eJournals Colloquia Germanica 47/4

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Motion, and the absence of it, played a central role in the debates about reading that occurred in Germany around 1800. Many critics of reading held that books were dangerous because they immobilized their readers, both physically and mentally. My paper argues that the discourse of reading as invisible movement, as edifying mental activity, develops around 1800 in response to the charge that books fostered inactivity and passivity. Johann Adam Bergk, writing in 1799, seizes on the invisibility of readerly activity to defend reading and cast it as an ambivalent practice. Though it seems that the reader is still and passive, it could be that the mind is moving all the time. Bergk employs metaphors of motion to connect reading practices with an Enlightenment discourse of self-improvement through the exercise of mental faculties. Attending to these metaphors reveals the contours of the debate over how one ought to read and makes Bergk’s contribution more perspicuous.
2014
474

The “Invisible Movement That Reading Is”: Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800

2014
Brian Tucker
Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 309 The “Invisible Movement That Reading Is”: Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 Brian Tucker Wabash College Abstract: Motion, and the absence of it, played a central role in the debates about reading that occurred in Germany around 1800. Many critics of reading held that books were dangerous because they immobilized their readers, both physically and mentally. My paper argues that the discourse of reading as invisible movement, as edifying mental activity, develops around 1800 in response to the charge that books fostered inactivity and passivity. Johann Adam Bergk, writing in 1799, seizes on the invisibility of readerly activity to defend reading and cast it as an ambivalent practice. Though it seems that the reader is still and passive, it could be that the mind is moving all the time. Bergk employs metaphors of motion to connect reading practices with an Enlightenment discourse of self-improvement through the exercise of mental faculties. Attending to these metaphors reveals the contours of the debate over how one ought to read and makes Bergk’s contribution more perspicuous. Keywords: reading, motion, rhetoric, Enlightenment, Johann Adam Bergk Reading is typically a silent, solitary, and stationary act. And yet, in the history of determining what reading is, writers frequently associate reading with a kind of movement. In other words, the way we talk about reading has often relied— for at least the last two hundred years—on a rhetoric of motion, movement, and vigorous activity. This kinetic essence seems at odds with the familiar phenomenon of reading, with the secluded stillness of the study carrel or the person passing time in an airport. Alberto Manguel captures this tension when he reflects on the process of reading and writes: “Nothing moves except my eyes and my hand occasionally turning a page, and yet something […] unfurls, progresses, 310 Brian Tucker grows, and takes root as I read” (28). To understand the process of reading is to understand this “and yet”: the reader is passive and yet active, receives and yet creates, remains still and yet sets something in motion. My title, which begins with a citation from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, draws on this same tension between what reading looks like and what reading is. On the surface, there is no sign of motion. But the appearance of stillness, on this view, belies a concealed essence of movement and dynamism. Reading is a kind of movement, it asserts, even if that movement does not present itself to perception. Here is the passage in full, taken from the character Silas Flannery’s diary: In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven. (169) Calvino describes here a double or two-sided motion. On the one hand, it is the reader who moves in barely perceptible ways: the gaze shifts; attention focuses itself and then strays. On the other hand, it is language itself that is in motion as it travels through the reader. Crucially, Calvino’s passage blurs the line between these two movements, making it difficult to tell when words are moving and when mental faculties are moving—to tell, that is, when the reader is moving and when she is being moved. More important to the historical understanding of reading, though, is Calvino’s insight that all these blurred forms of movement remain, for the most part, invisible. Flannery, for example, cannot be certain that he perceives traces of movement in the reader’s “unmoving form.” When he writes, “I feel able to perceive,” he emphasizes the possibility that his perception is a product of his imagination, a movement merely imposed on an unmoving form. Herein lies the crux of the problem. If reading is, in essence, a kind of movement, but that movement always remains invisible, how can one be sure that the proper activity of reading is really taking place? In other words, if activity and passivity are, at least superficially, indistinguishable, how does one know that an engagement with books truly leads to movement in an edifying direction, that it does not in fact foster passivity and inactivity? At a distance, everyone who reflects on the private act of reading is like Silas Flannery—believing that movement is taking place but never being able to perceive it adequately, much less confirm it. These questions and concerns lie at the heart of the debates about reading that took place in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 1 Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 311 The discourse of reading as movement, reading as edifying activity, develops at this time in response to a growing skepticism with regard to the increasingly widespread practice of reading. As has been amply documented, in the 1790s, many German critics spoke out against the plague of Lesesucht infecting the country and warned against reading’s deleterious effects. My hypothesis, in short, is that the notion of invisible movement gets invented around this time as a way to countenance and counter those accusations. Sure, the argument runs, in many outward ways, books can seem to make people passive, lethargic, isolated, and neglectful of their duties. But inwardly, books—when read correctly—involve a great deal of effort and concentration, a setting in motion of the mental faculties. Though it appears that the reader is still and passive, the mind is moving all the time. In Germany at the time, the primary proponent of this position is Johann Adam Bergk, whose treatise, Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen, published in 1799, sought to instruct the public on how to put books and reading to productive use, without succumbing to their dangers. Around 1800, the best one can say about reading is apparently that it is a deeply ambivalent practice; this, at least, is Bergk’s modest goal—to introduce ambivalence into the effects of reading by tempering risk with the prospect of potential benefit. While there is always the danger that reading will lull one into slothfulness, he introduces a degree of optimism: it could be that the mind is moving while the body is at rest. As a defender of reading, he employs metaphors of motion to connect reading practices with an Enlightenment discourse of self-improvement through the exercise of mental faculties, and he uses the invisibility of readerly activity to his rhetorical advantage. Because Bergk refuses to meet the most vociferous critics of reading headon and to dismiss their claims out of hand, his position within this debate has remained somewhat difficult to pinpoint. The most common way to distinguish Bergk’s work from the mainstream denunciations of reading is to argue that, while other critics focus their concerns on the content of reading material, Bergk attends instead to the practice and process of reading. 