Sometimes, a book is just a book.
Friday, May 7, 2010 at 10:28AM Salon's Ann Nichols pens an elegant defense of reading for the sheer pleasure of it in her blog post at Salon.com. In college, she confesses:
As soon as I took "real" literature classes in school, I became facile at the parlor tricks that would carry me through high school and a degree in English; these included decoding what I read based on symbolism, historical facts, and the life of the author.
While she doesn't call down jihad on literary critics, her essay does begin to tease apart the knotty relationship between the creator and the created, between the maker and the consumer of any art, literature, photography or otherwise.
I've always read and looked at art as a combination of reading a page out of an interesting person's diary and sociocultural puzzle. That is to say that the person making the art was an actual human citizen who lived in a time and place different from mine. When I consume his art or read her books, I'm reading what the person wanted to say based on the fact that they existed in a real time and place. Of course that artist is going to be shaped and influenced by the sociocultural soup he's floating in.
It is valid, I think, to ask oneself if what an artist has to say is relevant. But as a reader, I grant the work that relevance by feeding their product through my filters. If I'm black, I may resent the fact that Iago the bad guy is cast as a black person. But I think I do Othello a grave disservice if I write the entire play off as racist claptrap simply because the world Shakespeare wrote of doesn't ideologically align with the world I live in today.
As she concludes, Nichols writes:
What is gained by the picking, the dissecting, the categorizing and the smug analyzing of what was intended, in the first place, to be an expression of something personal and unique, floated in the literary ether to be absorbed by readers only imagined by the writer?
It's worth remembering. Because while it's fun, and sort of like a treasure hunt, picking through a work for hints of latent "isms," overly analytical interpretations can drain a work of its essence as effectively as a bucket of leaches at an Open Wound Festival.
