I. Nabokov’s Astute Bitchiness
Most people think, or have been taught, that reading is a hunt for symbolism or a search for ‘the message.’ Let me tell you a story. Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, worked some years at Cornell as a professor of writing. And there’s a famous tale about his time working there. One day, a student went to one of Professor Nabokov’s office hours. She asked him for advice on writing. In response, he turned toward the paned window behind him, and asked: “What kind of tree is that?”
The student didn’t know.
“Then you’ll never be a writer,” the professor replied.
Now, Nabokov was notoriously bitchy, and this story shows that. I mean, he’s the guy who called Dostoyevsky a “cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. A prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian” and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake a “formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book. Conventional and drab.” But there’s something important to be recovered for our discussion of how to read the great books: Nabokov’s emphasis on the power of observation. Because reading the great books is, above all, about the cultivation of perception. Great literature doesn’t just teach us what to think, it teaches us how to see, how to wonder, and how to ask and start to try to answer better questions.
II. The ‘Hidden Meaning’ Model: Why Common English Education Fails Us
Lots of us are introduced to literary analysis as if the text were a puzzle that we are meant to solve. For example, in the Great Gatsby Fitzgerald employs a lot of color imagery, and teachers like to ask: ‘what does green symbolize? How about gray? What about yellow?’ There’s an implicit assumption in the structure of this analysis: the author has hidden a meaning beneath the surface of the writing, and that as the clever reader, it is your job to crack that code. Not only does that produce a particular anxiety around getting the interpretation wrong, especially when you’re just starting out, but also sends the reader like a truffle hunting dog to sniff around corners to see if there’s some treasure we have to dig out.
There are two particular issues I take with this approach: (1) That approach is based on decoding ‘authorial intent; (2) It prioritizes interpretation and argumentation over experience
1. In his 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” “La mort de l’auteur” by French theorist Roland Barthes, Barthes established what I, and many others, think is one of the most fundamental tenets for good reading and analysis. Prior to this essay, literary criticism relied on the author’s biography and their intention in order to explain the ‘ultimate meaning’ of a text. Let’s look at how both biography and intention don’t provide fruitful literary attention or analysis. For example, In the literary criticism around Clarice Lispector’s Perto do Coração Selvagem, Near to the Wild Heart, there are numerous readers and articles who categorize it as a feminist novel. However, Clarice Lispecto herself resisted categorization and, in fact, rejected the label of “feminist.” To say either “Well, she was a woman writing about women’s concerns so she wrote a feminist novel” or “She didn’t like feminism so that’s why she focuses just on interiority rather than female interiority,” limits our reading of a complex, prolific, and multifaceted text to one single aspect. Any piece of writing is much bigger than its author and her life, so biography doesn’t help us much. Or rather, it can only get us so far. Sometimes poems or novels are autobiographical, and tapping into biography can help us understand an aspect of the poem––that is the case for the poem we’re going to be analyzing later. But the point is that sticking only to biography will not yield a close reading or analysis whose significance and stakes are as profound as they can be.
Second, intention. The question of intention and authorial intent could get its own entire video. But, to summarize: authors don’t always know what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, or why they’re doing it. If you’ve ever done any creative writing and shown it to a friend, they may have picked up on threads and connections you didn’t necessarily mean to create, but that adds to the text. If we reduce everything to ‘what the author meant’ then we limit our ability to experience the text and, later, interpret it. Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí famously rejected singular and fixed interpretations and the seeking of rigid messages and meanings in his art. When asked to explain his work, he answered “Nothing.” When he was asked by a museum to write an explanation for his painting Honey is Sweeter than Blood he asked an assistant of his to open a random book to a random page and send a paragraph from there.
As Barthes argues, “to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text” because it precludes us from embracing the manifold interpretations that a single text can provide us. Separating a work for its creator liberates the text from interpretive tyranny. And, I mean, just look at how quickly this gets messy: “Well I think that Clarice thinks that she is trying to convey this thing through this other thing.” We are not mind readers, and we never will be. As Barthes writes, “A text’s unity lies not in its origins… but in its destination,” in other words, the reader. If we get rid of considering what we think Clarice meant or didn’t mean by whatever sentence in Near to the Wild Heart, then we allow the novel to present whatever world it is and become attentive sponges that absorb the world it's presenting to us rather than imposing our own on it.
