Interpreting fiction: 3 more principles for better reading

[This follows on from last week's blog - the first two points were 'Don't focus on the wrong thing', and 'All fiction is metaphorical']

C] All fiction is true to life

Seen in the light of point B. (All fiction is metaphorical), that would seem counter-intuitive: how can something be both metaphorical and true to life? Isn’t the clue in the word ‘Fiction’?

That is a discussion we can leave to theorists (even though it pays to remember the parallels between the usual chronologies of narratives and life); what matters most to us is that all fiction comes from life, and all fiction therefore reflects life. It doesn’t mean that all events, characters and the rest are true, that they exist in the world as themselves. Yet they do, in many ways, because fiction is the product of a mind at a certain time – a person, basically – and so their thinking is necessarily constrained by being in the world at a certain time. It follows that everything in fiction will be at least inspired by – and sometimes will copy – what and who is out there. I wrote about this earlier in ‘The boy is real': it really pays to remember that characters in a book are to some extent completely real, they have motives like us, fears and desires like us, and the best way to get some understanding of who characters really are is simply to compare and contrast them to people we know (or we know exist). The only way to understand a text is to put life into it – leave the critical analysis to those whose point it is to critically analyse. If you’re looking for meaning, for interpretations, remember: it all comes from the real world.

 

D] A fourth point is to do with Asking questions: not only in terms of which types of questions there are , but more simply in terms of helping yourself connect the elements of the text into a whole. You must not read a fact and accept it as is, you must ask questions of it – typically a simple question like ‘why?’, or ‘what is it like?’, and probably more importantly: ‘what does that remind me of in the real world?’.

For example: John and Mary are sat on a bench, talking, holding hands. Then Albert walks by, and on seeing him, Mary quickly disengages her hand from John’s.

We just need to ask questions to ourselves – and encourage learners to do so; here for example, some interpretive questions would do nicely: ‘If John and Mary are holding hands, what does that suggest? (for example: love, intimacy; family; firm friends; one of them comforts the other; one of them encourages/supports the other). When someone takes her hand away like she does, why is that? What are possible reasons for her to do so? (for example: she’s embarrassed; she doesn’t want to be seen like that; Albert is her fiancé; Albert is her father). The point here is not to come to a definitive answer (or not yet anyway), it is to look for possible causes that could explain what we are reading – what we are observing in the text. Later on, we will connect those possibilities to other parts of the text which might disprove them, confirm them, or introduce a nuance we hadn’t thought about.

Reading fiction as we mean it here is to read actively; reading actively is having your mind constantly open to asking tiny questions, making a mental note of possible answers, and not rushing towards a quick conclusion but letting the whole material come together bit by bit.

 

E] Would that last point be the most fundamental thing you must accept if you want to go forward? Maybe – maybe it is indeed. This last principle seems obvious, no-one overtly disputes it, and yet so few do believe in it with any degree of certainty. The idea is this: YOU, the reader, are the master of the text you’re reading. You’re not its slave, nor are you the slave of its author. You, the reader, are FREE.

The French poet Baudelaire said it better than I could – he was writing about Wagner but that doesn’t matter: ‘In music, as in the written word, there is always a gap that is completed by the listener’s imagination’. That gap is where the reader must go, the space they must occupy – it is the space they must not only inhabit and make their own, they must fill with themselves and what they know of the world.

I can’t resist quoting Jorge Luis Borges again of course: ‘Reading can be a creative act, no less creative than writing. A book is one thing among things, a dead thing, until someone opens it’.

You, the reader, are the only one capable of giving life to that book by picking it up and reading it. And that’s important because someone else reading the same text will give it their life, just like you give yours to your own copy of that text. Their breath of life which makes the book alive is theirs; your breath of life is yours, and therefore the book lives differently depending on who breathed life into it.

If you do not accept – truly, in your heart – that as a reader you are free, that you must be free, you’ll always be looking for that one idealised, utopian, academic ‘Meaning’, forgetting along the way that you are the creator of meaning, not the book itself.

Emerson, the 19^th-Century American poet, said it best perhaps:
‘One must be an inventor to read well’.

      ·   The Baudelaire quote is in Graham Robb’s Parisians (2010). Robb’s The discovery of France is a much better book 😊

     ·     The Borges quote is in: J.L. Borges: Conversations with O. Ferrari (Seagull, 2017). Borges also talks somewhere else (can’t remember where now…) about literature being a continuum, where each book is the continuation of another book, and the beginning of yet another – all books are linked.

    ·     The Emerson quote is in the wonderful Alberto Manguel’s A history of reading (Penguin, 1997). Famously of course, Manguel was a reader to Borges when this last became blind.