A bit of background on myself, for those who might question my chops: I studied Latin for six years (finishing with translating the Aeneid and Catullus), have a Bachelor of Arts in English, which included reading Chaucer in the original middle English, and essentially had to read and critique a 600-plus-page classic novel a week in my last two years of uni. When it comes to reading and dissecting symbolism in language, I have a strong background.
Long before they were written down, stories told around the campfire were allegories for what society of the time decided was “good” behavior, but people wouldn’t’ve listened to them in the first place if they weren’t entertaining. As Unesco defines the intangible of oral storytelling, “Stories are a combination – differing from genre to genre, from context to context and from performer to performer – of reproduction, improvisation and creation. This combination makes them a vibrant and colourful form of expression, but also fragile, as their viability depends on an uninterrupted chain passing traditions from one generation of performers to the next.”
Note here the use of language like performer, creation,and colourful. A storyteller had to be able to keep someone’s attention for hours, if not days, on end. A modern author is much the same – and I can tell you, we aren’t all hooked into a novel because of how much depth there is in the critique of modern society. (Though sometimes I will add a little four-letter sticker to the points that make me want to throw a book, but I like my book and the walls too much to do it)
As a former English major, I can tell you I very, very rarely actively annotate and critique the books I read. More often than not is that as I’m reading I recognise the layers of meaning an author is building, and sometimes I choose not to engage with them within the context of the story. And that’s okay. Sometimes I just want to read for entertainment.
And if I do annotate, it’s after I’ve read it twice – once for pleasure, and then once with a critical eye. The annotations I make are usually for favourite quotes — one that may be a particularly profound allegory for a larger human experience, or something which resonates with me specifically, but I am not annotating like a literature student. I’m not tagging theme recurrences, or particularly pointed bits of “the author” coming through into the novel to share a belief statement of some sort or another.
On her TikTok, Diana Rodriguez Wallachmakes a very good point: we as readers, when we critically analyse an author’s novel, assume the meaning we’re attributing to a specific colour, or object, or recurring theme, or whatever else was actually intended to be there by the author. It may not have been. So just as much as someone speaking to “anti-intellectualism” in the social media consumption of novels where “if all someone gets out of a book is the vibes, they’re missing the point”, if someone analyses a novel and finds meaning in it other than what the author intended, a meaner person might call them just as “wrong,” because they’re reading something there the author didn’t originally intend to be read that way.
Either way, the vibe-reader and the new-analysis reader are getting the same thing from the book: a new and lovely reaction. It made them feel some way. Both valid.
And if you think “classic literature” was never meant to entertain, or be entertaining, go read your Shakespeare again. Or better yet, see it in theatres, as it was intended.
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