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Julie Strauss-Gabel on Reading

My publisher, Julie Strauss-Gabel, has a tumblr but hasn’t quite figured out how to maximize the tumblr experience. However, she sent me this after reading my defense of critical reading and the kind of analysis that is done in literature classes. Read it:

I think at the heart of this matter is an inability for people to be comfortable with opening themselves up to enjoying and understanding their reactions to literature—and finding a way to discuss the humanity and experience and emotion they bring to it—without putting it in an intellectual scaffold that, as part of process, overlays intent and purpose from the author. We’re all of afraid of allowing our response to good literature to be emotion, and then needing to figure out ourselves as part that response (even though that’s the whole point, isn’t it?).

To some extent, literary analysis gives us a framework to discuss literature together, to momentarily put aside the importance of our varied personal experiences and find some sort of common language that allows us to share the experience, because as personal as reading a good book is, there’s also an intense need to discuss those books. To whittle it down to symbolism and intent and analysis that implies some sort of singular valid method/response is partly a safe playground for starting that conversation. It kickstarts one’s ability to understand that there is more to his/her own personal response than enjoyment and plot. But we all take it too far when it becomes the conversation itself, allowing us to avoid understanding what we bring to a book and, more importantly, what’s essentially human and emotional about good literature. It also denies the same human experience that an author brings to the process.

Sadly, it also misdirects the dialogue about the way creativity works, how great authors create, and tells aspiring writers from early on that there are right and wrong ways to build narrative and tell stories, putting handcuffs on what can be considered “literature” by boxing in what is usually an indefinable and initiate and personal and creative process for that writer, sometimes keeping people from allowing themselves the sophistication and freedom and core of personal engagement that would actually make that expression of self—an expression of self that has great value to others—truly great.

I’m sure I did plenty of symbolic, literary analysis in high school and college. I don’t use it in that way now, but the one lasting effect is that I’ve learned ways to question what I’m reading and separate out my response to it—to be keenly aware of my own voice as a reader in the process of that creation. That lets me to know myself better through reading as much as it allows me to edit.

That said, writing (to publish/share) is also a process with purpose and part of the act of translation is building that bridge so the reader can jump the divide between experiences. A writer’s job (though symbolism or whatever) is building that bridge. I have spent years in critiques trying to explain to people that they cannot stand over a reader’s shoulder and tell them what to think as they read. If you are disappointed in the way people receive and translate your work, then you have to think—as with any form of two-way communication—about better ways to bridge the gap between yourself and the rest of the world; make peace with the truth that it’s never going to be a controlled, one-sided relationship.