Alma Alexander

Why do people treat books as mirrors?

I recently came across a post by Elizabeth Bluemle at the Publisher’s Weekly site entitled “The New Literal Mind” (link to the full post, and comments that follow, given at the foot of this essay). Elizabeth writes, amongst other things:

“I’ve noticed a strange trend among grandparents these days, and sometimes among parents: the tendency to reject a book for not being specifically, literally, representative of their child’s world.”

Parents or grandparents apparently look at a book – its cover, to be more precise – and come up with reasons why their child or grandchild won’t want to read it. The kid’s a country kid, and the book is set in the city – or vice versa. The kid has a brother, and not a sister (like the character in the book) – or vice versa. Most damningly at all, the “Oh, I don’t think he’ll really be interested in THAT” comment when the skin colour of the child depicted on the book cover doesn’t happen to match the precise hue of the potential reader of said book.

That neatly connects with another trend that has seen a lot of Internet exposure recently – the blog posts of a whole bunch of people, particularly people of colour, about how they could never “find themselves” in the books that they were given to read as children..

And that brings me to the brink of something that I do comprehend as a concept but which I completely fail to understand on a visceral level.

Why are all these people so bent on treating books as mirrors? Why is the value of a book measured by how much of oneself – in an absolutely literal sense – one can “find” in it? I have never picked up a single book with the purpose of looking for multiple incarnations of me – but, instead, I’ve sought new things, new experiences, new ideas, landscapes I might never see in real life, people I might never meet, and people I might be fascinated with but would not remotely want to actually BE. I have never picked up a fantasy book with a dragon on the cover and expected to find a clone of me riding the dragon by page five.

When I read a book, I’m not looking for me.

Look at (a random selection of) books which have touched my life.

“Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott: at the time I first read that, I was still a young kid living in Europe. American history was not remotely familiar as such, not in detail, and the context of the March family’s lives might as well have been on a different planet. But with the one possible exception of going “Oh! She writes too!” when I met Jo March, I have never identified with any of the sisters. Meg is entirely too holier-than-thou (which I never was), Amy annoyed the snot out of me, Beth made me cry but I am not sure that she would not have been too precious to live with if I ever had to do it in real life, and even fellow-writer Jo often went off the rails and did things I did not approve of. I did not wade into the book desperately seeking a reflection of myself, and I was not put out when I did not find one. Did that stop me from enjoying the book and from loving my early copy of it literally to pieces? No, it did not. And if the cover on it had been anything to do with choosing it I would never have had it at all – because oh, these were AMERICAN characters who ran around wearing long dresses and white gloves none of which was remotely familiar to me so in other words these were the equivalent of “city” characters being thrown at a “country” child.

Any book of China, by Pearl Buck: my mother had a set of these and I read them, in translation, when I was pretty young. The books were old-fashioned hardcovers with slipcovers on them – the slipcovers are long since gone but as I recall a lot of collected-edition type books of that era basically had the title and the author’s name on the cover and very little else so relying on the cover art to determine whether I would “find myself” in these books never arose – but even if there was a Chinese girl on every cover that would not have prevented me from picking up such a book because, well, it had a Chinese character on the cover and I was not Chinese. I was not seeking myself in those books – I was getting thoroughly and enchantingly lost in a world not my own, where characters did not think or behave as I would have thought or behaved, where the rules were different and everything was rich and strange.

“Through Desert and Jungle”, by Henryk Sienkiewicz: Yes, I am a European child and I read European authors. Sienkiewicz was a Polish writer – of adult historical novels – who happens to be a Nobel Prize winner; he wrote a book for what would these days be considered a YA audience, which was a cornerstone of my mother’s growing up, and then mine, and then I gave the book as a present to my young nieces when THAT generation came up to the point of demanding things to read. I loved that book. I love it today, still. It concerns the adventures of a young English girl and a young Polish boy, children of Suez engineers in Egypt, who are snatched as hostages to be exchanged for persons being held by the colonial government during the Mahdi rising. The kids ride on camels across the desert in the moonlight; they are thrown into the chaos of conquered Khartoum; they are tossed out again in search of someone who would know what to do with them; they escape, and in their travels they cross from the Sahara into the near-equatorial jungles and savannahs, meeting lions, and elephants, and warring black tribespeople into whose path they blunder, and dying explorers, and malaria, and they live in hollowed out baobab trees, and oh GOD it is wonderful stuff. I first read this book years before I, too, stepped onto African soil – and even after I had done this my own experience of Africa was far, far different than those of the two protags of this book (thank Heaven…) To this day I have never been in Northern Africa, the Arabian part of Africa, Egypt or Algeria or Libya or Morocco; I have never seen the pyramids, the dunes of the Sahara, the Nile, or the Suez canal. I may or may not get to do this in the future. There was NOTHING of me in that book when I read it – I was not English, I was not Polish, I had never been to Cairo or seen the desert or experienced the humidity of equatorial jungle or set eyes on a living elephant. But I plunged into the story which has now held three generations of my family’s girls, and I had one hell of a ride.

