Reading is about more than words. Take Cherwell for instance: ignore the text, and just feel its weight in your hands, the texture of the paper, the pages still stuck together from the press. These are all signs, conveying meaning no less than the content itself. The smudges of cheap ink on your fingers are war wounds, badges of honour: you’ve endured the earnest pretension of an entire student newspaper and given your critical instincts a thorough exercise. The feel of a crisp hardback fresh off the shelf or of a tattered paperback passed between family and friends – these are inextricably bound up with the joy of reading.
Watching a film could hardly be more different. The atmosphere of a cinema unsuccessfully combines the community of a theatre audience and the darkened anonymity in which handsy 15 year olds delight – cue the awkward and empty gesture of clapping at the end of movies. The whole process is ruthlessly commercialised. You spend at least 25 minutes not watching the film you paid to see, senses rapidly dulled by a barrage of Hollywood hyperbole. You fall asleep during the crucial moments of characterisation; inevitably Bad Cop does in fact love his prodigal teenage daughter, or some minor variation on the genres which straitjacket mainstream film far more than literature. Rubbing your eyes at the surprise of daylight, you leave with a vague sense of self-loathing that you decided on a Pick & Mix chaser for your Ben & Jerry’s, or that you’ve sullied your conscience by sponsoring Torture Porn VII.
With novels, there’s no danger that the special effects budget will eat into the script-writers’ allowance. Metaphor, at once a condensation and magnification of experience, remains the cheapest and most effective way to illustrate ideas. The imaginations of author and reader are fused in a highly personal process – and it is surely part of the novel’s charm that every reader pictures Gatsby (or Hogwarts) in a slightly different way. Moreover, the special effects arms race is a damaging trend. Bibliophiles have known that bigger does not necessarily mean better long before Callimachus wrote ‘a big book is a big evil’ in the 3rd century B.C. Perhaps James Cameron should read more Alexandrian poetry. His bloated and self-indulgent Avatar, hyped as the future of film, was in desperate need of such advice, a CGI-backlash over two millennia old.
Books allow for – even demand – your own interpretation at every step. Film is the passive option: you can switch off as soon as the TV switches on. Admittedly this has its advantages. No one will ever put on an audiobook of Wuthering Heights to set the mood post-Kukui, let alone suggest a reading of favourite passages. That’s not to say that films can’t be stimulating or engaging, but they require a base level of engagement which borders on the vegetative. Appeals to realism all too often conceal the lazy peddling of clichés.
Surely it’s not cultural snobbery to prefer a more challenging option. If books are harder to get into than films, they are all the more satisfying for it, and their influence is the more profound. A film is yet to change to world.
To use a garishly modern word for a simple concept, books are an interface, a tangible interaction with someone else’s thoughts. Ever since St Augustine spotted St Ambrose reading – bizarrely – in silence, the act has taken on a ritual or sacramental quality. The appeal of books evades concise definition; language has limits, as do all forms of expression, and the novel has confronted this fact over the last century. But you need only imagine the walls of the Bodleian lined with a shiny collection of DVDs to realise something very special is at stake.