2 This distinction, while not entirely incorrect, obscures Bergk’s intervention by acting as if other critics of reading were not also attuned to the reader’s attitude, method, or practice. 3 In fact, all the critics share this concern in common, for the various warnings about passivity and immobilization all return to fundamental misgivings not simply with the kinds of books being read, but also with what happens when readers consume literature. Scholars have long attended to the opposition of activity and passivity in the reading debates in general and within Bergk’s treatise in particular. Martha Woodmansee, for example, summarizes nicely Bergk’s emphasis on this op- 312 Brian Tucker position when she writes, “The dominating ‛rule’ of the craft [of reading] […] instructs us to become ‛active’ readers. This critical concept derives its meaning in opposition to the […] ‛passive’ mode of consumption ” (97). In what follows, I shall argue along similar lines that Bergk seeks to counter charges of readerly passivity with an insistence on readerly activity. I submit, however, that attending to the discourse of movement and mobility makes Bergk’s contribution to the reading debate more perspicuous in two key ways. First, it reveals the rhetorical strategies by which Bergk clears a space for active, productive reading. Whereas earlier critics saw a direct connection between the reader’s outward, physical immobility and her inward, mental immobility, Bergk deploys the mind-body duality to make the case for a movement of the mental faculties that cannot be discerned in an immobilized body. By insisting on the possibility of invisible mental motion, Bergk prepares the way for a new understanding of reading as a potentially worthwhile and edifying activity. Second, attending to Bergk’s metaphors of motion allows us to reassess the connection between his praxis of reading and Kant’s theory of the sublime in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Although reading looks related to judgments of taste and beauty, Bergk’s descriptions of salutary reading repeatedly draw on Kant’s language of the sublime. By the late eighteenth century, the practice of reading had taken hold in Germany. Increases in education and literacy rates, growing demand in the middle class for reading material, and advances in the publishing industry—all these developments reflected the “reading revolution” or “Leserevolution” that took place in Germany during the Enlightenment period (McCarthy 79). 4 In short, the number of people who read for pleasure and entertainment was rapidly growing; reading was becoming an increasingly common and widespread phenomenon. But what appears in retrospect to be a positive sign of progress was, to contemporary observers at least, a cause for grave concern. Thus, when Johann Adam Bergk notes in 1799 that “In Teutschland wurde nie mehr gelesen, als jetzt” (411), the comment is not the basis for unalloyed cultural congratulation. Indeed, toward the end of the century, a number of intellectuals were sounding the alarm that the trend of reading had spread out of control. From the perspective of this critical backlash, the “reading revolution” of the last century had given way to the Terror, and they began to describe it in alarmist terms as an addiction, a scourge, a plague, or an epidemic. 5 Andrew Piper addresses what many saw as a surfeit of reading, writing that “what was new around 1800 was the imminent sense of too-muchness that surrounded the printed book” (5). These critics perceived a problem of both quantity and kind. An excess of Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 313 readers consuming an excess of bad books could lead only to cultural and social decline. 6 The specific concerns regarding widespread reading took a variety of forms, and I do not intend here to retrace the lines of a debate that has already been the subject of repeated scholarly attention. 7 My focus falls, instead, on one common trope in these complaints—namely, that books, particularly works of narrative fiction, have the power to immobilize their audience. Reading renders people idle, indolent, and practically useless. There were two related layers to the problem of the immobilized reader: the first was a visible, physical immobility (that of the silent, stationary reader), and the second was an invisible immobility, a torpor of the mental faculties. Although education and self-betterment were certainly Enlightenment ideals, one had to be suspicious of anything that interfered with the efficient acquittal of day-to-day duties, especially domestic duties. J. G. Hoche, for instance, asserts in 1794 that “Die Lesesucht der Frauenzimmer stimmt ihren Fleiß und Thätigkeit herab, und führt zu einer falschen lächerlichen Empfindsamkeit” (122). There was clearly a paternalistic and gendered component in these debates about reading. Much of the hand-wringing over bad books and the pernicious effects of reading was directed at the women who constituted an ever-increasing segment of the reading public. One sees that sentiment clearly in Hoche, who not only frets about what women are reading but also worries that exposure to the wrong books will infect “Mannheit” with “Weichlichkeit” (16). In addition to the gendered nature of Hoche’s concerns, one should also note just how seriously he casts the danger of reading: it erodes work ethic and one’s underlying ability to act, to do anything. And if reading moves the subject at all, it does so by leading it in the wrong direction, toward sentimental excess. In a time in which leisure was the privilege of the upper classes, anything that made one unfit for hard work and vigorous activity was a dangerous impediment to practical life. 8 Johann R. G. Beyer takes up the same problem and puts it even more concretely. In his 1795 treatise “Ueber das Bücherlesen, in so fern es zum Luxus unserer Zeiten gehört,” he writes, “Tagelang sitzt der Leselustige auf einer Stelle und betrachtet jedes ernsthaftere Geschäft, das ihn von seinem Buche abruft, als eine Störung in seinem Vergnügen” (194). Beyer indicates succinctly why reading belongs