Thoughts About Reading

[alaterdate]

The sum of a text is the collaboration between writer and reader. Every writer begins as a reader learning how to interpret letters, sentences, paragraphs, stories. Take these interpretations to a fresh blank page. A single line in a new work can act as a hyperlink to an interpretation of another. But it takes the mind of the reader to click onto and parse that hyperlink. The place where the reader's thoughts collide with the writer's creates a crater of depth able to be mined for precious minerals.

Part of the fun of reading is pairing your imagination with the writer's like a good wine and cheese. Part of the fun of writing is leaving broader implications to the reader's imagination. Just as one cannot articulate every little train of thought into speech, the writer cannot put down every facet of a character or world. And why should they? Sometimes it's fun to ask people to guess. Guess what I found under the seat of the bus, guess what I bought you for your birthday, guess who I saw in the park. Guess why the curtains are blue, I've given you the clues. A great writer lets their work be a bit of a puzzle. A great reader finds enjoyment in being challenged.

As Thomas C. Foster writes in How to Read Literature Like a Professor (2014)
"We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to."

There are perils in this mutual work. A writer may distrust their reader and try to get ahead of any interpretations by making their themes plain or including no symbolism at all. A fear of the reader making a bad faith claim. As Foster continues,
"Imagination isn't fantasy. That is to say, we can't simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not to hold her to it."

Yes, there is risk of misinterpretation, but why should we preemptively leave our windows plain or bare in fear that bad actors will rip our curtains down and throw them in the trash. They will do that whether the curtains are blue or pure white, and they will break our windows too.

A responsible reader responds to what actually appears in the text. This is why any good analysis of a story is asked to prove itself with examples and direct quotes. Evidence of your interpretation through the context of the story. So that it can then be agreed with or refuted by others who have also read the text.

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The internet has become a fearsome tool capable of stripping a work of its context. Purposefully or accidentally misconstruing it. A single quote can be spun in any way the poster chooses. Of course it's irresponsible of anyone to take a single quote's interpretation at face value. What an idea means to someone who has to interpret it changes depending on the context with which the idea is presented; it only ever means what it was meant to when decoded by its original context. The context is what provides the tools that must be used to make an interpretation. This holds true not only for works of art, but for any dialogue disseminated anywhere.

The removal of context in web spaces has unfortunately become such a problem that in his book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010), computer scientist, philosopher, and critic Jaron Lanier laments the tendency to separate meaning and context as a reduction of humanity,
“Context has always been part of expression, because expression becomes meaningless if the context becomes arbitrary. [...] Meaning is only ever meaning in context.”
This is only a small part of his larger work warning against the sterilization of human expression through digital means. Just as Lanier rails against humanity increasingly being boxed into standardized formats that do away with nuance so must readers rail against this happening to stories.

This can be done by insisting on context. By being curious and examining a work with your own eyes. Practice reading exactly what is on the page or screen exactly where it came from. Find out by reading for yourself. Don't take my word for it.

Comments

[pauraque]

I don't have a lot to say about this besides that I agree. But I agree!