Review of a Public Speech:  “Why Read Books in an Era of Television?” [Imagination, Comprehension and Analysis].  Given by Carol Rigolot, Executive Director, Humanities Council, Princeton University

Publication Source:  Vital Speeches of the Day, September 15, 1993, Vol. 59 Issue 23, pp.709-711

Subject:  Reasons for Reading in an Age of Media Content and Computer Games

(Check with your local educational institution or public library on how to get a copy of the speech through their research databases; or use your access privileges from your school or local library to their research databases to find the article.)

Background:  Carol Rigolot was a long-time Executive Director of Princeton University’s Humanities Council and was also a Professor of French in the Romance Language Department at Princeton University.  She is a published writer and editor.  She edited along with the noted writer John McPhee the book, The Princeton Reader:  Contemporary Essays by Writers and Journalists at Princeton University (2011).  And she authored the scholarly work, Forged Genealogies:  Saint-John Perse’s Conversations with Culture (2002), on Nobel Prize of Literature winning poet Alexis Leger (1887-1975) who used the pseudonym Saint-John Perse.

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Introduction

Carol Rigloto’s speech was given on April 19, 1993 in Tulsa, Oklahoma as part of the presentation ceremony of Princeton book awards to gifted Oklahoman high school students.  Her speech is well-crafted.  Her enthusiasm and her identification with her audience are clear.  Also, her depth of knowledge and humaneness are clear in her speech.

Rigloto in her speech uses sound and vivid accounts at times to make her meanings about reading poignant to her audience. Examples are using an incident from a Winnie-the-Pooh story by A. A. Milne and a Peanuts cartoon by Charles M. Schultz.  I cannot reproduce the vividness of Rigolot’s speech.  I recommend you obtain a copy of her speech to read what she has done.

I will organize reviewing Rigloto’s speech into the following areas:

I.  A First Look at Reasons Why Reading is Important: The Challenge Posed to the Audience and Some Reasons for Reading that Need Balancing

II.  A Second Looks at Reasons Why Reading is Important: Increased Perceptions and Emulating Culturally Significant Models

III.  A Third Look at Reasons Why Reading is Important: The Future Society Requires Competent Readers

I.  A First Look at Reasons Why Reading is Important: The Challenge Posed to the Audience and Some Reasons for Reading that Need Balancing

At the beginning of her speech Carol Rigolot challenges her audience as to what they will do with their book awards.  To quote her, “What could entice you to read them when there are so many demands on your time.  Why would anybody read books in a civilization of telephones, boom boxes, VCRs, and Nintendo?”[i]  She pursues her query by first looking at two reasons for reading books:  reading books to make us feel better and reading books makes us better persons.  Both need tempering as for reasons for reading.

Reading books to make one feel better is a reason for reading, but as a reason for reading books it only goes so far.  There are books that need to be read that will not make one feel better, or happy.  Rigolot points to Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who she states was the first existentialist author, being against reading books that make one happy.[ii]  She notes that Kafka’s own writings were dark and disturbing and would not be a choice for making one happy.  But, she states, Kafka is an essential author to read for his vision of the world; that “Kafka makes us feel new-even if he does not make us feel good.  And no one should miss the experience of reading The Metamorphosis.”[iii]

Then there is the reason that reading books makes one a better person.  Rigolot states the argument for this as “…reading can make us better people, that if people can only be exposed to artistic beauty and truth, they will become moral, or put differently, that if we know what is good, we will be good.”[iv]

Rigolot says this view has been challenged as to its truthfulness.  She points to Leon Botkin, the then President of Bard College, who wrote an article in The New Republic (February 11, 1985) showing that cruelties and atrocities have been committed throughout history by cultured individuals, including the Nazis.  Botkin instead finds that literature “is about criticism and critical inquiry.”[v]  Literature presents points of view and their interpretation and meaning requires analysis, discussion, and debate.  In this process issues and controversies will arise to work through.  And in this process questions about societal values and of societal change will occur that can be disruptive to society.

II.  A Second Look at Reasons Why Reading is Important: Increased Perception and Emulating Culturally Significant Models. 

The students at Princeton University evaluate highly the course in which the students read the great books for two successive semesters.  Rigolot looks into why this would be the case for present day student to appreciate past authors.  She finds the answer to this is that there are changes in perceptions that take place with reading literature and there is a relationship between life and art.

Rigloto demonstrates the primacy of people’s perceptions by quoting the American photographer, Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), who stated that when people perceive the world, people “see what we have learned to believe is there, what we have been conditioned to expect.”[vi]

Rigolot finds the best example of Siskind’s quote for her is the historical event in 1054 AD when the Crab SuperNova exploded in the sky before turning into a black hole.  For several weeks after the explosion people could walk outdoors at night from the light that was emitted from the explosion.  The explosion was observed and recorded by the Chinese, and some other non-European civilizations noted the event to a lesser extent.  There is no record in all of Europe of having observed the explosion.  In medieval times Europeans had no idea of what the explosion meant, or to see what was happening was out of the ordinary. The idea they did have, what future science would prove erroneous, was Aristotle’s notion that celestial matter was unchangeable – what was outside the earth in the heavens was unalterable in its constituent matter.  So, what they observed they disregarded due to having one notion of what celestial matter was.