to the realm of luxury: it is inessential, it distracts one from serious pursuits, and it costs time and resources. The real danger here, though, is the immobilizing force that the book exerts on its reader. Left undisturbed, the reading enthusiast would sit in one spot for days on end and would neglect all forms of movement and activity. The threat of physical immobilization played a prominent role in the critiques of popular reading around 1800. Erich Schön’s investigation of “Der Leser und sein Körper” documents this concern by trac- 314 Brian Tucker ing “die Tendenz zur Immobilisierung des Lesers” through a wide range of late eighteenth-century visual and textual sources (82). The question for writers like Bergk will be whether the reader’s visibly immobile body reliably signifies a corresponding immobility of the mind. In another instance, Beyer writes that reading undertaken for the sake of entertainment and passing the time “ist eines der verführerischen Vergnügen, welches den, der es einmal gekostet hat, so sehr fesselt und anzieht, dass er sich nicht wieder losmachen kann” (194). When Beyer asserts that pleasure reading “fesselt und anzieht,” he returns to a vocabulary that one finds frequently in the essay. “Fesselnd” is a common way to describe the consumption of literary fiction and of cultural products in general. In the English equivalent, one says that a book is “gripping,” “captivating,” or “enthralling.” But this discourse of dangerous reading binds together the loose and strong senses of the words “fesselnd” and “captivating.” Precisely because books are “captivating” in the loose sense—because they command one’s interest and attention—books also subject the reader to a more literal kind of captivity: they hold the reader immobile, prevent salutary activity, and even shackle the mind. There is at least one further point to make regarding Beyer’s passage on the “seductive pleasure” of reading: it describes reading through the language of narcotics and addiction. Just “one taste” is enough; after that, the person is hooked, held in bondage by the fetters of addictive reading. It is no coincidence that Beyer rhetorically equates the dangers of reading with the dangers of drug addiction, just as it is no coincidence that many writers, including Hoche, refer to the exponential growth in publishing and the reading public at the time as a “Lesesucht,” an addiction to reading. Both exemplify a common rhetorical strategy in the debate over reading around 1800. Even the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, in lectures delivered in 1804 and 1805, likens reading to drug abuse: “So, wie andere narkotische Mittel, versetzt es in den behaglichen Halbzustand zwischen Schlafen und Wachen, und wiegt ein, in süße Selbstvergessenheit, ohne daß man dabei irgend eines Thuns bedürfe” (191). What makes reading analogous to a narcotic is, in Fichte’s view, precisely its ability to lull the reader into a trance-like state suspended between sleep and wakefulness. Furthermore, ingesting this drug of narrative fiction has the side-effect of inducing a kind of paralysis in the reader; in the thrall of books, one is indifferent to all forms of activity. 9 When Beyer, Hoche, Fichte, and others compare reading to drug addiction, they seek to explain and vilify the phenomenon of widespread reading by mapping onto it other discourses, other metaphors and patterns of behavior. The more specific narcotic analogue lurking in the background of these similes is opium. The idea of reading as a kind of opiate had already been established in Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 315 Karl Phillip Moritz’s “psychological novel” Anton Reiser : “Das Lesen war ihm nun so zum Bedürfnis geworden, wie es den Morgenländern das Opium sein mag, wodurch sie ihre Sinne in eine angenehme Betäubung bringen” (143-44). The two key points in this comparison of reading and opium are “Bedürfnis” and “Betäubung.” On the one hand, Anton has become dependent on—addicted to—reading; the passage goes on to report that he cares more about books than about basic needs like the clothes on his back. On the other hand, the opium analogy evokes one of the central concerns about reading in the late eighteenth century—namely, that it saps the will to move and act, that it deadens the senses and anaesthetizes the mind. Opium thus serves as a particularly powerful metaphor in the late eighteenth century for the dangers of reading: not only is it addictive, but it also acts as a sedative that slows the heart rate and circulation (that is, the movement of blood) and immobilizes the user. 10 These twin concerns are the very same concerns that proliferate in the warnings about excessive reading—addiction and torpor, or more specifically, an addiction that robs one of activity and leads to inertia. The popular correlate to this anxiety is the image of the opium den, where otherwise able-bodied citizens waste their days lying in a drug-induced torpor, the same liminal half-waking narcotic state that Fichte compares to pure reading. In other words, the opium analogy is simply an especially vivid variant of the critique that sees reading as a source of lethargy, sloth, and indolence. But like any other narcotic, reading’s more insidious effects were not as easily perceptible because they were thought to take place in the mind. Hoche refers to this physical-mental duality when he says that the reader of bad literature “fliehet alle Anstrengungen der Kräfte, alle Thätigkeit wird abgestumpft, weil sie keine Nahrung findet, sie sinken in eine Lethargie des Körpers und Geistes” (74). 11 Beyer, by the same token, includes among the dangers of reading both “Unthätigkeit,” visible immobility, and “Geisteserschlaffung” (204), or invisible immobility. 12 The point remains that these two forms of stagnation were inextricably linked. The outward signs of inactivity and sloth were but the physical manifestations of mental inactivity, mental inertia. Bergk’s Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen (1799) constitutes an important document within these critiques of reading because it takes the debate in a new direction. Among the condemnations of readerly immobilization, it inserts a positive potential. Instead of mere stagnation without redeeming qualities, Bergk sees reading as an ambivalent, problematic act. From his perspective, the visible immobility of reading could simultaneously inculcate in the reader an invisible mobility, a mobility of the mind. 316 Brian Tucker Bergk’s rhetorical strategy is not to refute these critiques directly. Instead, he adopts the more nuanced tactic of agreeing with much of what the critics have said, and then carving out a space for positive potential despite the pitfalls of reading. He aims in this way to move the practice of reading from a clear danger to something that is at least ambivalent. His point is that it could go either way: performed improperly, reading could be as passive and pernicious as writers like Beyer suggest. At the same time, however, he identifies a prophylactic method