Part III: Reading Experience and
Interpretation
John Green—author, vlogger, and
general Internet personality—has (in some circles famously) said, "A book
belongs to its readers." I admire Green's work and find myself agreeing
with a lot of his gnomic sayings, but this is one with which I can't
unreservedly agree. My main problem with it is that it's imprecise (at best; at
worst it is inaccurate). It's the reading experience, not the book, which
belongs to the reader. In a capitalist economy, a book legally and creatively
belongs to the author (or it should by capitalist logic, anyway), while, as
discussed above, the meaning of the book probably belongs to the book itself as
much as it belongs to anyone (though an argument could be made that a book
belongs to either language or literature).[1]
I think it is very important to
note that the reading experience belongs to the reader. What John Green tends
to mean when he says that books belong to their readers is that a reader's
interpretation of the book should be judged by whether or not that
interpretation enriches their experience of the book. If their reading
experience is better—they enjoy it more, they learn more from it, they are more
challenged by it—then that interpretation has done its job. I don't disagree
with this sentiment. Even a misinterpretation can be a rewarding reading
experience, and if a rewarding reading experience is what the reader wants,
then the misinterpretation has been, nonetheless, a good one.
The distinction is that the
reading experience is not the same thing as the meaning of the text. An
interpretation that makes for an enriching reading experience does not
necessarily make for a good explanation of the text. So, the question is, when
should we be concerned about a faithful interpretation of a text rather than an
enriching reading experience?
The most obvious example is in
the classroom, when you're called on to complete an English assignment. Whether
it's at the high school or the university level, what's usually being asked of
you is to give an interpretation of a text, not to record your reading
experience. But I think there are more important instances: when you want to
lay blame for, make criticisms about, or recommend a book.
By now most of us are familiar
with the idea that someone might say some novel—or webcomic, or television
show, or movie—is sexist or racist or homophobic. Or the claim might be that a
young adult novel provides a poor model for romance, or that there simply are
not enough books about some topic or some group of people. These claims, if
they are to be broadly applicable, cannot rest on one particular reader's
experience of novels. If I find my reading experiences do not have enough
dinosaurs, that's not a failing of novelists, since I might simply be ignoring
the dinosaurs that are in all of the books I'm reading. It's only if books
actually do, in general, lack dinosaurs that my complaint is something that
other readers should worry about. Therefore my claim cannot be that my reading
experience lacks dinosaurs; my claim is that books today lack dinosaurs, and I
back this up with interpretations of books as
they are, not as I read them. I
call upon the actual fields of possible meaning for books.
Consider the complaints about
Strong Female Characters. These are some good examples of arguments showing
that Strong Female Characters are not actually as helpful for women as they are
made out to be. The argument generally goes that these characters tend
to prove their strength by committing anti-social actions, actions which would
be roundly condemned in male characters. Presumably the reason people do this
is because a female character's strength needs to be proven—the assumption is
that a female character is weak—and the standard for proof is a lot higher for
a female character than it is for a male character. This does not actually
diversify the kinds of female characters books can have but rather limits it
further: a female character, in order to be Strong, cannot have moments of
compassion, weakness, and so on that a male character, already perceived to be
strong, could have. I think this is a strong argument, but the important thing
to note is that the argument works or fails based entirely on what the guilty
novels actually do, not just on how I personally read them.
It's when you are making this
kind of claim—when you want to criticize a text, or defend a text, or praise a
text—that you need to interpret the text rather than just record your experience
of reading it. And this goes double if you want to praise or blame the author
for producing the text; the author can only be responsible for the writing, not
the reading. It doesn't matter what kind of criticism or defence or praise that
you want to make, or what politics motivates you; in order for your claim to be
relevant to anyone else (let alone the author), the claim needs to be about the
text, not your experience of it. Of course, insofar as your experience of it is
based on the text itself, any problems you have with your experience likely
results from the text itself.
[1] I am unconvinced, actually, that the
metaphor of ownership for meaning is useful. I am using it only as a response
to a particular way John Green’s saying could be interpreted. This metaphor is
perhaps troubling: it constrains meaning to the terms of private property. And
I’m aware that there are other possible meanings of John’s phrase: insofar as
he is suggested that books become part of culture, which is a sort of public
commons open for use by other culture-creators, I agree with him.
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