Alchemist to How to Read Literature Like a Professor

  How to Read

Literature

Like a

Professor

How to Read

Literature

Similar a

Professor

A Lively and Entertaining Guide

to Reading Between the Lines

THOMAS C. FOSTER

Quill

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

For my sons, Robert and Nathan

Introduction – How'd He Do That?

p. xi MR. LINDNER? THAT MILQUETOAST?

Right. Mr. Lindner the milquetoast. And so what did you think the devil would look like? If he were red with a tail, horns, and cloven hooves, whatever fool could say no.

The form and I are discussing Lorraine Hansberry'due south A Raisin in the Sun (1959), one of the great plays of the American theater. The incredulous questions have come up, as they frequently practise, in response to my innocent suggestion that Mr. Lindner is the devil. The Youngers, an African American family in Chicago, accept made a down payment on a house in an all-white neighborhood. Mr. Lindner, a meekly atoning piffling man, has been dispatched from the neighborhood association, bank check in hand, to purchase out the family's claim on the house. At first, Walter Lee p. xii Younger, the protagonist, confidently turns down the offer, assertive that the family's money (in the grade of a life insurance payment afterward his father'south recent expiry) is secure. Presently subsequently, however, he discovers that two-thirds of that money has been stolen. All of a sudden the previously insulting offer comes to wait like his financial conservancy.

Bargains with the devil go back a long way in Western civilisation. In all the versions of the Faust legend, which is the dominant grade of this type of story, the hero is offered something he desperately wants—power or knowledge or a fastball that volition vanquish the Yankees—and all he has to give upwards is his soul. This design holds from the Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus through the nineteenth-century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust to the twentieth century'south Stephen Vincent Benét's "The Devil and Daniel Webster" and Damn Yankees. In Hansberry's version, when Mr. Lindner makes his offer, he doesn't demand Walter Lee's soul; in fact, he doesn't fifty-fifty know that he's demanding it. He is, though. Walter Lee can be rescued from the monetary crunch he has brought upon the family unit; all he has to exercise is admit that he'southward non the equal of the white residents who don't desire him moving in, that his pride and self-respect, his identity, can be bought. If that'southward non selling your soul, and so what is it?

The chief divergence betwixt Hansberry's version of the Faustian bargain and others is that Walter Lee ultimately resists the satanic temptation. Previous versions accept been either tragic or comic depending on whether the devil successfully collects the soul at the terminate of the work. Here, the protagonist psychologically makes the deal but and then looks at himself and at the true cost and recovers in time to pass up the devil'southward—Mr. Lindner's—offer. The resulting play, for all its tears and anguish, is structurally comic—the tragic downfall threatened just avoided—and Walter Lee grows to heroic stature in p. xiii wrestling with his own demons as well every bit the external one, Lindner, and coming through without falling.

A moment occurs in this substitution between professor and student when each of united states of america adopts a look. My await says, "What, you lot don't get it?" Theirs says, "We don't become it. And we think you're making it up." We're having a communication problem. Basically, we've all read the aforementioned story, just we oasis't used the aforementioned belittling apparatus. If you've ever spent time in a literature classroom every bit a student or a professor, you know this moment. It may seem at times as if the professor is either inventing interpretations out of sparse air or else performing parlor tricks, a sort of analytical sleight of manus.

Really, neither of these is the case; rather, the professor, as the slightly more experienced reader, has caused over the years the use of a sure "language of reading," something to which the students are merely beginning to exist introduced. What I'yard talking about is a grammar of literature, a set of conventions and patterns, codes and rules, that we learn to employ in dealing with a slice of writing. Every language has a grammar, a fix of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no unlike. It'due south all more or less arbitrary, of form, just like language itself. Take the discussion "arbitrary" as an example: it doesn't mean annihilation inherently; rather, at some betoken in our past we agreed that information technology would mean what information technology does, and it does so but in English language (those sounds would be so much gibberish in Japanese or Finnish). So as well with fine art: we decided to agree that perspective—the set of tricks artists use to provide the illusion of depth—was a adept thing and vital to painting. This occurred during the Renaissance in Europe, but when Western and Oriental art encountered each other in the p. xiv 1700s, Japanese artists and their audiences were serenely untroubled by the lack of perspective in their painting. No i felt it particularly essential to the experience of pictorial art.