of reading that promises to shield the subject from every danger of torpor-inducing Lesesucht and indeed to bring about positive effects of mental mobility and independent thought. That is why he sets out from the idea of an “art” of reading books; it is a particular kind of skill or “Geschicklichkeit” that must be acquired, developed, and properly applied. As he puts it, “Es ist […] nicht genug, Wissenschaft zu besizzen, sondern man muß auch eine Fertigkeit erlangt haben, die Regeln, die man kennt, anzuwenden” (73). All this talk of knowledge, rules, and abilities makes clear that reading is a far more complicated endeavor than simply making sense of the words on a page. Beyond grammar and syntax lies a higher-order set of rules that dictate how one ought to approach a work of literature. Bergk derives a clear argumentative benefit from this regard for the rules and craft of reading. By conceding that there are both right and wrong ways to read, he is able to set aside the broader discussion of reading per se and make a more focused argument for the value of a particular kind of reading and a particular kind of reader. It is precisely this focus on a narrow subset (of reading practices, of readers, and hence of reading material) that sometimes makes it difficult to gauge how progressive or conservative Bergk really is with regard to the exponential expansion of reading. For one of the first moves in his argument is to cede a great deal of ground and to accept as true much of what others have written about the deleterious effects of reading. He agrees, for instance, that reading is a potentially hazardous activity, and he concedes that many read simply to entertain themselves, to pass the time, and to avoid boredom. He even imagines a person who pursues reading for its (more literal) narcotic effects, “um seine Körperschmerzen zu tödten.” By referring to the narcotic, pain-relieving effects of reading, Bergk basically accepts the characterization of reading as a kind of addictive drug. And he goes on to reiterate the more precise version of this trope: “Die Menschen wollen sich durch Lesen wie durch einen Zauberschlag in eine bessere Welt versezzen. Sie bedienen sich der Bücher wie die Türken des Opiums” (60). It is a formulation that would seem odd, were it not already established by other tracts in the anti-reading movement, and it is certainly not what he understands under the proper art of reading. While the passage does describe a certain kind of mobility—namely, fictional literature’s Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 317 power to transport the reader to a different world—this movement is immediate, magical, and even hallucinatory. It remains, perhaps ironically, a passive and stagnant form of mobility, one wholly at odds with the more positive movement of self-activation and exertion that Bergk emphasizes. The point is that, even in Bergk’s more charitable account, a great deal of what takes place under the rubric of reading remains a dangerous waste of time. Again, though, the crucial difference is that Bergk does not seek to make a case for the harm or benefit of reading as such; he argues, rather, for the ambivalent potential of media consumption, in this case the consumption of books and printed material. This is why he can say of reading both that there is no “zweckmäßigeres Mittel, unsern Geist auszubilden” (v), and that it corrupts “Kopf und Herz” (411). Reading, for Bergk, can have sharply opposed effects. It can cultivate Enlightenment ideals or ruin the mind, and he locates in the reader’s disposition the factor that determines whether the outcome is positive or negative. This ambivalence in outcome distinguishes Bergk from the critics of the 1790s, for whom the detriments of reading were all too obvious and unambiguous. To make as compelling a case as possible against reading, authors such as Hoche and Beyer present dire relationships of cause and effect. Confusion, weakness, inactivity, and so on: such ill effects are what popular reading leads to, and they are the only thing it leads to. They are, in Hoche’s words, reading’s “ganzes Verdienst” (15). Bergk agrees to an extent, but with an important twist: in his defense of reading, the causal becomes conditional. When he discusses reading, he casts its deleterious effects as a merely potential hazard, one contingent upon the subject’s attitude toward a text. 13 He writes, “Das Lesen bringt Gefahr, wenn es bloß ein empfängliches aber kein selbstthätiges Gemüth an uns findet” (64). The passage begins entirely in the vein of contemporary warnings about reading but then deviates from them with the introduction of a conditional clause that limits reading’s danger. The crucial shift is this: what others see as the effect, as the confirmation of reading’s danger (it makes one overly passive, sensitive, and receptive), Bergk sees as the condition of reading’s danger: the merely passive, receptive reader is exposed to danger. Whereas others locate reading’s risk in its ability to shape the subject’s attitude and disposition, Bergk reverses the direction of influence. He sees risk instead in how the subject’s attitude and disposition could shape the experience of reading. In the above passage, Bergk lays out succinctly the opposed poles of good and bad reading. One reads with either an “empfängliches” or a “selbstthätiges Gemüth”; one is either a passive and susceptible reader, or one is an independently active reader. On the side of excessive susceptibility, Bergk com- 318 Brian Tucker plains, “daß man so oft ohne volle Aufmerksamkeit liest, daß man sich so oft passiv verhält, und daß man sich nicht auf seine eigene Verstandeskräfte zu stüzzen wagt” (64). One will hear in this passage both an echo of the complaints about the immobilized reader and a note of difference. “So often,” one reads inattentively and indifferently, but in this case, passivity is not an inevitable effect emanating from the practice of reading. It is, rather, an unfortunate disposition that too many readers bring to books—too many, but not all, since Bergk’s formulation leaves open the possibility that readers will occasionally get it right. He makes this possibility more perspicuous in another formulation: “Es ist ein unnüzzer Zeitverlust und eine schmähliche Vernichtung unserer eigenen Selbstständigkeit, wenn wir uns beim Bücherlesen bloß leidend verhalten” (63). Once again, Bergk reiterates some of the most emphatic complaints about reading, but it is worth noting that previous critics would have ended the sentence before the conditional clause. For Beyer, Hoche, and others, widespread reading is a despicable waste of time, period. For Bergk, reading could be a waste of time—but only under the condition that one remains passive while reading, “sich leidend verhalten.” 