Leithart and Humble Reading

"To read well, we must become as little children." Thus says Peter Leithart in his sublime essay Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader, in which he presents a theory of authorship and readership based on authority and humility.

Leithart begins by proclaiming the "death of the author" in postmodernism. He argues that postmodern theorists are "challenging the 'authority' of the 'author'." He points us back to a time when "literary theory centered on the concepts of auctor [author] and auctoritas [authority]." To be called an author was "an accolade".

This being in mind, "reading could not be anything but an act of humility -- homage to the auctoritas of an auctor". Leithart argues (and he laments that truisms have to be argued in the postmodern age) that "simply by picking up a book, opening it, and following the words someone else has written, the reader is subjecting himself to the author". Reading fiction and reading it intelligently "requires a humble acceptance of the world of the novel". Leithart calls the "suspension of disbelief" an act of humility. Chesterton wrote that "humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." It makes everything around us large and magnificent. The humility Leithart speaks of is not mere "let's pretend", but "paying attention to what the author thinks is important".  We have to submit to the rules that the writer sets, and we play by the rules because he is an auctor with auctoritas. Not every writer deserves the accolade of auctor, and Leithart argues that we have a responsibility "to judge literature ethically.... Though fiction creates its own world, the book also is an objective presence in our world; the world becomes flesh and dwells among us, and the question must be asked whether this incarnate word is doing mischief or good." There are consequences of reading, and we surely do prefer that they be profitable.

At the essay's end, Leithart assures that, "having humbled himself before the author, the reader shall, quite properly, be exalted."