Not long ago, I read Andrew Gordon's “A
History of Modern Japan,” considered one of the definitive texts on
how Japan, from the Meiji Revolution to the present day, has
transformed from hermit kingdom to economic power. And I can safely
recommend it for anyone who's looking for a solid source of
meat-and-potatoes history about that particularly much-misunderstood
nation.
But what I thought about the most in
the days following was not so much what I had read, but how long it
had been since I'd read a book that was even remotely similar – a
book full of straightforward, narrative history. Here is how things
happened, how event X paved the way for event Y, without any kind of
explicit theoretical or ideological framework, without much of an
argument, per se.
I suppose this is what you would call
“textbook” or “encyclopedia” knowledge. Now, having read my
Marx and my Gramsci, I know full well that this kind of knowledge is
by no means “neutral.” There is an ideology in what is and is not
told, how it is narrated, no matter how light Gordon attempted to
make his fingerprint. Perhaps some more hard-core postmodernists or
phenomenological thinkers would say that such a history says nothing
about the events in question, and only says something about the
author and his or her prejudices, contexts, and perceptive faculties,
but I'm not quite that isolated.
Yet it is undoubtedly that kind of
skepticism that prevents me from reading books full of
just-the-facts. To me, it seems infinitely more honest when authors
lay down their cards and cop to their stance, their context, whether
or not I agree with their approach, before they get to the subjects
of their argument (and yes, I know the hardline perspective would
deny the “subjectness” of the supposed subjects, but let's all be
William James about this and say that there is indeed a subject
there, until a decent argument is made to the contrary).
This isn't to say that I avoid this
kind of writing entirely, but I contain my experience of it to
shorter form work, to scientific journals (when I'm feeling
rigorous), Wikipedia articles (when I'm not, which is more than I
care to admit), and those standard-issue publications that have best
resisted the temptation to become clickbait.
Because a book seems to serve a
different purpose for me – it is something more totemic, regardless
of whether it is “fiction” or not, to the extent that distinction
has merit (leave that topic for another day). To read a book is to
dissolve myself.
And yet, up until my early teens, it
was quite the opposite. On the contrary, I just wanted to sponge up
knowledge, and it frustrated me when the text failed to act as a
neutral medium, a sort of agar gel for ideas to grow in and express
their true, absolute form. Which I suppose makes sense – children
aren't exactly renowned for their sense of nuance, and that probably
goes double for annoyingly precocious children.
There is a certain irony that I seek
those sorts of fact-driven arguments in the world of the shorter
form, considering the fractured media landscape which we inhabit. In
which that framework has to such a great degree swallowed the facts
themselves, whether the media outlets in question are mocking the
very notion that a statistic in a major American newspaper could be
true (a practice of both the sorts of entities that come charging in
with their ideologies, banners waving, and those that conceal their
ideologies under a veneer of “nonpartisanship”), or whether the
media outlets in question are telling us how to feel about an article
before we even read it (number 8 will make you CRINGE!!!).
However, these are stupidities that, in
my reading life, I can safely and comfortably ignore, even if I feel
the need to occasionally check the cesspool to perform a stool-sample
analysis on the hive mind's feces. When I read something as simple as a research report on primate behavior, I'm a bit less frazzled. And when I shut off my computer, and
look up at my bookshelf, and see the possibility for something more measured, I am again approaching contentedness.