14 When the critics of reading describe it as a kind of addiction, they emphasize the complaint that people are reading too many books, without pause, and consuming them for quantity rather than quality. Woodmansee notes the gendered tone of these critiques when they refer to allegedly excessive reading as “literary philandering,” an expression of consternation with readers “devouring greedily one after another these new titles, forgetting the last one the moment they turned to its replacement” (90). Critics see this promiscuous or extensive reading practice as the cause of many ills, but Bergk once again switches the poles of cause and effect. From his perspective, it is a passive and immobilized readerly disposition that leads people to consume one book after the other. He portrays this relationship in a passage that I will cite at length because it also reflects the high stakes of bad reading: Die meisten fahren im Lesen fort, weil sie keinen Funken von Selbstthätigkeit und Energie in sich spüren. Die Thätigkeit des Geistes ist von der Masse von Eindrücken gänzlich erstickt: der Mensch vegetirt bloß und ahndet nicht, daß er zu etwas Bessern bestimmt sey, als zum Schlafen, zum Essen und Trinken. Der ewige Ueberfluß an Büchern unterdrückt in ihm allen Adel der Menschheit. (65) He casts the dangers of excessive reading in the starkest terms: the mind suffocates, the body vegetates, and the dignity of human life is destroyed. But why do some people read immoderately? They do so because of a passive attitude toward books. It is not that they necessarily lack an internal spark—one of activity, energy, and independence—but rather that they are not able to per- Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 319 ceive ( spüren ) that spark within themselves. The passage suggests that even bad readers are not inherently passive or doomed to vegetate; it could be that they simply need to recognize and activate the faculties of good reading that already lie dormant inside them. But as long as they do not perceive any drive toward self-exertion, they bury themselves in an endless avalanche of textual stimuli. In sum, whereas others say that reading is damaging, Bergk says instead that it is merely dangerous—dangerous because it could potentially be damaging if done the wrong way. The problem is not that reading damages by leading to passivity and immobility; it is, rather, that a passive disposition leads to damaging forms of reading. If passivity constitutes the root of all readerly evil, then the antidote is fairly obvious. And in his warnings about passive, inactive reading, Bergk rarely fails to contrast passivity with its positive alternative: a mode of reading that is vigorous, energetic, and active, one in which the immobilized form of the reader hides a mind in constant motion. 15 The single most important word in Bergk’s argument is “Selbstthätigkeit,” and he conceives of the art of reading—of proper, salutary reading—as one that requires a “selbstthätiges Gemüth” (64). While the first move in Bergk’s argument is to shift the perceived effects of bad reading to the conditions of bad reading, his second move is to imagine a form of reading that occurs under different conditions, with different results. And this radically different form of reading is one in which the subject is ever active, alert, and independent: “Wir müssen selbstthätig seyn und den Inhalt des Buches durch die Bewegungen unsers Gemüthes und durch die Thätigkeiten unsers Verstandes in uns erzeugen, um denselben uns verständlich zu machen” (61, emphasis added). Bergk makes the case for reading by imagining a site of motion and activity that is hidden inside the subject’s “unmoving form,” to borrow Calvino’s words. Against this backdrop of physical immobility, Bergk perceives “that invisible movement that reading is” (169)—namely the invisible motions of intellect and understanding. He finds a vivid example of this discrepancy between outward appearance and concealed essence in Goethe’s Werther, who is so overwhelmed by nature and love that he can no longer produce art. For Bergk, Werther’s outward artistic stagnation or inactivity does not signify internal stagnation but rather its opposite: “Werthers Unthätigkeit rührt von dem Uibermaaße der innern Thätigkeit […] her” and further, “Alles, was er sieht und hört, macht auf ihn den lebhaftesten Eindruck, und setzt alles in seinem Gemüthe in die größte Bewegung und Thätigkeit” (241). One could, at first glance, be puzzled by Bergk’s sense that this depiction of artistic inactivity is magnificent or exquisite. And yet the response to Werther makes sense in the context of Bergk’s broader argument, for Werther models indirectly how the reader should consume and 320 Brian Tucker respond to literature. Books should set the mind to work and the faculties in motion. Werther furthermore does the important task of demonstrating that outward idleness can conceal—and indeed result from—an excess of internal, mental mobility. This discrepancy is the wedge that Bergk needs to counter allegations of lethargy and stagnation. Whereas most critics of reading saw a direct correlation between physical and mental passivity, Erich Schön has identified an opposed branch of the “‛Lesesucht’-Kritik” around 1800 that located the harm of reading in the “Mißverhältnis zwischen dem körperlichen Unbeweglichwerden und dem inneren Erleben” (90). In this regard, Bergk’s treatise turns one branch of the anti-reading movement against the other and uses the mind-body incongruity to his own advantage. It is precisely this discrepancy between physical and mental activity that Bergk promotes as the site of potentially beneficial reading. When the mind is in motion and the power of understanding is activated, reading becomes a productive rather than a receptive process. “Erzeugen,” to generate or produce, is the verb of choice: good readers do not consume or absorb a book’s contents; they reproduce it for themselves, through their own mental motions. 16 Bergk elaborates on this curious sense of productive reading in a related passage: Nicht das Buch muß uns eine Erklärung von dieser oder jener Erscheinung zu geben scheinen, sondern die Bewegungen unsers eigenen Gemüthes müssen den Verstand zum Reflektieren über seine Thätigkeiten nöthigen, und ihm die erzählte Thatsache durch sich selbst erklären. (62) Books do not simply give explanations and information. If they did, the reader would do nothing but receive them and would be merely receptive, which is to say passive and stagnant. Instead, it is once again the invisible movement of the mind while reading that produces— durch sich selbst —the knowledge that one seeks in books. From this perspective, books give the reader nothing but an occasion to think, a springboard for independent reflection. It is as if Bergk conceives of books as exercise equipment for the mind. For what do such machines do but allow one to move in specific ways while generally remaining in a single place? He sees reading similarly as a platform on which to activate, exercise, and thus to improve one’s mental faculties. And if the analogy of exercise equipment seems anachronistic, consider Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 letters on Ästhetische Erziehung, in which he compares “die Anspannungen einzelner Geisteskräfte” to “gymnastische Übungen” that