someone picking his nose in the middle of a crowded room?

And then there’s the matter of texting. If I send my parents a text message, I know that they will acknowledge it with a reply, even if just an “OK.” If they text me, they expect as much of me. My siblings are the same; send them a message, and they let you know they got it. My students, though, are not. I send a message — maybe I’m sick and can’t come to class, or I’m running a few minutes late — and very few, if any, reply.

I’ve got a theory: these habits are a sign of a blithe uncouthness afflicting our young. They simply don’t value manners the way older generations did and still do. They are less sensitive to how their actions will be seen by others. In the age of the Daily Me, that apt term for the ego-stroking echo chamber we make for ourselves in these gadget-infested times, this should be no surprise. As we become better at surrounding ourselves with experiences that please us and at keeping away those that won’t (only the music we like on our iPods, only our friends as contacts on Facebook), we become far less attuned to the feelings of others. Especially to feelings of disapprobation. To those on the outside of such a cocoon, the person inside looks indifferent and apathetic, not to mention underskilled in the art of living with others. And who else would be more accustomed to living in such cushy virtual aeries than our technology-besotted youngsters?

But then again, all this could be hasty generalizing, my quick willingness to attribute the faults of a handful to an entire age group. Besides, rude and polite are terms made meaningful by context. We might want to think that these are objective qualities, but they depend on what people expect of each other, and expectations change over time, over generations. One example: The written invitation has become passé in the age of text messaging, but don’t tell that to my folks. They still prefer invites that you pull out of envelopes, that you can slip into your book to mark your place, that burn when lit. For my part, you need only text me if you want me at your party. I won’t think you’re rude.

Expectations depend on where you are, too. Just as I was explaining this theory of mine to another friend, cleverly linking the uncouthness of the young with a general degradation of good manners and hospitality in our society, she stopped me cold when she said, “But that’s only in the city.” Older and far wiser than me, she explained that people who lived outside the confines of our snarling cities still display the civility and kindness that is disappearing here. And since I’ve lived most of my life in the belly of the rude urban beast, I never noticed.

Ultimately, maybe I am making too much of all this. I think of my parents again. I love them, but sometimes I think they’re fussy old coots. It could be that I’m turning into one, too. Maybe the best thing to do is to shut up and accept this generation for what it is, full-throated yawns and all. Besides, things could be worse. Years from now kids might be fixing their wedgies in public and think nothing of it. (I hope to God I’m retired by then.)

And come to think of it, maybe it’s best that the girl who tugged at her bra right in front of me did so without any fuss. That showed a kind of grace, didn’t it? Imagine if she’d said, before doing so, “Excuse me while I pull up my bra.” Now how would I have reacted then? Some things should be done quickly and quietly, no? I’m sure the flabbergasted witnesses among us will be most grateful.