Falling In

I just finished Crime and Punishment. Any time I finish a book like that, I end up in a particular mood, and I write all of my blog posts in that mood. The name for it escapes me.

Recently, I have been thinking more and more about literature. Generally about the importance of the liberal arts in society, but more specifically: Is it sensible for a person untrained in literature (e.g., me, or likely, you) to spend their time reading “great books”—and if it is worthwhile, what are the rules, strategies, and intuitions that should guide the reading of these great books?

About a year ago, I decided I was going to write the Great American Novel. Not sometime in my life, but “right, exactly now.” In parallel, I had another brilliant idea: What if I read some books too, just to get an idea for what might be required? Being breathtakingly arrogant (in a deeply embarrassing but wildly joyful way), I decided to start with the most difficult, most broadly acclaimed, and, well, most greatest novels in the world.

I am guessing that a lot of educated people will empathize with my impulse. We do not have a lot of time, so if we are going to read, it makes sense to be efficient. Read the very best the world has to offer, and soon your mind will be able to reference the wealth of abstracted knowledge humanity has stored in the novelistic arts—a relatively esteemed accomplishment, both socially and psychologically. Then, of course, you discover the obstacle. You open the first page of Ulysses, realize that it was written by an absurd madman attempting to keep college professors (funded by tax-evading philanthropists) gainfully employed for millenia, and return to whatever pursuit you had interrupted. Hopefully you do not also conclude that “great literature” is subjective and self-serving, but are left instead with a nagging question: What did I miss out on, and is there a way to access it?

In his famous three hundred page essay S/Z, narrative theorist Roland Barthes distinguishes between two types of novels: readerly novels and writerly novels. I have not read the essay, only struggled through the translator’s note and the introduction, but I find the distinction functional. According (through the lens of my limited understanding) to Barthes, readerly novels entertain. They may have themes and interpretations, but these interpretations are limited in scope and variety, and when realized in excess will be distracting to a reader who wishes simply to experience the book. The readerly novel is found on everyone’s bookshelf, and reading it should be a comfortable, perhaps unchallenging, activity.

On the other hand, there exist writerly novels. Writerly novels are, like the human mind, composed of pointers and associations, connections and disconnections, direct references and vague, subconscious influences. There is an infinite amount to read in a writerly novel, just like there is an infinite amount to read in a single decision made by a human being—background, personality, conscious desires, unconscious motivations, biases, passions. All of these and more can be extracted by a sufficiently pathological interpreter of the human mind, and of the novel. A writerly novel, like Ulysses, becomes defined by its indefinability. There is evidence that in his selection of each and every word, the writer desired to impart some meaning. So how can we even begin to approach such a text, much less learn from it in a utilitarian, time-conscious manner?

Here we have two questions: One, are the great novels in life writerly or readerly? Two, if they are writerly, if they are infinite, if even approaching an understanding of their galactic network of references and feelings and impulses would require immense time and study, does it still make sense for us to read them? Or are we being just as arrogant as I was a year ago when I committed myself to paddling through Faulkner and Hemingway?

I think the relationship between technical investment and productive takeaway in reading great novels is analogous to the relationship between technique and enjoyment in close reading. You might remember close reading from your AP English classes, where you had to identify polysyndeton and asyndeton and anaphora and alliteration and allusion. The idea is that by considering the precise wording of a passage, we can understand how the author has accomplished something rhetorically. Through this scientific deconstruction of their accomplishment, we simultaneously gain insight into the technique of rhetoric and augment our appreciation of the art. In high school English classes, the process often appears contrived and tiresome. But I am a particular fan of close reading, and I think trying it out will shed light on some of the questions of this piece.

When I read a passage I find particularly beautiful, poignant, or well-stated, I take a picture of it on my phone. Here’s one I adore from Jane Eyre, about heartbreak:

“No reflection was to be allowed now: not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet—so deadly sad—that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.”

I include this passage (which, incidentally, is not particularly easy to read) because its value may not be wholly described by the templated thematic analysis to which you may be accustomed. But before I argue that, try a quick second read, both for meaning and aesthetic. Our narrator informs us that in her heartbreak, she cannot bear to think about past good times, which are abrasive with nostalgia, and does not want to look to the future, which feels empty without her love.

How do we analyze this passage? On one level, we could argue thematically that the passage demonstrates Jane’s remarkable fortitude in insisting upon her own individuality, denying the emotional, humanistic impulse towards succumbing to patriarchy (in the context of the novel, returning to the man she loves). We could also recognize the Biblical allusion to Noah’s Ark and the flood. We could take away, as educated people who want to augment our understanding of literature, the knowledge Bronte has concretized: Externalized oppression can easily become internalized pain, and in the face of this internalized pain the oppressed must strive that much harder for freedom.