produce “athletische Körper” (42). Schiller’s point is that such exercises—both mental and physical—are too specialized and one-sided, but Bergk remains more optimistic about the benefits of reading’s mental exercise. Because proper reading Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 321 requires an investment of effort and mental labor, its true purpose is to provide a vigorous workout for the mind. As Bergk puts it, “der Mensch muß also seine Denkkraft anstrengen” while reading, and “Durch diese Anstrengung übet er den Verstand und die Vernunft” (79). Exertion, activity, and exercise constitute the proper readerly disposition. He has thus moved the discussion of reading as far as possible from the narcotic-induced, trance-like state in which Fichte imagines the pure reader. Instead of immobilizing the mind or lulling us into indolence, reading “muß in uns die Kräfte in Thätigkeit sezzen” and “die Operationen in Gang […] bringen, die zur Hervorbringung von irgend etwas nöthig sind” (66). Reading is, in other words, a mobilizing force, an impetus to exertion. It puts the mind in motion and thought to work. With his seemingly endless remarks about activity, effort, and motion, Bergk could justifiably be accused of redundancy in his writing. At the same time, though, all the repetitions bolster his central aim—namely, to counter those critiques that cast reading as a narcotic or a soporific, as something that deadens both body and mind. For Bergk, good reading (artful reading) is not a soporific but rather a mentally invigorating tonic. His treatise moves the discourse of reading out of the opium den and into something that, to our contemporary eyes, looks more like a fitness center or training ground. And when one uses books to move and exercise the mental faculties in the way Bergk prescribes, one stops being a receptive reader and becomes instead a kind of writer after the fact. Good reading activates the same processes necessary to produce a text in the first place. Bergk is a late-Enlightenment thinker wholly in the Kantian mold. When he introduces his treatise on the art of reading with lines such as “Unser ganzes Leben soll ein Streben seyn, uns mündig zu machen” (iv), he signals via his choice of words that he is a proponent of Kantian ideals. The notion of “Mündigkeit” figures famously in Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay on the question “Was ist Aufklärung? ” wherein Kant’s contrast between passive dependence and independent thought prepares the ground for Bergk’s later distinction between passive and active reading. 17 Kant recognizes in the essay that reading could contribute to a comfortable and yet stagnant form of passivity: “Es ist so bequem, unmündig zu sein. Hab ich ein Buch, das für mich Verstand hat, […] so brauche ich mich ja nicht selbst zu bemühen. Ich habe nicht nötig zu denken, wenn ich nur bezahlen kann” (A 482, 11: 53). Kant is certainly not as alarmist as the reading critics of the 1790s; he sees reading less as a corrupting influence and more as a mental crutch, an instrument one employs to avoid the trouble of thinking for oneself. Here one finds the same language of comfort and exertion that Bergk will apply to the art of reading. In the latter case, though, the aim is to bring reading into the Kantian fold, to show that books, far from replacing 322 Brian Tucker human understanding, actually set understanding in motion and provide the impetus for mental activity. Kant indicates that books can exacerbate the laziness and passivity that prevent most people from taking their first “Schritt zur Mündigkeit” (A 482, 11: 53) and from learning to walk independently. When Bergk seeks to rehabilitate reading from a Kantian perspective, he works to show that books can necessitate thought, agitate the faculties, and induce effort. He writes in the preface, “Die Bücher muntern uns zum Denken auf, zeigen uns den Weg, den wir gehen müssen, um Aufschluß über uns und über die Welt zu erhalten” (ix). 18 His broader point is that because books have the power to set the mental faculties in motion, they also have the power to set people on the path to enlightened independence, just as Kant would want. There is a second peculiar way in which Bergk’s choice of words connects him to Kantian philosophy—not in the sense of a general borrowing of concepts and terminology but rather a more particular connection. Bergk’s treatise makes several excursions into Kant’s theory of the beautiful and the sublime, and scholars have noted that he draws much of his critical vocabulary from Kant and from the Kritik der Urteilskraft specifically. 19 While Woodmansee, for instance, finds a link between Bergk’s concept of reading and the Kantian cultivation of taste (94), focusing on metaphors of motion recasts that connection in a new light: when Bergk sets out to rehabilitate reading as a beneficial practice, he does so with recourse to Kant’s language of the sublime. Bergk repeatedly refers to the mental motion required by good reading as “die Bewegungen unsers Gemüthes” (61). Readers of the third Critique might recognize this turn of phrase as similar to the one Kant uses to describe the central difference between the beautiful and the sublime. He writes that the feeling of the sublime carries with it as a defining characteristic “eine mit der Beurteilung des Gegenstandes verbundene Bewegung des Gemüts” (B 80, 10: 168, emphasis in original) and foregrounds the important feature of a mind in motion. Given the objects that Bergk cites as inspiring feelings of sublimity—majestic oaks, for instance, or the night—it might seem peculiar to align the activity of reading with the sublime rather than with Kant’s notion of the beautiful. Bergk, however, is less interested in fidelity to the Kantian system than in repurposing Kant’s ideas to his own ends, a tendency that could be seen as exemplifying the same kind of productive reading for which Bergk advocates. Here the sublime and the beautiful provide him with a ready-to-hand distinction between active and passive modes of judgment. For when Kant asserts that mental movement is a characteristic feature of the sublime, he adds, in contrast, “anstatt daß der Geschmack am Schönen das Gemüt in ruhiger Kontemplation voraussetzt und erhält” (B 80, 10: 168, original emphasis). One should note that Kant himself Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 323 highlights the opposition of motion and rest in his explication of the beautiful and the sublime, and that it is this very opposition that Bergk will carry over to different kinds of reading. Bergk aims primarily to refute the claim that reading is necessarily restful and passive, that it leads inevitably to inactivity and immobility. And as a keen student of Kant, he recognizes that the third Critique equips him with an active-passive duality in the perception of different kinds of objects. Although he does not make the argument directly or explicitly, he claims, in essence, that the critics have mistaken reading for a judgment of taste about the beautiful when it is, in