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Although I could take issue with many of Alan Jacobs points and beliefs, I think perhaps the most detrimental of his theories is his notion of the reader and what those implications might be. Jacobs notion of suggesting charity from the reader is not absolutely unattractive in its own right. More troubling is his seeming command to always be a charitable reader as a Christian reader. This belief then creates a literary cultural world in which the audience is no longer active, but merely a passive recipient whose only “action” (if you can call it that) is to bestow charity. This process allows for no development of thought or diversity in reaction and so Jacobs essentially advocates a monotonous, homogeneous reader.
And if this weren’t his only fault, I would still have to seriously question the underlying belief that charity even should be the aim of reading. Yes, Jacobs is perfectly accurate in drawing attention to the Christian imperative towards love and charity, yet I question whether this imperative is also applicable to a non-living work, the result of a person’s labor. I can hardly imagine Jesus advocating us to compliment our neighbor who sells us their rotten crops and instructing us to turn our eyes and noses away from the stench in the name of an attitude of charity while simply consuming the crap offered us under the false pretense of quality. Neither should we have to suffer through and consume literary crap in this charitable name.
When we read a work, something of the thoughts expressed in the work begins to impregnate our own minds. If we read bad writing, bad poetry, bad literature, and allow it to simply wash over and through our own minds, we are doing significant harm to ourselves. To a degree, this process is inevitable, as nobody can ever be entirely sure that what they will read will be quality, but at least in the situations where this crappy consumption takes place, our ability to retaliate, criticize, and challenge become the means to fumigate our brains and remove the negative influence. A reader without this power who must do nothing but extend charity, has no way of participating in art, and in the negative cases of art that necessitate charity in the first place, participation is the only way to re-form the experience into a positive.