A caveat here is that although I’m resisting the idea that there is one singular definitive interpretation of texts, there are better and worse interpretations based on textual evidence and the soundness of and validity of one’s argument, evidence, and analysis. I’m thinking about creating a more practical video series with short focused videos on how to research/read/analyze/argue/write/create your own syllabus/curriculum/canon more in depth, and if you’re interested in that or think that would be useful, please let me know in the comments.
(2) Now, onto the next problem with the ‘hidden meaning’ model: its privileging of analysis over experience. It is important to write a good essay when it comes to passing English class. You can become competent at the basics of literary criticism without having been encouraged to develop literary attention. Recognizing literary features, even well, and attending to a literary work are different acts of cognition, imagination, and interaction. I can show you how that works in real time. Let’s look at Kafka’s Metamorphosis. The first sentence, in the Stanley Corngold translation, is: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” (“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”) From that one line, a competent reader might get that the symbolic nature of dreams and the diction of “unsettling” conveying discomfort and that he woke up alone demonstrate alienation as a topic or theme of the novel. Again, this analysis is competent, it will get you a surface level analysis of the metamorphosis and can––with a little further context from the novella––produce a thesis like: “The Metamorphosis by Kafka conveys the alienation of modern labor conditions.”
But let’s look at that line and those that follow it more closely, and instead of presuming answers, let’s ask questions. “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” Why does the narrator report something so impossible with such a calm tone? What does the passive grammatical framing of “found himself changed” convey? What do the ‘unsettling dreams’ have to do with this transformation? What is the relationship between waking and sleeping? Why is Gregor already transformed when he awakes? If the title of the novella is The Metamorphosis, is this what it’s referring to? If not, what else could it be?
Let’s read on a bit, “He was lying on his back as hard as armor plate, and when he lifted his head a little, he saw his vaulted brown belly, sectioned by arch-shaped ribs, to whose dome the cover, about to slide off completely, could barely cling. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, were waving helplessly before his eyes. ‘What's happened to me?’ he thought.” Why isn’t the first response total existential terror? Why doesn’t he scream? Why are there no other ephemeral adjectives “unsettling,” only those of physical description in these first four lines? Why are there no adverbs? Why do we move so quickly from a description of his body to the room? As you continue reading on, you wonder why everyone, including Gregor himself, begins treating his disconcerting physical condition as an administrative inconvenience, and how that becomes the wondrous and insane part of the story rather than the fact that he is a “monstrous vermin.” And how the text creates that tension. And form is an essential part to this. If the Metamorphosis could be reduced to ‘modernity is alienating’ or ‘labor in modernity is alienating’ Kafka could have written an essay. Marx did. That’s all to say: a literary work is not an elaborate delivery system for a proposition.
So, if reading literature isn't extracting a message hidden underneath the words, what are we actually doing? We're learning to pay attention to what's there, and what’s not.
III. My Page Makes Love and Understands it Feelingly: Reading as Prayer and Morality
French philosopher Simon Weil argues that: “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Real attention requires suspending your ego, delaying judgment, allowing reality to disclose itself. Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest and professor, wrote that “to listen is very hard because it asks of us so much interior stability that we no longer need to prove ourselves by speeches, arguments, statements, or declarations. True listeners no longer have an inner need to make their presence known. They are free to receive, to welcome, to accept.” I agree with his definition, and I follow Weil’s framework that reading can function as an activity analogous to prayer. I’ve talked in previous videos and essays about how reading is an existential act of attention that will help us overcome the abyss of fragmentation and convenience that our current world has dug us into.