Literature has its grammar, likewise. You knew that, of grade. Even if you didn't know that, you lot knew from the structure of the preceding paragraph that it was coming. How? The grammar of the essay. You tin read, and office of reading is knowing the conventions, recognizing them, and anticipating the results. When someone introduces a topic (the grammer of literature), then digresses to evidence other topics (language, art, music, dog training—information technology doesn't matter what examples; as soon as y'all run across a couple of them, you recognize the blueprint), y'all know he's coming dorsum with an application of those examples to the main topic (voilà!). And he did. So now nosotros're all happy, considering the convention has been used, observed, noted, anticipated, and fulfilled. What more can you want from a paragraph?

Well, as I was proverb before I so rudely digressed, so too in literature. Stories and novels have a very big set of conventions: types of characters, plot rhythms, chapter structures, point-of-view limitations. Poems take a not bad many of their own, involving course, structure, rhythm, rhyme. Plays, too. So there are conventions that cross genre lines. Spring is largely universal. So is snowfall. So is darkness. And sleep. When spring is mentioned in a story, a poem, or a play, a veritable constellation of associations rises in our imaginative heaven: youth, hope, new life, young lambs, children skipping . . . on and on. And if we associate even further, that constellation may pb united states to more abstruse concepts such equally rebirth, fertility, renewal.

Okay, let's say you lot're right and there is a set of conventions, a key to reading literature. How practice I get so I can recognize these?

Aforementioned way you get to Carnegie Hall. Exercise.

When lay readers see a fictive text, they focus, as they should, on the story and the characters: who are these people, what are they doing, and what wonderful or terrible things are p. 15 happening to them? Such readers respond first of all, and sometimes only, to their reading on an emotional level; the work affects them, producing joy or revulsion, laughter or tears, anxiety or elation. In other words, they are emotionally and instinctively involved in the work. This is the response level that near every writer who has e'er set pen to newspaper or fingertip to keyboard has hoped for when sending the novel, forth with a prayer, to the publisher. When an English professor reads, on the other hand, he will accept the affective response level of the story (nosotros don't listen a good cry when Piffling Nell dies), but a lot of his attention will be engaged by other elements of the novel. Where did that outcome come from? Whom does this grapheme resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? Didn't Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard) say that? If you learn to ask these questions, to meet literary texts through these spectacles, you volition read and understand literature in a new light, and it'll become more rewarding and fun.

Memory.

Symbol. Pattern. These are the iii items that, more than than any other, split the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd. English language professors, as a grade, are cursed with memory. Whenever I read a new work, I spin the mental Rolodex looking for correspondences and corollaries—where accept I seen his confront, don't I know that theme? I tin't not exercise it, although there are plenty of times when that ability is not something I desire to exercise. Thirty minutes into Clint Eastwood's Pale Passenger (1985), for instance, I idea, Okay, this is Shane (1953), and from in that location I didn't watch another frame of the film without seeing Alan Ladd'southward face. This does not necessarily improve the experience of popular entertainment.

Professors also read, and call back, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, information technology seems, until proven otherwise. We ask, p. sixteen Is this a metaphor? Is that an illustration? What does the thing over there signify? The kind of mind that works its style through undergraduate and then graduate classes in literature and criticism has a predisposition to meet things as existing in themselves while simultaneously also representing something else. Grendel, the monster in the medieval epic Beowulf (eighth century A.D.), is an actual monster, only he can as well symbolize (a) the hostility of the universe to human existence (a hostility that medieval Anglo-Saxons would have felt acutely) and (b) a darkness in human being nature that only some higher aspect of ourselves (as symbolized by the title hero) tin conquer. This predisposition to sympathise the world in symbolic terms is reinforced, of class, by years of training that encourages and rewards the symbolic imagination.

