In Defense of Difficult Literature

On Valentines Day, I bet my girlfriend that if she read The Brothers Karamazov, then I would run a triathlon with her.  Now, I'd bought her a copy of Villette over a year earlier that she still hasn't finished, so naturally I assumed I would never run a triathlon.  She finished Ilyusha's funeral a week ago.  Crap.

Of course, as a classmate noted, it's a fair trade.  In both cases, muscles are being strenuously exercised.

Literally.

As Ben Marcus notes in his famed 2005 Harper's essay, "In the left temporal lobe of the brain...sits Wernicke's area, a tufted bundle of flesh responsible for language comprehension.  It gets its name from Carl Wernicke, a German neurologist who discovered in 1874 that damage to his region could cause an impairment of language comprehension.  Think of Wernicke's area as the reader's muscle...If we do not read, or do so only rarely, the reader's muscle is slack and out of practice..."

If, as Marcus claims, the Wernicke's area is a reading muscle, then it can atrophy and grow weak from disuse--but it can also be exercised and strengthened.  We sometimes speak of books "stretching" the mind, which not coincidentally is also how we often discuss muscles--because your mind is a muscle, too.

Now, one does not just jump into a Russian novel anymore than one just jumps into a triathlon.  When you start, you'll get a headache the same way your whole body aches when you start a new workout.  But with training and determination, you can complete both a triathlon and a long novel--and not just complete it, but feel a sense of exhilaration and mind-expanding sublimity at the end.  You'll feel healthier, too.

For you know how, when you work out, you actually start eating less greasy and sugary food, naturally, without having to be told to?  Because your body just doesn't crave that junk anymore.  Similarly, once you start reading difficult literature, and begin exercising and exhausting your Wernicke's area, you no longer feel like consuming the trite and simplistic--bumper stickers and billboards, TV talking heads and political stump speeches--all these your brain will naturally begin to reject as unhealthy, without you having to be told to.  You will be far less swayed by them, you won't be tempted by them, you will feel more free.

It's no surprise to me that the Humanities (particularly English) are constantly under attack--the last thing the powerful want is a populace that is no longer easily seduced by their slogans and jingles.  A well-read citizenry is harder to control.  So please, for your own health and well-being, pick up a long novel, one with unfamiliar words and complex sentences.  Workout your Wernicke's area.  Notice how much healthier you feel.

And if an inexperienced reader like my girlfriend can finish some Dostoyevski, then an out-of-shape grad student like myself can run a triathlon.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have a triathlon to train for.