What the Crab SuperNova event suggests to Rigolot is the following: “This incident suggests to me the enormous importance of having minds that are conditioned to look for-and therefore to see-the widest variety of phenomena, ideas, opinions, emotions, and possibilities.”[vii]

Art in the form of imaginative literature widens perceptions.  To quote Rigolot:  “Stories can open our imaginations to models and possibilities beyond the ones we know, broadening our imprisoning and simplistic categories.  Or they can offer paradigms or models of human experience, helping us rehearse in advance the predictable patterns and events of life (both the crises and the glories).”[viii]

Rigolot’s own experience in living has led her to conclude that life imitates art and this is important to understand as a reason for reading.  To quote her on this:

“You all know that art imitates life; every television sitcom tries to seem like real life.  But I am convinced that life imitates art.  This in my view is the most enriching realization gained from a sojourn among books, and the most serious argument for reading good books.  We often, even unconsciously, model aspects of our lives on artistic representations of other lives.”[ix]

In particular, Rigolot finds imaginative literature offers significant cultural models and points to literary characters as offering guidance in one’s conduct.  To quote her on this:

“….There are individuals in literature whose experience is both a mirror and a model and of human dilemmas and quests.

The more you read in the years ahead, the more models you will have.  When you find yourself in baffling situations, you can be able to cope if you recognize that your dilemma has already been lived-by Ophelia or Antigone or Don Quixote or Aeneas or Dido or Heathcliff.  It is not that I wish you the fates of any of these characters, but I am quite convinced that books and paintings enable us to recognize precedents and put our strivings in a larger context.  At certain crucial moments in our lives we surprise ourselves undergoing experiences that we recognize; we become aware of a precedent, a pattern that has been lived by other characters.  The awareness of these patterns can place our individual grapplings in a wider context.  For the rest of your lives, you will recognize events and scenes that you have read in books.”[x]

III.  Third Look at Reasons Why Reading is Important: The Future of Society Requires Competent Readers

Reading is a needed ability in a rapidly changing world.  Rigolot gives three reasons why this is so.

The first is the new millennium that is on the horizon.  Rigolot tells her audience of high school students that they will shortly be living in and adapting to a new millennium.  What society will be like in the new millennium cannot be fully envisioned.  But current trends suggest the world is evolving from an industrial to an information society.  In an information society the amount of information to be dealt with is ever increasing.  She gives the statistics that the amount of information in the world’s libraries and computers is doubling every eight years, down from doubling every ten years.  She finds that with the multiplying of information in society reading, writing, and thinking skills are necessary.  To quote her:

“There is something terrifying about this statistic; it also underscores the reading and writing skills that will be necessary to sift out and communicate what is valuable.  An MIT professor has said that ‘We are working ourselves out of the manufacturing business and into the thinking business.’  Employers will need people who can think.”[xi]

The second is that decision making will need to evolve for societal progress:  decision making will need to be geared more explicitly towards achieving long-term strategies rather than achieving short-term strategies. This will require thinking by both employees and citizens who can see issues for their far-reaching meanings and impacts, and who can create multiple approaches with flexible strategies for implementation.  Rigolot says these same abilities of thinking about and understanding issues parallel the same abilities when applied to reading and analyzing texts:

“…when we analyze texts, in which there is not one solution, but rather a network of interpretations from several points of view.  Reading calls forth our powers of imagination, comprehension, and analysis; it doesn’t ask for-or provide-quick and easy solutions.” [xii]

And the third reason is that Rigolot finds is that “we are becoming increasingly a global economy and culture. People who understand foreign cultures will be best to succeed in a global economy.”[xiii] She refers to Harrison Salisbury (1908-1993), who was a long-time foreign correspondent in China and Russia for the New York Times.  Salisbury in his memoirs stated the core knowledge of Russian culture and life that served him best in his reporting on Russia was far more a product of his reading Chekhov and Dostoevsky than from reading diplomatic communiques and documents.

Rigolot nicely ends her speech by stating Harrison Salisbury’s understanding a foreign country from its literature equally applies to understanding a regional area/culture such as the state of Oklahoma.  The Tulsa Visitor’s bureau graciously provided her information on Oklahoma, but she would be better served by reading what Oklahomans have written about their state.  She asks those in the audience to recommend to her books to read on Oklahoma so she can read the books.  Just as she started her speech with an entreaty on why read books in age of television, she ends her speech with an entreaty to be given suggestions on what to read on Oklahoma so as to participate in reading what her audience is reading.

The next blog entry will review the book, Know Can Do!:  Put Your Know-How in Action.  The book’s authors  are Ken Blanchard, Paul J, Meyer, and Dick Ruhe.

 FOOTNOTES

[i] “Why Read Books in an Era of Television,” Vital Speeches of the Day, September 15,1993, 709

[ii] Ibid, 710.  In her speech Carol Rigolot uses quotes taken from a letter Franz Kafka wrote when he was twenty years old about books and reading.  The quotes she uses from Kafka’s letter are well worth reading.

[iii] Ibid, 710

[iv] Ibid, 710

[v] Ibid, 710

[vi] Ibid, 710

[vii] Ibid, 710

[viii] Ibid, 710

[ix] Ibid, 711

[x] Ibid, 711

[xi] Ibid, 711

[xii] Ibid, 711

[xiii] Ibid 711