One of my best and most beloved professors at my college changed the way I understood literary analysis when she told us to never read the blurbs at the back of the book. We were reading Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart, and one of the comments suggested that the author “moral censure in her treatment of taboo subjects such as brother-sister incest” among other difficult topics. And I, as many of my peers, had read that comment and were now looking at the relationship between the two protagonists as that. It came up during class discussion, and my professor was shocked. “What do you mean incest? There are no clear instances of incest in this book.” And we were like “yeah, I mean no explicit ones but that’s what the back said.” And she admonished us to never impose our own realities and categorizations on the text, but rather to remain receptive to what it is showing us.
Building on Weil’s ideas, Irish-British philosopher Iris Murdoch discusses how the great moral task of human existence is overcoming fantasy, to learn how to project less onto the world. According to Murdoch, moral improvement is mostly about learning to see reality more truthfully rather than making better decisions––which is what we tend to see morality as. She outlines how we’re constantly projecting our desires, prejudices, resentments, and simplifications onto the external world. Drawing on Weil and Schopenhauer, Murdoch argues that art’s function is to interrupt this; encountering another’s depictions, another’s mind means coming face to face with another consciousness that resists our categories. Reading refuses to let reality become simple and abstracted. It is about particularity, conveyed in both form and content. Reading great novels and poems and essays changes what you’re capable of noticing.
IV. An Example of Everything Worth Noticing: Six Key Categories of Questions
There are six key categories of questions you can/should ask any text:
Language: Notice the particular words, not synonyms (gets complicated in translation),
Form: how it is on the page
In novels: Narration: Point of view: first, second third; perspective: omniscient/limited (limited to whose, how does that affect our experience); reliability
In poems: metre, rhyme, stanza
In both: tone/mood/diction/syntax
Pattern: what repeats? How often? When does it stop if ever? What contexts?
Sounds, Images, objects, colors, weather, animals, silence, questions, dialogue
Tension: where are the contractions? What are the conflicts? What expectations does it create—and break? Look at surprise, contrast, irony. What questions does the book refuse to answer? Where is the ambiguity?
Context: the historical production, what the literary field was like at the time, the philosophical movements. Context applies to both the historical and temporal setting of the work itself and when the text was produced. Arguably, the internal one is more important than the external, but once it comes to analyzing, it’s worthwhile having both. However, the former is more essential. For instance, when you read Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, knowing the WWII context and the difference between and V1 and a V2 rocket is essential to understanding the text. Knowing, on the other hand, that Pynchon wrote it during the postmodernist period more or less is helpful, too, but less so than the setting within the novel.
Your reactions: What emotions arise? What associations do you draw? How does reading, sticking with Pynchon here, Gravity’s Rainbow feel different from V? Why?
This list is not exhaustive, it’s a starting point. It perhaps goes without saying that it’s also not necessary to keep all these things in mind at all times while you’re reading. But when you start asking yourself questions in order to more deeply connect with the text and understand it better, they will come in handy.
And if you want to start your own life of reading, there are some habits that the great readers I know possess.
V. Habits of great readers:
Read slowly.
I, personally, am a slow reader. People read at different speeds naturally, and that’s okay. I’m not saying you have to read inordinately slowly, but don’t speed read. The point of reading is to spend time with the text in front of you, and if you’re rushing through it, you honestly might as well be not reading.
I read a lot, and it takes up a lot of my time. When I was in college, I would read about 50-70 books a year, and nowadays it’s about 30-50. There are a lot of people in the online literary space who boast of reading 100, 200+ books a year, and I’m just not sure how that’s feasible if you’re doing it right, or reading truly great works of writing. With poetry, it’s always worth reading aloud (including longer poetry, like Homer). That makes your cadence slower naturally, as I think generally we read more quickly in our minds. But even when I read in my head—which is most of the time—I don’t let go of my narratorial voice. Giving characters voices, pausing and taking beats, feeling like I’m listening to the text in my head narrated by me is essential to my experience.
2. Reread.
Always, with a poem. And more than once. Ideally also with prose. Rereading texts, especially longer texts, is something I struggle with. There are so many books in the world, and so little time it feels like sometimes, but I think that any great work will benefit from a rereading. Nabokov agrees, he writes:
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader…. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation…. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.”