Performing this analysis has not asked much from us—there is little of Barthes’ writerly infinity here. We needed to parse the sentences closely, and know a bit about the Bible, but it appears that in a novel such as Jane Eyre, which I think is about median difficulty among great literature, a surprisingly reasonable amount of effort has been asked of us as readers. We might get used to this kind of language, ramp up to harder, more abstract themes, read Ulysses, and finally become “well-read.”

Here lies the trap of this type of reading, which I would insist, despite its analytical nature, is readerly and not writerly, though we have been trained in it since we were young. The trap has two teeth: On one side, we may reach fluency in this style of reading, finish Jane Eyre, and think, hmm, a rather good book about the birth of feminism, remarkable in relation to its time period and its prescience, and beyond that Bronte was incredible for having done it when she did! But is it mandatory reading for all people? Meh. On the other, we might pick up a much more difficult novel, like Ulysses, feel the language is just too difficult, the allusions just out of our range, and put the novel back down, assuming it requires a literary expansiveness not available to us at the moment.

But the magic of Barthes’ dichotomy is that he does not let us off the hook so easily. He asks us to approach writerly novels as if the process of reading a novel is itself creative. Because there is no limited guide with which one can approach an unlimited problem, discovering your relationship with a text becomes necessarily generative. It is not like sitting back and watching a Marvel movie, letting yourself be entertained by the action, or even quite like scribbling out an English essay identifying themes of feminism in Charlotte Bronte’s writing. If there are one hundred lenses laid out through which you may peer, the very process of selecting one and squinting your eyes becomes creative, and thereby fundamentally personalized.

Barthes' approach to reading is also remarkably ferocious: You do not gently pull on easily recognizable threads, you yank them one by one. You split a novel into its pieces, you smash it, you demand of it an infinitude of questions and answers which it may or may not contain. You do not cajole theme, whisper intention, guess at relation. Engagement in writerly text requires creative violence—to actively interpret rather than passively consume, you have to involve yourself in the novel, have to push at the limits of text.

In an effort to attempt a more meaningful analysis, let us return to Jane. I picked this passage because of its final line: “The last” (referring to the future) “was an awful blank: something like the world when the deluge was gone by.” This is an expansively gorgeous line: What did the world look like after the flood, when all animals lay drowned except those on the Ark, and the Earth reduced to nothing? All history reset, all future uncertain except to know that the safety and belonging of before will be rejected in what is to come. To be leveled by heartbreak, to be so utterly empty—has such a feeling occurred to a human on this Earth? Have you felt it?

There is a solution to the question of technique and context in interpretation. There is a machine which works in ways of infinite, cumulative association, which can bounce across oceans of collected knowledge almost without pattern, which is comfortable with translating scene to emotion, sentence to memory, imagery to feeling: the human brain.

Bronte’s line is only that—a line, one of many stellar lines in a remarkably beautiful book. But across authors and across time, engaging with literature in this way offers something more than we bargained for when we set out, asking naively if great literature “should” be read and how to properly “optimize” its reading. Smashing a book into its pieces, hammering it with the only tool we have suited to the task: ourselves, our consciousness, our emotions, our mind—this is the true value of a novel. A novel cannot only be experienced as a movie or understood as a lecture, but must be felt in communion. Literature is humanity in cipher. English classes teach the theory of cryptography, but our own self, our willingness to commit to the creative process of reading, constitute the real key.

In our approach to great novels, we must pursue drastically more, and ask somewhat less, than what we have been taught (in this sense I may diverge greatly from Barthes). We should be willing to understand less and feel more, to classify more conservatively and to empathize more liberally. I am speaking to people like myself—those with the desire to read, and read literature, but for whom reading appears daunting or even painful—and for these people I hope to rescope the problem rather than offer a specific solution. Perhaps changing our relationship with what we read, and disregarding a more utilitarian or even formalist approach to literature, will allow us to integrate literature more fully into our lives.

Should you read The Brothers Karamazov, Wuthering Heights, Ulysses? Yes, yes you should. But not only with a focus on plot, because Wikipedia will give you the plot, and not only for theme and context, because a longform YouTube video can give you that as well. What more is offered by reading a book than reading about a book? The difference is you. The author has left you an open space, and their narrative is waiting patiently for you to not simply observe but to dive in, to allow yourself to feel how the author and characters feel, to ask yourself why their approaches, sentiments, and conflicts are not academically informative but immediately imperative, in an emotional and perhaps even subconscious sense, to the course of your life.

It is not surprising to me that Large Language Models are a quantum leap forward in reaching artificial intelligence. Chomsky demonstrated to us that humans subjected to language deprivation lack much of what makes us intelligent creatures. Children can be born blind, deaf, dumb, but Helen Keller proved it is the act of reading and writing that crystallizes the truly vital senses. We arrange ourselves, abstract our minds, store our knowledge, emotions, consciousness and subconsciousness in words: to dip our finger in that endless pool, if only briefly, is one of the great gifts of being human.