fact, a feeling of the sublime. Bergk reproduces Kant’s emphasis on motion and repose when he distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime: “Jenes [das Schöne] gefällt, dieses [das Erhabene] rührt uns. Der Genuß von jenem kostet weder Mühe noch Anstrengung, dieses wird uns nur durch einen Kampf mit gewaltigen Kräften zu Theil” (177). The distinction sounds familiar, because it is a note Bergk has been hammering all along in a different key: bad reading is pleasant and comfortable, but passive; good reading moves the mind by exercising the mental faculties. In his “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? ” Kant worries that reading is easy whereas thinking for oneself is strenuous, and thus that books could be another fetter of comfortable dependence. Bergk, however, by casting reading through the language of the sublime, uses Kant’s own vocabulary to counter that concern. Reading looks like passive contemplation (that is, like the beautiful), but on the inside, it requires effort, exertion, and movement (the sublime). Bergk’s frequent recourse to the language of the beautiful and the sublime underscores the primary goal of his text—to present reading as something that can mobilize, rather than immobilize, the mind. While it is true that he is concerned with the process of reading to a greater extent than other contemporary critics are, his more lasting and influential intervention in this debate is his move toward a discourse of reading as activity, motion, and self-exertion. As a result, reading must no longer be the cause of certain stagnation and passivity. The possibility of an invisible, internal motion allows Bergk to set reading, instead, on a fulcrum and balance it upon the reader’s method of consumption. Whether reading tips toward salutary or deleterious effects depends on the reader’s disposition and whether that disposition is inclined toward activity or passivity. Bergk’s treatise thus presents reading as an ambivalent, rather than a necessarily destructive, activity, and there is evidence that this sense of ambivalence persisted into nineteenth-century discussions of reading. For instance, the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson sounds like a disciple of Bergk’s art of reading when he writes in 1837 that “Books are the best of things, 324 Brian Tucker well used; abused, among the worst” (88). For Emerson, as for Bergk, the results of reading are uncertain, and the proper use of books means reading inventively, actively, and creatively. He goes on to write that “The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul,” which might as well be a direct translation of Bergk’s insistence on a “selbstthätiges Gemüt.” In his explication of the active soul and the correct way of reading, Emerson adopts the same late-Enlightenment language of activity and self-exertion that Bergk applied to reading at the end of the eighteenth century: “When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion” (90). Here, too, effort is the key to making reading productive, and again, more importantly, the benefits of reading remain entirely conditional. Writers like Bergk and Emerson demonstrate just how effective the late eighteenth-century backlash against popular reading was. In the wake of that critique, even the defenders and proponents of reading must set out from the proposition that books can often have harmful side-effects. And yet they manage to carve out a space for “a right way of reading,” an art of reading, in which the critics’ alarm no longer applies and which indeed reverses the valuation of bookish immobilization. The unresolvable ambivalence of reading results then from the invisibility of mental movement and from the fact that right ways and wrong ways of reading are superficially indistinguishable. In the context, however, of unstinting attacks on popular reading, to introduce ambivalence is also to introduce positive potential, to create the promise of a different kind of reading, one flatly opposed to the torpor-inducing narcotic condemned throughout the 1790s. With his emphasis on movement and activity, Bergk does not just move the debate in a new direction; rather, he opens new lines of argument that will allow for future justifications of reading as a worthwhile activity. Notes 1 In Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur, Jochen Schulte-Sasse sketches the history of this tension between “geistige Beweglichkeit” and “Trägheit” in the consumption of popular literature, 25 f. 2 See, for example, Woodmansee, who distinguishes Bergk from the “‛supply-side’ ideologues of reading” (92) as someone concerned instead with influencing demand; Bledsoe, who argues that Bergk is unique because he cares about the reader’s attitude more than content (475); and Kreuzer, who sees Bergk as a critic of reading practices but separates him from the conservatives who want to limit the scope of Enlightenment (66). 3 Furthermore, from the other direction, it is not as if Bergk completely sacrifices the “what” of reading for the “how.” His writing sounds remarkably Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 325 like other denunciations when he complains that most people read “die elendsten und geschmacklosesten Romane mit einem Heißhunger, wodurch man Kopf und Herz verdirbt” (411). Part of my point is that Bergk’s position is slippery, so to speak, because he adopts so many of the assumptions propounded by other writers, but that what he adds to the conversation is both nuanced and influential. On Bergk’s critique of reading as entertainment, see Frels, 250-53. 4 For an introduction to the history of German publishing and reading from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, see Lynne Tatlock, “The Book Trade and the ‛Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” For an in-depth study, see Rudolf Schenda, Volk ohne Buch. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe, 1770 — 1910 . For comparison’s sake, William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period explores English-language publishing of the same general era. 5 Cf. Johann Georg Heinzmann’s Über die Pest der deutschen Literatur (1795), whose title contributes emphatically to this metaphor of popular reading as disease. 6 Woodmansee summarizes similarly a concern common to these debates over reading. The critics, she writes, generally agreed “that too many readers were reading too many of the wrong books for the wrong reasons and with altogether the wrong results” (90). 7 Schenda provides a good overview of the “Anti-Lese-Bewegung” in Volk ohne Buch, especially pages 53-73. 8 Karin Wurst explores how gender roles inflected leisure time and reading practices in this period. See, for example, the sections on “The Site of Entertainment in Middle-Class Life” (32-40) and “The Role of Reading” (91-99). She furthermore summarizes the gendered vocabulary of cultural consumption, 111-16. 9 Matt Erlin does an excellent job of situating the concerns about reading within broader discussions of material culture and luxury consumption in the eighteenth century. See “Useless Subjects,” particularly pages 149-51, for his remarks on Beyer and Hoche. 