I’ve been toying with the idea of, after I finish a book, to immediately reread it and read over every work twice. But I haven’t built up the courage to do that yet.
A minor way of rereading I’ve learned from Ben McEvoy to, whenever you pick up whatever book you’re reading, is to read/skim/look through the pages that came before it. Then you’re constantly reorienting yourself through the story—like a microrereading.
3. Annotate, and Keep a Journal/Database
Many many years ago, I used to be of the mind that a book is so precious an object it shouldn’t be written in, and there are some copies of books I have––like an 1895 copy of Don Quixote given to me by one of my closest friends––that I will not write in. But of those books, I buy a paperback copy and really go through it. I ask questions, I write reactions, I underline passages that are surprising, that I love, that I disagree with, I box words. I imagine myself having a conversation with the author or the text. That’s what a book is: a space to commune with the minds and imaginations of others.
If there’s any particular passage I find important for whatever reason, I put the page number and some key words on the back cover/back pages of my copy for later reference. If you find a passage that reminds you of another page, go and find the other page and write it down. Moreover, following Montaigne, the father of the essay, I also, after I finish a book, write a couple sentences about how it made me feel as I finished it and what I thought. Nothing crazy, nothing super analytical, just a couple sentences. And then when you reread, you can notice your thought progress.
I keep a common-place journal, but not religiously. I’d like to get better at that and build it into a weekly system. I like Ben McEvoy’s idea of setting aside a time every week to just journal and meditate on a passage or piece. I think I end up doing that with my substack and Book XI essays/newsletters and these videos, but I’d like to do it more robustly myself. What I’ve ended up doing is following Adam Walker’s note-taking system, which is making some encyclopedias—topical, of people, and timelines. I started this only a few months ago at the recording time of this video, so they’re not at all close to exhaustive, especially given that I’m working through literature and philosophy in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and a bit of Italian.
4. Phone a Friend
Reading is to some extent by nature solitary. But it’s much more enjoyable with a friend. I read Infinite Jest once on my own and once with a college seminar, and I learned so much more discussing with others. A text is already a dialogue. When you triangulate that dialogue, it helps you parse through it, and can give you motivation to keep going or just to go. To read things you wouldn’t have thought of before and think about the text in ways you hadn’t. Things always tend to be better in community. My own Book Club will be starting soon so I can facilitate spaces and dialogues like this, too.
5. Read criticism after your first reading, not before.
Reading criticism without a doubt will make your knowledge of any text more robust. However, allow yourself to take it in on your own first, without anyone telling you one thing or another. A guide that explains the text is different; for example, the schemata for Ulysses might be seriously helpful, or knowing the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow. That allows you to find your bearings. But criticism will go into deep close readings and interpretations of passages that will, I think, hinder your own creative and analytical ability if you engage with them sooner rather than later.
VI. Conclusion: The Person (Reader) You Become
Reading critically does so many things for you beyond the ability to extract more from a text or interact more deeply with a text. You become more observant of the things and people around you. It’s like mindfulness meditation, because it teaches you to slow down and notice.
I have learned from reading that I should not believe the first thing my mind tells me. You develop the ability to notice the limits of your first impression of things, what it excludes and perhaps what presuppositions formed it. You become able to tolerate ambiguity without desiring it to be converted too quickly into certainty. If you notice, these are ways of ethics. You can develop intellectual humility and confidence at the same time, which, in turn, can help you in engaging politically and intellectually with others in more productive ways.
And, because our lives are made of language––arguments, advertisements, stories, political claims, the explanations we give ourselves––reading critically and closely repeatedly trains your attention and your mind to not accept whatever interpretation most serves you in the moment. A life of reading will not make you a hermit unless you want to become one, it liberates you to become as deeply entrenched as possible into our highly connected and incredibly rich world.
My 87-year old grandmother who has been learning french and italian for the past two years, has read thousands of books, and is taking up oil painting for the first time in her life this year has told me since I was young that the day you stop learning is the day you die. I agree, and that’s why we must read on, always.