June 22, 2006
"Reading in abeyance"
Giles Foden, deputy literary editor of The Guardian, writes in the one-hundredth issue of Frieze:
Problems arise when the key, as explained by the critic, takes up more room than the map in the reader's head. This is a real issue in universities these days, with students often paying more attention to works of criticism than to the literature that criticism is intended to elucidate. My friend Ian Sansom, who has inhabited all of these worlds—a former don, he is now a novelist and book reviewer—has coined the phrase "reading in abeyance" to describe this process.Reading in abeyance of another view . . . it's not reading at all, really. Nothing human comes of literature until one is able to read properly oneself. There is something idolatrous about raising criticism to too high a level.
Perhaps I'm given a partial waiver because I practice criticism, and therefore reading it is, in a way, reading a "primary text." But I am definitely guilty of "reading in abeyance": From reviews, I can recount the plots of all six 2006 Man Booker-prize shortlisted novels, but have only read one half of one. One of my resolutions for this year was to read fewer magazine articles and more books. So far, not so good: I have read perhaps ten of the latter, while consuming fifty books' worth of the former.