In a world of personal branding and image cultivation, your book is an accessory and it says as much about you as your choice of clothing or footwear or bag. Cue for pearl-clutching cries of is this what literature’s come to? Not in the slightest. Because, dear friends, many who painfully came of age in the decade in which there were only three television channels will recognise this phenomenon. Yup, we too had Performative Reading!
However, we didn’t call it that, and the context was different, less layered, less complex. Nowadays, the simple process of taking your current book out with you to read on your train or bus journey or sitting on a park bench or while you have your coffee or lunch has become weighed down with choices and beset with anxieties. What picture of you will it create? If you were to post a selfie of you with your book, would it support or undermine your carefully created persona? If you are seen reading a thick literary tome, will your audience be impressed, or will they mock you for being pretentious? And what if your litfix of choice is a steamy romance or teenage fantasy… Perhaps the answer is not to read at all in public.
A solution might be to turn the metaphorical badge you wear when reading in public into a real badge. It might say:
- Reading this ironically
- Reading for research
- Checking for suitability
- I started so I need to finish
- Really enjoying this
- Want to borrow this? (cheeky meet-up line)
- Reviewing this for the TLS (you just can’t help yourself, can you?)
Back then, as now, the books you read, like the music you listened to, said something about the tribe to which you belonged or aspired. It was much harder to get that message across to the right people. No internet, no chat groups or personal profiles… Oh, we knew how to do it. A copy of, say, The Catcher in The Rye or The Collected Poems of William Blake casually stuffed in the back pocket of your jeans or peeping through the holes of your crocheted shoulder bag should give the right message.
Easier in theory than practice though, for impecunious teenage schoolgirls dependent on pocket money and poorly paid Saturday jobs – and dependent on the public library for our reading matter. Then as now, you could borrow what you wanted, for free. A thousand cheers for this life-enhancing service.
Library books weren’t that portable, though. Most public libraries didn’t start stocking paperbacks until later in the 1960s, and it wasn’t easy to create an oh-so-casual display of a hardback bristling with stamped classification numbers and glued-in cardboard pockets. You looked as if you’d brought your homework out for the evening. So those few precious paperbacks we managed to acquire did a lot of hard work.
Tribal element
In those days, the performative aspect of reading was part of a self-conscious presentation of an image, but it is also an indication of how difficult it could be to meet what you hoped were like-minded people. It became easier as the decade unfolded, but spare a thought for those who were just too young and too geographically constrained to be part of the world which was tantalisingly out of reach.
There we were, roaming the streets of suburbs and small towns, displaying our copies of Les Fleurs du Mal and Plays for Today like calling cards, unable to contain our excitement at a sighting of someone in a coffee bar reading Absolute Beginners.
Ways and means
Performative Reading can work in different ways. We can be judged and categorised not just by what we read, but also by what we don’t, or haven’t.
If you choose, you can make your rejection of or lack of interest in particular works part of your persona. Some people make it a thing to be proud of never having read a word of Harry Potter, for example. It’s a thin line though. Depending on your audience or reference group, declaiming that you hate Shakespeare or dismissing ‘chick lit’ can make you sound crass.
It’s a small world, my masters
In literary or academic circles, the stakes are high. In one of David Lodge’s very funny campus novels, Small World (1974), we see an example. Lodge invents a game called Humiliation, in which players gain points by confessing to not having read particular books which they think the others will have read. You can see it, can’t you, the delicate balance of knowledge and cultural background which informs you intuitively of areas which are safe and those which aren’t…
Alas for the hero of the novel, young lecturer Philip Swallow, who plays the game with the English Department and has a triumphant victory with his admission that he’s never read Hamlet, this proves to be a step too far. Shortly afterwards, he’s sacked.
OK, that’s half a century ago, and even academic life has changed. But how it resonates. Here we are, forging links between what someone reads and the nature and worth of their very being. We think we have control over it, that we can influence the process through our knowledge and awareness of self-promotion. Lord, what fools these mortals be, as Shakespeare wrote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Quoted absolutely non-performatively.
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