Before I read Clarissa I was nobody: Aspirational reading and Samuel Richardson's great novel

My students read for the plot not the sentiment, and when one of them, inevitably, bothers to read the back book cover and finds out that some book designer at Penguin has killed the surprise, he becomes seriously splenetic, sulking at the periphery of the classroom, next to the nonadjustable heater which is chugging along like Mike Mulligan's steam shovel even though crocuses are blooming outside (to hot! to hot!). There's always one student in the room who knows that Clarissa gets raped and who also knows what happens next (I won't ruin it for the non-Clarissa readers-if you buy the Penguin edition, be prepared to clap a book jacket on the cover). But this knowing student is kind enough not to spoil it for his classmates who, in any event, sail right past the rape without realizing it has happened. In the most famous letter in the novel, on the 883rd page of the Penguin edition, Richardson communicates the rape of Clarissa by having Lovelace write:

And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives. And I am

Your humble servant,

R. Lovelace

My students generally come to class after reading this passage with no idea that something momentous has occurred. They are initially resentful that, after having dutifully read 883 pages, they have been given so slight an account of the novel's central event. It is almost as if Orson Welles, instead of lingering over the sled at the end of Citizen Kane, had opted instead, to put an advertisement for Rosebud sleds on a distant billboard in the corner of the screen. We talk about the contrast between this elliptical little letter and all the wordy letters that precede it, about why an author whose characters write at so great a length-a stickler for verisimilitude once proved that these characters could not have written so much and still have had time to live the events they describe-would be so reticent. My students come around to the view that Richardson's refusal to describe the rape of Clarissa, or at least his refusal of detail directly after the event has transpired, is a stroke of brilliance, that the rape is all the more shocking for its not being immediately described. Sometimes someone brings up Hitchcock's method of increasing suspense by letting the viewer's imagination fill in what the director refrains from depicting in gory detail. OK, sometimes I bring up Hitchcock since everyone has seen Psycho. No matter-we are suddenly a community of readers with strongly held opinions about the rape of Clarissa. Before the semester is over, a few of my students become evangelical in their enthusiasm for the novel and try to bring others into Richardson's fold. One of them hails me at the Handimart fuel pump in order to report that her sister has tried to read Clarissa. "How far did she get?" I ask, trying not to let gasoline drip on my shoes.

My students are part of the wired generation that is leaving librarians with no one to shush, and Clarissa might seem immune to the kind of digital innovations that are making it possible to get a college degree without checking out a book from the library. Yet Richardson's behemoth has been well served by the technological advance guard. The good people at Literature Online stand poised to transmit a machine-readable transcript of either the 1748 Clarissa (all 5,914 kilobytes of it) or the 1751 third edition (with its 935 extra kilobytes). You, with the laptop computer and the internet link-you could be downloading Clarissa at this very minute. You, there, checking out the Rookwood auction on eBay-why aren't you reading one of the greatest European literary works of all time, the high-water mark of the English novel? Inspired by the success of Oprah reading groups, several municipalities have called on their citizenry to join together in a communal reading effort. A year or two ago, Chicagoans were urged to read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mocking-bird; Boiseans were coaxed to take up Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. In Chicago, lapel pins were issued so that Mocking-bird readers could identify each other in supermarket lines or across crowded buses and feel licensed to express their views of Boo Radley to complete strangers. There is a general unassailable consensus that reading is a good thing, that people who read together will exhibit a heightened civility, an increased brotherly love, an enhanced vocabulary.