from the The Times South Africa
| Henrietta Rose-Innes on the dark side of books |
Writers on reading
Reading is, of course, a good and precious thing, and my career — and the existence of this column — is based on the understanding that people love to read, need to read, should, indeed, be reading more.
But literacy has a dark side too, doesn’t it? Bookish people drolly claim to be addicted. I think, in some cases, this is literally true. I’d like to know the brain chemistry involved — what pleasure centres ignite when you part the pages of a new book and sniff the ink. It seems those neural pathways are laid down young: you’re hooked early or not at all. And from that point on, you need to keep feeding the habit with progressively larger doses of word, no matter how cut and contaminated.
Highs and lows, altered states… in my life, books have often played a pharmaceutical role, either sedative or stimulant. I’ve read to forget, as well as to remember. Worse: hardcore, compulsive reading can sometimes feel like secret drinking or binge eating, like going on a bender. I can’t say I’ve ever had a crack cocaine book experience — although a couple of authors come quite close — but I’ve sure read Valium. And who among the readers of these pages hasn’t had a literature jones? Fortunately, it’s a benevolent dependency, most of the time. Expensive, though. (The library fines alone can drive a woman to crime.) And sometimes, you just want to go clean.
I suppose this makes me a small-time pusher, holding a couple of capsules of a novel compound, looking for vulnerable readers for whom it might turn out to be habit-forming. There’s enough of them. When I walk into a bookshop — one of the big ones, a vast dispensary stacked with complex uppers and downers — I can’t help thinking, my God, what army of junkies is all this feeding?
So when someone asks what the purpose of literature is, as people occasionally do, I can’t give a very high- minded answer. It feels physiological. I read to self-medicate. And because I get antsy if I can’t and because, well, it’s a trip. Which is as good a way as any of describing the transports of a really good book.
Henrietta Rose-Innes is the author of Shark’s Egg and The Rock Alphabet. Her short story Poison won this year’s Caine Prize for African Writing.