The Big Picture

Dear MC, 

Once upon a time, there was an English professor who told a handful of freshmen to start an essay focusing on one sole word in a book--to really question the meaning of that word, to read so closely, that word symbolized the universe and beyond in said book. Once there was a particular freshman who thought that was really stupid, why couldn't we just write about the big picture like normal people?

Two years later (gulp, where has the time gone?), this stubborn freshman realized that focusing on one word was the big picture. It just wasn't the blatantly obvious big picture.

Before you send me to the looney bin, allow me to explain.

For this professor, I wrote an essay about Lolita. My primary intention was to write "this guy is a pedophile who takes the freedom away from little girls, what of it?" But, unless I wrote in REALLY big font, there was no way that would take up five pages (remember when we thought five pages was horrifyingly long?). So, I begrudgingly followed the assignment, and looked for the words "lock" and "key" (paging Doctor Freud) in the novel. At first glance, all I saw were instances where Humbert locked Lolita into his grasp, yet after farther exploration of the novel, there were more subtle references to Lolita locking Humbert out.

Because of this "investigation" of the novel, I reached the main conclusion, that this a story not of a stepdaughter's loss of freedom, but a stepfather's own personal prison.

While I still am a strong believer in reading a story just to enjoy the plot, I realize that close reading is not completely pointless, if you want to find a new perspective in a novel.

With that being said, I realize that there are only so many genuine perspectives a novel can have. And with thousands of people in academia analyzing the same books, racing to get their analyses published, when is the struggle to find a new perspective harming us, rather than helping us? When do these new ideas seem forced? When are we reading too much into a word, rather than just being observant?

-Kira

The Importance of Close Reading

Dear Kira,

I'm an English major who doesn't really like being an English major.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy reading Shakespeare and stuff like that, but a lot of stuff that goes on in upper level English classes seems kind of stupid to me. I mean, I don't need an old guy in a crazy tie asking me: "what is rhetoric? what is it really?". I used to feel that way about close reading. Because, let's face it, when you have a half an hour of lecture on the use of the word grape on page 451 and the word doesn't even come up in the rest of the book, you're wasting your tuition dollars.

(P.S. Dear every English professor ever, this is especially annoying when you assign an entire novel and then decide to spend the entire class to talk about the importance of the grape as a symbol in the first five pages.)

(What is a grape? What is it really?)

But I've recently had a change of heart regarding that higher education hoodoo known as close reading. Let me tell you a little story:

I consider myself to be a sort of amateur A Song of Ice and Fire theorist. (I say amateur because you should see some of the ASOIAF discussion forums out there). Recently, I was doing some reading about an ASOIAF theory called The Great Northern Conspiracy. I know you don't like ASOIAF, so I'll spare you the details, but the gist is that people think that all of the great Northern houses are conspiring to make Jon Snow the Lord of the North. The primary evidence for this claim is a letter that Lyanna Mormont sends to Stannis Baratheon in A Dance with Dragons:

          "Bear Island knows no king but the King of the North, whose name is STARK."

You have no idea how this tiny phrase has been picked to pieces. I personally, have mulled it over many a time. The use of "whose" suggests that she's thinking of a specific person. She could have said something like "Bear Island only recognizes the Starks"or something like that, but instead she writes as if she has a specific person in mind. This is controversial because, at this time, most people think that all the Starks (minus Sansa and possibly Arya) are dead. So who is she referring to? This leads back to another theory that Jon Snow (the illegitimate child of Ned Stark) was legitimized by his half brother, Robb before Robb's untimely death.

And all of this is based off a handful of words.

What's weird about this to me is that I understand why people are analyzing this to death. It makes sense to me. Actually, I'm currently re-reading the ASOIAF with the sole intention of scouting evidence for some of my theories. That's not how I normally read books; if I'm reading something casually, my primary goal is to appreciate the work as a whole, not pick at little details while overlooking the overall plot and side stepping the pleasure of a well resolved work of fiction.

Were my English professors right? Is this really the best way to read a book? Should I start doing my casual reading with a pad of post-it notes on hand (which is what I'm doing with ASOIAF)? Could it be that I have finally found a way that close reading benefits me in real life? I mean, you can argue that being able to predict what's going to happen in a fantasy series is important but I know of 15 million billion nerds that would say differently. My concern then becomes that this sucks the fun out of reading. What I like about ASOIAF is that it's another world. I don't want to have to worry about the implications of a grape when I'm trying to get sucked into a fictional universe.

So, I offer you this question: what is reading? What is it really?

M.C.