Samuel Johnson on the utility of books of entertainment

Cafe Society
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My question for the denizens of Cafe Society: to what extent do you agree with the bolded sentence quoted above? According to the site from which I pulled the quote, at least one non-scientist agrees with Samuel Johnson’s assessment. On the other hand, one often hears variations on the theme: “I get more out of the novel every time I read it.” Also common is the attitude taken by Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast: when reminded by the bookstore owner that she’s already read twice the book she plans to borrow, she replies, “Well it’s my favorite – far off places, daring swordfights, magic spells, a prince in disguise!”

So would the inhabitants of this forum consider Johnson’s statement to be early enlightenment naivete, or is it actually defensible against the attacks of romanticism?

Since this OP is basically a poll, I’ll offer my own opinion to start the ball rolling. I usually do get something new out of movies when I watch them for a second or third time. This observation is less true of books of entertainment, because I can read them at my own pace (not the pace dictated by a film producer) and take time to digest all the material within. Books of science definitely provide more insights when I read them a second or third time, especially when further study has established more mental connections among the various disciplines. I would say that Samuel Johnson had the basic idea right, although he could have better acknowledged the possibility that literature can also provide new insights on subsequent readings.

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Hmm… I do a lot of re-reading, both fiction and non-fiction.

With fiction, sometimes I miss something on the first read, or it’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten most of what is going on. Occasionally, it’s nice to re-aquaint yourself with the characters.

Non-Fiction: I would have to agree that you probably learn more from re-reads than with fiction, especially books that are designed to teach you something.

But guess what? Literature can teach you something too… :slight_smile:

And then there’s books like Cryptonomicon … it’s taking me longer to read through this than anything I’ve read in a long time… but I’m really enjoying going slow & steady, trying to assimilate what I’ve read.

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I’m going to disagree with Johnson – for myself, at this point in time – but then I’m going to defend his point of view for his time.

Personally, I just don’t feel that way about books. When I’m looking at, as he puts it, “a book of science”, I’m pretty much only going to get something out of it the first time (with a few exceptions, which I’ll detail more later in this post). If it’s a textbook, and I learn differentiation by parts, then I’m not going to get anything more the second time. If it’s a technical manual, and I’m learning how to do something, once I know it, the book is only a reference for me. And as a reference (or if the book is already just a reference book), it sits on the shelf waiting for me to look up something specific to refresh my memory – but it’s a refresh, and not a re-read for information.

A novel, on the other hand (which is the type of “book of entertainment” I’m prone to), if sufficiently deep – Wolfe, Herbert, Twain, what have you – will entertain me all over again. If I have read it before, I’ll get more out of the depth the second time. Maybe it’s because I remember the entire plot, and can place things in context. Maybe I see the foreshadowing better. Maybe the first time, I only picked up the action, and the second reading, I’m learning more about the characters, and the third reading, I’m using those parts to hone in on the themes… for whatever reason, I enjoy rereading good books. So I disagree with him.

But.

The “books of science” that I’m reading aren’t the ones that Johnson was reading. He was writing really pre- industrial revolution (or at the head of it), and science was in its, if not infancy, at least it was a toddler. Texts were much more likely to be full of unanswered questions and issues to think about. A science book published today is far more likely to act as though a question has been settled – whether it has been or not – and to try to be a “complete” resource on the subject. So it’s not the same comparison. His “arithmetic textbook” sounds terribly boring to me. But was it really like the Calculus text gathering dust in my basement, or worse, the algebra textbook that I didn’t bother keeping? Or is it more like a book by James Gleick, or Douglas Hofstader, that talks about a few of the issues that are known, and goes off speculating? Today, those aren’t considered “texts” – indeed, they are (to warp Johnson’s phrases) “science books for entertainment”, intended for the lay audience, to popularize science, explain it, and build an interest. I suspect (though I don’t know for certain) that the type of texts available to Johnson might well be more like this.

And I’ll tell you this – I could reread Hofstader’s Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid a number of times, and get something new out of it each time. And I call it a “book of entertainment”. Would Johnson, perhaps, have referred to the same text as a “book of science”?

Look at http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1636.htm”]this link for a description of science books – even one hundred years after Johnson – and compare that to the science books we know.

And the “books of entertainment” we read – novels, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy – what was the equivalent in Johnson’s time? He was writing in 1773. Novels (to the extent that we call them that) weren’t at the same stage in development then, and many genres we have didn’t exist. Would Johnson have referred to Plato as a “book of entertainment”? I don’t know that he would have.

So no, I don’t agree with him – I would prefer to reread entertainment – but I can see that with the literature of his time, I might well have felt differently.

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I apologize for screwing up the link. Here’s the correct one:

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1636.htm

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You’re right that novels as we know them did not exist in 1773. But if Samuel Johnson had held out six more years before jumping to conclusions, he could have read G. E. Lessing’s play Nathan der Weise, a simultaneously entertaining and instructive piece of literature. In the meantime, surely the plays of Shakespeare would have provided Johnson with counterexamples to his assertion that a book of entertainment “can do no more for you” on subsequent readings.

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Johnson was a homotextual.

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amore, I agree with you about Shakespeare. I don’t have any idea how common it would have been in 1773 for people to have copies of Shakespeare’s plays available for entertaining reading, or whether or not that would be something people would do. But clearly Johnson was educated enough that he would have at least thought about them. (Or how about Marlowe? We could come up with many other examples.)

I guess my main point is that literature is deep, and was (I think) deep even then, but:

  1. There were fewer books to draw from, and
  2. Science books have become drier, in exchange (it would seem) for accuracy and certainty.