But all of those are more or less “real” contexts, in the sense that although they were unfamiliar at least they were possible, they existed somewhere out there on this planet which turned with me upon it. What of true fantasy? If it is true that you need to find yourself in a book of fiction in order to enjoy it or even accept it, how did true fantasy ever even get a toe in the water?

The Hobbit, by J R R Tolkien: There are no such things as dragons. Or trolls. Or dwarven kings under the mountain. Or hobbits, for that matter. And there are no characters in that list which I could identify with, even remotely. Oh, I have always aspired to be an Elf, but I can no more be Tolkien’s Luthien than I can be Cinderella – both are creatures of the imagination.

Yes, before people point out the obvious, I am aware of archetypes, and people possibly identifying with an ARCHETYPE of a character rather than the character themselves. But I ask, again – where does Imagination come into this? Curiosity? An itch to discover things that are outside one’s own purview, things that one might never see or smell or touch in reality but which become all the more real because they take such firm and potent root inside the potent imaginary scenery of our own minds and hearts? Isn’t this what books are FOR – the chance to imagine something that had been unimaginable, to look out onto the world through a pair of eyes which might perceive it differently from our own?

Do people seeking to find themselves and only themselves in a story – people who dismiss the story as inadequate, for whatever reason, if they cannot – really believe that a child is incapable of imagining the things that are not spelled out for it? If that is the case I despair for the human race because it is wonder and imagination, the kind nurtured in very young children, which has taken us this far – and which may still be the only thing that will carry us forward.

Elizabeth Bluemle writes:

“As a child growing up in the sand-colored deserts of Arizona, I loved reading about kids in New York City, or the swamps of the south. I did enjoy the odd book about my own landscape, in part because there were so few of them, but if I’d limited myself to books about kids like me in a setting like mine, I’d have likely been bored, for one thing, and grown up with a very narrow world view, for another. I was living my life; the magic of books lay in getting to live someone else’s.”

A commenter by the name of Gail Gauthier then comes in from a completely different direction:

“I think one of our reasons for reading is to connect with someone–the author or characters we believe to be like ourselves. Even when we’re reading to try out different lives, I think there’s usually something about the book that we connect to. We think a character is like ourselves or like someone we’d like to be. Or something is happening in the book that has some significance for us.”
As a reader – then (as a child) and now (as an adult) – I am not sure that Gail Gauthier’s comment speaks for me. I did NOT enter a book seeking a character I believed to be like myself, or even particularly want one. The “something about the book that [we] connect to” that Gail speaks of has always, for me, been the STORY. A story lived by characters whom I could believe were living it. It did not matter in the least whether or not the character was “like me” or not – and preferably it would be someone not like me at all, someone whose own take on life and their own particular worldview would be sufficiently UNLIKE me to teach me something which I had until that moment not known or been capable of knowing.

Elizabeth Bluemle continues:

“We have many missions as booksellers, but it’s a strange world when one of them is the need to defend children’s curiosity and imagination against the instincts of some of their most loving and well-intentioned guardians. “

To which I can only give a resounding AMEN. Let’s keep the books as portals, as gateways into the unknown, as a magic carpet which can take us to lands unknown and perils unnumbered, where we can go wearing someone else’s skin – learning what it means to be HUMAN, as opposed to just being ourselves. There are enough mirrors surrounding us all our lives in which we can peer short-sightedly and see only our own faces – there are more and more every day, and often life does seem, in an eerie and tragic way, to be lived inside a carnival fun-house where there’s nothing BUT mirrors to surround us. A book, a good story, is a doorway out into the green meadows of summer, into the dunes of a yellow desert, out into the stars. Leave the mirrors behind. Let’s stop trying to find ourselves in other people. Let us, instead, try to find other people in ourselves.

Full text of the Bluemle blog post, complete with commentary:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/blog/660000266/post/770045677.html