Judgement Under Duress
How should one read? For pleasure? With attention? To appreciate? To escape? How should one think about one's reading? How should one respond to it? And when? And why did I take this hateful English class: it's driving me all over the walls and ceilings and the answers it gives to those questions haunt me like the ghosts of sins and the whispers of damnation. (Read and respond, read and critique, read and judge - yes yes yes, it encourages constructive thought but there is just something in the college method that depresses me.) I can't decide if it's The Great Gatsby that I dislike or the professor's method of teaching that novel and or if it school or what. I wish I wasn't so sensitive to disappointment and dissatisfaction!
2 comments:
Warning: dangerously long comment that even needed to be broken into parts in order to publish!!
Don't fret! I didn't care much for The Great Gatsby, either! I read for escape, and I suppose that that's essentially what makes reading such a pleasure, anyway (when you're not forced into it, at least). Though high school and college literature courses would sooner have one tear a book apart rather than enjoy it, it's ultimately more rewarding to know that literature can be dissected, in the long run, I think, because it's sometimes how ideas are reaped and sown again, and we read for the ideas, too, and not just the story, right?
But there are usually times when it is more important to enjoy the story than anything else when it comes to literature. A simple story can perhaps bring more people together and with less fuss than a single philosophy could. The strong passion an idea is capable of inspiring in people can be easily turned destructive in building relationships. There were times in my English courses where I'd wonder whether the author really intended for his or her novel to be picked at for every detail it harbors, or for it simply to be read and understood slowly over time, just as how memories are made--because that's what novels and stories essentially are. The memories from one's life that just seemed to stick better than others--the experiences that, once strung together into a story, naturally compose the author's voice. Writing should never be forced, and I doubt that our best writers' favorite creations were written with the intent of having it utterly dissected before having the story itself read, first. Obstinacy toward certain philosophies and the penchant I had for tearing books apart as opposed to "listening" to them, first, has driven me to disliking too many good books. When I re-read some of the books I vowed never to read again, it feels as though I am reading them for the first time, and it disappoints me.
Okay, so everything I've written so far just sounds like a jumbled mess of a premature notions, but what I can say with confidence (and at least some coherence) is this; when I read Toni Morrison I'm never able to isolate every single implication my English instructors in the past have told me to search for. There are too many ideas to search for, and they all send different messages once isolated. When I read her for school, ultimately, she's unfamiliar. When I read Morrison's work I don't read with a pen in my hand (the first time, at least) because annotating while trying to read is like speaking over a person's storytelling. I always think I understand until the very end, which is where I realize I that I don't. The first time through a Toni Morrison novel, and through most good novels, I think, is always for the story and for the voice and for learning how to listen when some ideas, frankly, become too difficult to listen to. After the first reading, if you decided to re-read, the philosophies will just come to you without you having to search.
When you read Song of Solomon for class it might not be fun, at all. It's true what I hear some people say--that English class kills the joy of reading. I guess the only reason why we take English courses at all is to learn that "there's more to a book than meets the eye", and that literature is philosophy. I think that ultimately, though, it's more rewarding to leave the rapid-fire philosophical search to the essay-reading, and the "listening" to the novels.
(PART II D:)
I hope I'm not just rambling XD! And I hope that I don't sound dogmatic.
Just know that you're not being sensitive to disappointment. Dissecting novels is a huge disappointment, anyway. There are so many critiques written by countless critics and "schools of criticism" that it's difficult to believe that any one philosophy, or any number of philosophies together could ever aptly describe an author's purest intent.
Roland Barthes once wrote an essay that described the creator's interpretation of a piece of art to be lost in the art's making, only to be given an infinite number of entirely new or relatively similar meanings by a nearly as infinite number of audience members.
However you read is the correct way for you. The college method can go to Hell once you've finished learning it and tending to every assignment it provides you. In the end it's only important to at least have an interpretation when you read a book, I think XD.
Your personal method beats the college method by miles. Just make the college method feel less like a loser by submitting to it for the time being ;).
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