10 In Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), Thomas de Quincey seeks to correct the widely held but (in his view) mistaken belief “that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal and mental” (60). The passage’s closing modifiers, “animal and mental,” return to the two levels of immobilization, physical and mental, visible and invisible, that were prevalent in the reading debate around 1800. 326 Brian Tucker 11 On the accusations of “geistige Trägheit” and “Passivität” in both the eighteenth century and the modern theory of kitsch, see Schulte-Sasse, 25-26 and 60-61. 12 Wurst summarizes the contemporary view of pleasure reading in similar terms: “Characterized by passivity, the ludic reader is no longer actively engaged ( Tätigkeit ) but is said to be merely occupied ( Beschäftigung )” (92). 13 Note that the potentially positive effects of reading also depend on the subject’s way of reading: “welche Vortheile erwarten uns, wenn wir in der Kunst, Bücher zu lesen, große Fertigkeiten erworben haben! ” (v). 14 “Sich leidend verhalten,” as an expression of passivity, seems to have enjoyed wider currency around 1800, and it was frequently used in contrast with expressions of activity. In the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant employs the formulation to describe the apparent paradox of a subject that is both active and passive as it presents itself to consciousness (B 153, 3: 149). Friedrich Schlegel makes further use of the phrase in one of the Blüthenstaub fragments (attributed to Novalis) that appeared one year before Bergk’s book on reading (#26, Novalis 2: 423). Bledsoe sees Bergk as a writer whose ideas straddle Enlightenment and Romanticism, and it is perhaps interesting in this regard that Bergk’s turn of phrase also connects the two periods. 15 On the duality mental passivity vs. mental activity, see further Wurst, 108-11. 16 On a stylistic note, Bergk seems to be a more generous author for frequently using the first-person collective pronoun “wir.” While his contemporaries often turn to more distancing and condescending labels such as “der Leselustige” (Beyer), “der Leser,” or even “die Frauenzimmer” (Hoche), Bergk depicts good reading as a task and a challenge we all share. While there remains something exclusive, even elitist, in his hierarchy of active and passive readers, his use of “wir” implies that the guild of good reading is open to anyone willing to make the effort. 17 There is a general sense, reflected in Kant’s essay though certainly not unique to it, that enlightenment requires steady effort and exertion. Bergk situates himself in this vein when he calls the process a “Streben,” a struggle or difficult endeavor, something that requires striving, and when he describes reading as a constant state of alertness and self-exertion. 18 I note that “zum Denken aufmuntern” is the functional opposite of Beyer’s “Geisteserschlaffung” (204). Bergk uses a language of enlivened wakefulness to counteract the rhetoric of soporific reading. He writes similarly on the preceding page of the potential “Erweckung unserer Anlagen” (viii). 19 It has been widely noted that Bergk makes liberal use of Kantian vocabulary. See, for but two examples, Bledsoe (472) and Woodmansee (93). Metaphors of Motion in the Reading Debates around 1800 327 Works Cited Bergk, Johann Adam. Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen. Jena: In der Hempelschen Buchhandlung, 1799. Beyer, Johann R. G. Ueber das Bücherlesen, in so fern es zum Luxus unsrer Zeiten gehört. 1796. Rpt. in Die Leserevolution. Quellen zur Geschichte des Buchwesens. Vol. 10. Ed. Reinhard Wittmann. Munich: Kraus International Publications, 1981. Bledsoe, Robert. “Harnessing Autonomous Art: Enlightenment and Aesthetic Education in Johann Adam Bergk’s Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen. ” German Life and Letters 53 (2000): 470-86. Calvino, Italo. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1981. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. New York: John B. Alden, 1885. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Essays. Ed. Larzer Ziff. New York: Penguin Books, 1982. Erlin, Matt. “Useless Subjects: Reading and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Germany.” German Quarterly 80.2 (2007): 145-64. Fichte, Johann G. Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters. Ed. Fritz Mendicus. Leipzig: Fritz Meiner, 1908. Frels, Onno. “Buch und Leser bei Johann Adam Bergk.” Bibliothek Forschung und Praxis 10 (1986): 239-76. Heinzmann, Johann Georg. Über die Pest der deutschen Literatur. Bern: auf Kosten des Verfassers, 1795. Hoche, Johann Gottfried. Vertraute Briefe über die jetzige abentheuerliche Lesesucht und über den Einfluß derselben auf die Verminderung des häuslichen und öffentlichen Glücks. Hannover: In Commision bei Chr. Richter, 1794. Kant, Immanuel. Werkausgabe. Ed. Wilhelm Weischedel. 12 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977. Kreuzer, Helmut. “Gefährliche Lesesucht. Bemerkungen zu politischer Lektürekritik im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert.” In: Leser und Lesen im 18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Rainer Gruenter. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977. 62-75. Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. McCarthy, John. “The Art of Reading and the Goals of German Enlightenment.” Lessing Yearbook 16 (1984): 79-94. Moritz, Karl Philip. Anton Reiser. Ein psychologischer Roman. Munich: Winkler-Verlag, 1971. Novalis [Friedrich von Hardenberg]. Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs. Ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel. 6 vols. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960-65. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. Schenda, Rudolf. Volk ohne Buch. Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der populären Lesestoffe, 1770 — 1910. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970. 328 Brian Tucker Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford: Oxford UP , 1982. Schön, Erich. Der Verlust der Sinnlichkeit, oder, Die Verwandlungen des Lesers. Mentalitätswandel um 1800. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987. Schulte-Sasse, Jochen. Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung. Studien zur Geschichte des modernen Kitschbegriffs. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971. St. Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2004. Tatlock, Lynne. “The Book Trade and the ‛Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In: Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century. Ed. Lynne Tatlock. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. 1-21. Woodmansee, Martha. The Author, Art, and the Market: Rereading the History of Aesthetics. New York: Columbia UP , 1994. Wurst, Karin. Fabricating Pleasure: Fashion, Entertainment, and Cultural Consumption in Germany, 1780 — 1830. Detroit: Wayne State UP , 2005.