I read a bit more this year than in the last five years, which I very much intended. It was since I downloaded Instagram, whose reels section copies the wildly popular short form video format of TikTok, that my reading decreased. A friend and I often gripe about the effects of these genres of content on the human attention span. The consensual position in my Communication and Culture program was that the perspective of technological determinism; the idea that new technology shapes human consciousness and social change more than, say, social relations; hews too closely to behaviourist psychological perspectives (the work of B.F. Skinner and Pavlov among others) to give us the best tools to examine communication systems.
Technological determinism is a short hand criticism of some of the most important Communication theorists such as Marshal McLuhan and Harold Innis, who tracked changes in human politics or relations and sourced these changes in technological changes of communications systems. Innis believed some forms of communication had a time-bias (i.e. writing on stone tablets), while others had a space-bias (i.e. writing on papyrus, which is easier to transport, but does not endure as long through time). He thought that political changes were inherently related to changes in the dominant communication method. McLuhan believed technologies were extensions of our own bodies. The wheel is an extension of our feet, the camera is an extension of our eye, etc. He believed new technologies were subconsciously changing our behavior and habits. The idea that social media are curtailing our attention spans is certainly in line with McLuhan's thought.
While at the time I agreed with the consensus of my program, which was a curious one considering the above theorists worked in or were from Toronto, where my program was located, I can't help feeling different now. McLuhan came from a background in literature, and while he did design some experiments to prove his ideas, these experiments were fundamentally flawed in terms of validity and reliability. That itself, however, does not make him wrong. How else can one explain suddenly feeling unable to watch longer movies, or finish novels? How else can one explain the disparity between my memory of classrooms I learned in, and the classrooms of today, where students seem unable to listen or pay attention to anything without the quick edits and overly caffeinated delivery styles of social media influencers and their content?
While this is a lengthy digression, I see it as necessary to introduce my sum up of my reading experience. I consciously read more this year to try to reclaim my attention span. I picked longer books. I will pick my five favourite books from my reading this year to discuss, in no particular order.
1. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers. This is one of the classics of the Southern Gothic Fiction genre, one of my favourites. I don't know why, but the self-reflection of white authors in an area whose economy was entirely predicated on mass slavery just 175 years ago I find particularly compelling. I consider Faulkner, who also writes in this genre, the best novelist of all time for the simple reason he has written the most undisputed masterpieces (even if he himself considered one of them -- The Sound and The Fury -- a failure). I started reading this book in 2021, but I lost its thread and dropped it despite admiring the way it wove together the lives of five vividly drawn characters. The intersection of race and class in the novel is endlessly fascinating. Two of the characters, a Black doctor deeply respected by his community, and a poor white drifter, both harbour communist sympathies. The Black doctor and his son both suffer physical violence at the hands of law enforcement in the racist south. The centre of the novel is a deaf-mute, so this book was ahead of its time in terms of representing the disabled community. The four other characters each meet with this deaf mute to bare their souls, while he is mostly preoccupied with the loss of his gay lover and fellow deaf-mute to a family-led coerced commitment in an asylum over 200 miles away from him.
The other two main characters are Mick, a 13 year old girl (by the end of the book, she is at least 15), the daughter of a poor family forced to rent rooms to survive, one of which the deaf mute character, ironically named John Singer, occupies after his lover is committed. She dreams of composing music, but ends up relinquishing her dream at the end because of life's harsh realities. Finally, there is Biff, a restaurant owner whose gender identity seems somewhat fluid, whose wife dies of an illness. He/they (applying such pronouns to a character in a book published in 1940 seems anachronistic, but trust me, he's that) is the only one who realizes the extent to which the others are projecting their own dreams, hopes, fears, and desires onto John Singer, and the lack of reciprocity of understanding between Singer and the others. Despite being sympathetic in this regard, he struggles internally with a blatantly inappropriate romantic interest in Mick, who goes from tomboy to young lady during the course of the book. This is one of the qualities that make for the most compelling fiction: a very sympathetic character with a very terrible, unsympathetic secret. Fortunately, he never acts on it, and he lets it pass, as it eventually does.
John Singer is the only white man that Dr. Copeland can stomach, and one of the sources of tension in the book is how Jake Blount, the poor communist drifter, and Dr. Copeland never get to join forces to potentially collaborate to achieve their goals. When they finally meet, they have an all night tete a tete that culminates in a terrible quarrel over the role of the "race question" in the context of communist agitation. Soon after that, Jake ends up, through no fault of his own, in a race riot. He finds himself in the confusion on top of a dead black boy, one that Dr. Copeland grudgingly gave a scholarship-type award for best essay on how to uplift Black people in America. The newspapers blame the melee on "labor agitation" rather than the toxic race relations that are the residue of mass-slavery. That's his sign to leave town. Overall, it is a somewhat gloomy novel, but it has a very moving climax and denouement that rewards the reader who sticks with it. The characterization is superb.
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Doestoyevsky. After reading The Double and Notes From Underground, the former of which reminded me slightly of William Godwin's Caleb Williams, and which feels like a nightmare, I had Doestoyevsky pegged as abnormal psychology, the novels. That is, his work seems obsessed with neurotic or psychotic characters. Crime and Punishment is not so different in this respect. However, whereas I had the urge to reduce his work to a one-trick pony kind of evaluation, I cannot claim otherwise than that this novel is a masterpiece.
The main character is Raskolnikov, a desperately poor student who kills a pawn broker, robs her, but refuses to dispose of the booty to his advantage. The psychological dance between him and the police, with whom he has regular contact after the murder, is masterful. One of the great things about this novel is the ambiguity of his motivation. We are given different possibilities, such as he robbed her in order to start his path into greatness, to become a Napoleon type figure, or that her social function as a parasite of the poor must be eliminated. However, a relative of the pawnbroker, one towards which he bears no ill-will finds him over the pawnbroker's dead body with a bloody axe in his hand. He kills her too. He expresses remorse over this murder, but never over the pawnbroker's murder.
*Spoiler Alert*
On the cusp of getting away with his crime finally and completely, he suddenly turns himself into the police and confesses his crime, inspired by the saintly figure of Sophia, a woman so destitute she turns to prostitution to support her family. All of a sudden this lengthy narrative turns into a Jesus allegory. He accepts his punishment, and starts a relationship with the Mary Magdalene figure of Sophia, who moves to the town in Siberia, where he serves his sentence of hard labor. The boldness and audacity of turning the story of a murder into a Jesus allegory is certainly admirable, as usually such allegories are heavy-handed and saccharine.
Stay tuned for the next three books in my next post, before the New Year!
