Book Review: Breaking Bread with the Dead

[osprey_archer]

I can only assume that some bright-eyed marketing director chose the subtitle for Alan Jacobs’ Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, because that subtitle is in fact exactly orthogonal to the book’s actual thesis: Jacobs aims not to help readers achieve more tranquil minds, but to disrupt the tranquility of their minds by reading old books, which will allow them to engage with voices alien to their own.

(Jacobs is writing specifically about books, but I think this argument could equally apply to other art forms from the past - movies, music, and so forth.)

Or, as Jacobs puts it, “there’s something also to be said for that moment when a figure from the past who has perfectly anticipated something you already believe then turns around and says something that puzzles or alienates you. That is, I firmly believe, the greater moment of enlightenment: the moment of double realization. To confront the reality that the very same people who give us rich wisdom can also talk what seems to us absolute nonsense (and vice versa) is an education in the human condition.”

Rather, I should say that this is one of a number of reasons that Breaking Bread with the Dead offers for reading old books. It’s a wandering, discursive book, like a long thoughtful conversation with a friend, and I would be doing it a disservice to boil it down to a single thesis. I’ve latched onto this argument because it resonated most with me, because it’s the reason I am drawn to old books: they are genuinely alien. To quote Jacobs again: “the future we imagine is just that: not an alien anything, but what we imagine, what we can imagine. And often it’s what we can’t imagine that we’re most in need of.”

The genuinely alien stretches our imagination in a way that nothing else can achieve.

Jacobs also wrestles with the problem of how to engage with problematic aspects of old works in a way that I found thought-provoking. “Surely we have lost something vital when we have lost the power to be startled, even offended, by the voices from the past. To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better. Indeed, in foreclosing the possibility of real challenge it is worse.”

Jacobs argues instead that one should imagine old texts as dinner guests, brilliant, witty, with well-considered opinions on certain questions, and ill-considered nonsense on others. (Only, of course, a book has the inestimable advantage over a flesh-and-blood person that you can engage entirely on your own terms, and close it whenever the nonsense-to-wisdom ratio tilts too far toward the former; and then perhaps reopen it, months or years later, and take up just where you left off.)

And around this ghostly dinner table you talk with your guests, and you listen to what they say, and you argue; and you find they look at certain questions from angles you had never considered before, that perhaps they ask questions that you had never considered needed answering; and you realize that the world is much larger than you knew. “To read old books,” Jacobs contends, “is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.”

Comments

[marycatelli]

I recommend to aspiring fantasy and SF writers that they read primary source not for any incidental facts they may happen to pick up, but to knock their blocks off. Once they are familiar enough with the idea that people may be very different from them, they will gain the instinct to research whether something is different rather than assume they are the same.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, exactly. It exposes assumptions in your own thinking that you might never realize were assumptions otherwise.

[asakiyume]

Lets them begin to know what they don't know--which they won't know, otherwise....

[anna_wing]

Yes. True dversity is not limited to skin colour and sexual habits. Dealing regularly with people who think differently from myself in many completely different ways and about many different things is a constant reminder that pretty much no opinion is universally shared.

I like old murder mysteries and a lot of old fiction generally, novels that were contemporary in their day, because the background world is usually as interesting as the mystery, and often much more alien. And in many cases because the focus is the mystery, the background details feel much more...authentic is probably the wrong word but I am not sure what a better one would be ...real, perhaps. More genuinely revealing of the author's perception of their contemporary milieu.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that often the mystery part of mysteries can feel artificial (not that this stops me from gobbling down mysteries) - you can sort of see the cogs & strings as the pieces of the plot move into place. But even if the plot seems artificial, the background and characters often feel very real, and I think the mystery genre often offers them more room to be flawed and unpleasant than other genres do - after all, you've got to have a range of vaguely believable murder suspects.

[anna_wing]

I also like the mysteries that turn on issues that are now non-issues in most place, like someone being secretly a bastard, or adopted, and wanting to hide his origin for fear of social ruin. Exotic oriental artifacts are always fun too.

[kore]

I have this! It sounds really good, I should read it. (Have been rereading nothing but old fanfic and even older Marvel graphic novel collections.)

[osprey_archer]

This might be a big change from old fanfic! But sometimes a big change is fun.

[lucymonster]

To say ‘This text offends me, I will read no further’ may be shortsighted; but to read a ‘great book’ from the past with such reverence that you can’t see where its views are wrong, or even where they differ from your own, is no better.

I like that a lot! It’s a great way to approach morally challenging reading - and life in general, I think. I also love the dinner guest analogy to bits.

[osprey_archer]

The dinner guest analogy is so fun! And old books are the only dinner guests I'm going to be able to have for another six months, at the rate the US vaccine rollout is going... might as well make the most of them.

[asakiyume]

Jacobs argues instead that one should imagine old texts as dinner guests, brilliant, witty, with well-considered opinions on certain questions, and ill-considered nonsense on others. --What a perfect way of putting it, and what you say immediately afterward, too. And because you can put it down and then come back to it, it can have a way of being persuasive--or letting you formulate counterarguments--that a living dinner guest can't.

And I agree about the genuinely alien.

[osprey_archer]

Jacobs also notes that old books can be a good starting point for learning about opposing viewpoints because our feelings about a 600-year-old book are just not as intense as our feelings about what is going on right now. The age gives us a little bit of distance, just like the fact that we can put the book back down when we don't feel like dealing with it anymore.

[asakiyume]

I saved this comment in my in-box because I wanted to come back to it: I think it's absolutely true that you can feel more free to investigate something when there's less sense of personal implication, when it doesn't somehow seem to reflect back on you in some way.

[littlerhymes]

Jacobs argues instead that one should imagine old texts as dinner guests, brilliant, witty, with well-considered opinions on certain questions, and ill-considered nonsense on others.

That is such a useful way to frame approaching older texts. I will have a yarn with you happily but when you start up again with your foolishness GOODNIGHT.

[osprey_archer]

And unlike real dinner guests, if you decide to invite them back later, books are never offended by having been unceremoniously booted! They come back quite happily and pick up just where they left off.