A working philosophy for the practicing public reader

"When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings." -Emerson 

 i.

In one of my undergraduate lit courses, the professor was giving us ideas for our term papers. He threw out a variety of topics involving tying one theoretical school or another to the texts we were focusing on that semester: Marxism and the Romantics; Feminism and Frankenstein; Deconstruction and Wordsworth's Prelude. He then added, almost as if it didn't need to be said, words to this effect: or, if you don't want to spend a lot of time in the library doing research, you can take a work you identify with and do a close reading of it. You're never wrong doing a close reading. 

ii.

J. Hillis Miller, in his essay on Wuthering Heights "Repetition and the Uncanny," complained about other critics who, while not wrong in what they had said about the novel, approached it with too narrow a critical view. "The essays on Wuthering Heights I have cited seem to me insufficient, not because what they say is demonstrably mistaken, but rather because there is an error in the assumption that there is a single secret truth about Wuthering Heights. This secret truth would be something formulable as a univocal principle of explanation which would account for everything in the novel. The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that here is no secret truth which criticism might formulate in this way."

Writing in the mid-80s, the height of the influence of literary criticism, Miller was seemingly addressing something greater than just the critical reception of one novel. He seemed to feel that while the various theoretical schools--Marxist, structuralist, neo-historical, feminist, etc.--each had interesting things to say, there was something essentially wrong with seeing one school as THE school, the one that had arrived at the most fundamental way of interpreting texts. 

Most lower level literature courses adopt Miller's philosophy. A professor of students who aren't necessarily going to become literary professionals is happy to see a student apply any theoretical approach to a text, as long as it demonstrates some kind of insight gained from the approach. 

Most readers aren't literary professionals. They're curious people who bring a lot of their own experiences and intelligence to reading, but who might struggle, like the reader in Miller's essay, to "find a way in" to a text. Whatever gets them into a text is a good approach. 

In The Use and Abuse of Literature, Marjorie Garber points out that all theoretical schools tend to favor texts where their own theories work best. She was pointing out the limitations of all theoretical schools, but one application of her observation is that picking a theoretical approach to apply to a story is similar to how a mechanic chooses the right tool for a job. A reader who has an eclectic taste will benefit from the ability to switch theoretical tools. 

I was often frustrated by deconstructionist theory as a literature student, because I felt it was often being intentionally obfuscatory. One thing I do understand about it is that it values play and freedom. Unless one is going to only read books of a certain type, a good reader will need to also develop the ability to play different sorts of games.

iii.

You know a good reading or interpretation the same way you know a good primary literary text. It's interesting and insightful. The exact same criteria applies in both cases. 

iv.

Western thinking about literature has a long history of talking about the "interesting" and "insightful" aspects of stories. The ancient Roman poet Horace formulated these ideas as "to delight and instruct." 

Plato was suspicious of poets who made up stories, because he saw them as liars. Much of the history of Western literary philosophy has been an attempt to respond to this criticism. There have been many defenses of poetry written, including those by Sir Phillip Sydney and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Most of these defenses return to the "delight and instruct" concept. 

Writing in response to the attack that poetry corrupts morals, they often formulated arguments that went something like this: No, poetry doesn't corrupt morals. People don't naturally like being taught what's good, so poetry goes around that by giving people something that they do like, and in so doing, sneakily gets them to accept what is good and true. 

"Delighting" and "instructing" end up as two different things. They might be working in tandem like a one-two punch, but they are distinct from one another. 

I think this is something of a false distinction, though. Very often, instruction is itself delightful. A chess player will endure hours of grinding through drills in order to become a better player, because playing better makes the game more enjoyable. The same is true of a musician or really of anyone who is trying to perfect a craft. The drudgery of acquiring mastery doesn't need to be sweetened up for them, because mastery is itself a delight. 

v.

And so we return to the notion of play. 

Life resembles nothing in modern experience as much as an open-ended video game like Minecraft. There isn't really a way to "win" it. Winning it means enjoying it the most in whatever way you enjoy it. Whatever way you enjoy it, though, there are things you have to learn to get there. Players who enjoy Minecraft will enjoy learning these new skills because it will enable them to play the game in a way that fulfills them. They will take delight in instruction. I've seen this in my son, who generally hates reading, but will devour hours of wiki pages about a video game. 

Reading literature is one form of building skills for life. Reading well enables greater enjoyment.

vi.

There are four disciplines one can apply when reading: review, critique, theory, and analysis. There is some interplay between the four, but review is generally about whether something is good, critique is about what something means in both its literary and historical context, theory is about the fundamental contexts in which texts have meaning and readers understand those meanings, and analysis is about how a text works or how it accomplishes what it accomplishes.

All of these four matter when reading. Which one matters the most at any given moment is much like deciding which theoretical approach to take: whichever one makes sense for the text given. Which is to say, whichever one leads to a reading that delights and instructs. 

vii.

The same goes for the different possible centers of reading: author-centered, text-centered, and reader-centered. The "right" one varies from text to text, and you'll know when you've found the "right" one by how interesting and insightful the result of the reading is. 

vii.

There is a personal aspect to reading. While review, critique, theory, and analysis can all be done without bringing the "I" of the reader into it, reading as a whole, meaning the process of using texts to play the game of life in a more fulfilling way, cannot. 

ix.

When I read and respond to works, I am using the four disciplines, but there is at least some sense in which what I am trying to do is the full sense of reading, the one that invokes the "I." I am not a critic or an analyst or a theorist. I'm a person reading in the fullest possible sense and sharing that reading in public. 

x.

I very nearly quit doing this last year, because I felt like I wasn't educated enough about theory and criticism. It made me think I lacked the vocabulary to explain complicated aesthetic reactions. But if that's true, and I'm not really capable of reading responsively, then who can? Only tenured professors of literature? Wouldn't that then mean that ordinary people can't really use literature as a way to improve their own enjoyment of life? Or does the reading of ordinary people always have to be mediated by priest-professors? Can't people, bringing whatever they have, read fiction in ways that add to the texts? 

Of course I need to continually learn more about the disciplines that go into the full activity of reading, but in the meantime, I can read and share my reading for other people who are reading and living, too. So when I can pry the time away from other activities enough to do it, the point of this blog is to provide public readings, in the fullest sense, hopefully for the benefit of other readers.