A related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern recognition. Most professional students of literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. Like the symbolic imagination, this is a function of being able to distance oneself from the story, to look across the purely melancholia level of plot, drama, characters. Feel has proved to them that life and books fall into similar patterns. Nor is this skill sectional to English professors. Good mechanics, the kind who used to prepare cars before computerized diagnostics, utilise pattern recognition to diagnose engine troubles: if this and this are happening, then check that. Literature is full of patterns, and your reading feel will be much more rewarding when y'all can step back from the work, even while you're reading it, and await for those patterns. When small children, very small children, begin to tell you a story, they put in every detail and every word they recall, with no sense that some features are more than of import than others. As they grow, they begin to display a greater sense of the plots of their stories—what elements actually add to the significance and which do not. So too with readers. Showtime students are often p. xvii swamped with the mass of detail; the primary experience of reading Dr. Zhivago (1957) may be that they tin can't keep all the names direct. Wily veterans, on the other hand, will absorb those details, or possibly overlook them, to find the patterns, the routines, the archetypes at work in the background.

Let'southward expect at an example of how the symbolic mind, the pattern observer, the powerful memory combine to offer a reading of a nonliterary state of affairs. Permit'southward say that a male person bailiwick you are studying exhibits beliefs and makes statements that show him to exist hostile toward his father merely much warmer and more loving toward, fifty-fifty dependent on, his mother. Okay, that'due south only one guy, so no big deal. But you see information technology again in another person. And again. And over again. You lot might showtime to think this is a pattern of beliefs, in which case yous would say to yourself, "At present where take I seen this before?" Your retention may dredge upward something from experience, not your clinical work but a play you read long ago in your youth about a man who murders his father and marries his female parent. Even though the current examples have nothing to do with drama, your symbolic imagination volition allow you to connect the earlier example of this blueprint with the real-life examples in front of you at the moment. And your talent for nifty naming will come up with something to phone call this design: the Oedipal circuitous. As I said, not simply English professors utilize these abilities. Sigmund Freud "reads" his patients the mode a literary scholar reads texts, bringing the aforementioned sort of imaginative interpretation to understanding his cases that nosotros try to bring to interpreting novels and poems and plays. His identification of the Oedipal complex is one of the bully moments in the history of man thought, with as much literary as psychoanalytical significance.

What I hope to practise, in the coming pages, is what I do in class: give readers a view of what goes on when professional students of literature do their thing, a broad introduction to the codes and patterns that inform our readings. I desire my students non p. eighteen only to concur with me that, indeed, Mr. Lindner is an example of the demonic tempter offering Walter Lee Younger a Faustian deal; I want them to be able to reach that conclusion without me. I know they can, with practice, patience, and a bit of teaching. And then can you.

How to Read

Literature

Like a

Professor

i – Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When Information technology'south Not)

p. one OKAY, SO HERE'S THE DEAL: let's say, purely hypothetically, yous're reading a volume about an average xvi-year-one-time child in the summertime of 1968. The kid—let's call him Kip—who hopes his acne clears upwards earlier he gets drafted, is on his mode to the A&P. His bike is a ane-speed with a coaster brake and therefore deeply humiliating, and riding information technology to run an errand for his mother makes information technology fifty-fifty worse. Along the style he has a couple of disturbing experiences, including a minorly unpleasant run into with a German shepherd, topped off in the supermarket parking lot where he sees the girl of his dreams, Karen, laughing and horsing around in Tony Vauxhall'south brand-new Barracuda. Now Kip hates Tony already considering he has a proper noun like Vauxhall and not like Smith, which Kip thinks is pretty p. 2 lame as a name to follow Kip, and because the 'Cuda is bright green and goes approximately the speed of calorie-free, and also because Tony has never had to work a solar day in his life. So Karen, who is laughing and having a keen fourth dimension, turns and sees Kip, who has recently asked her out, and she keeps laughing. (She could finish laughing and information technology wouldn't affair to united states of america, since we're because this structurally. In the story we're inventing hither, though, she keeps laughing.) Kip goes on into the store to buy the loaf of Wonder Staff of life that his mother told him to option up, and as he reaches for the bread, he decides right so and there to lie nigh his historic period to the Marine recruiter even though it means going to Vietnam, because goose egg volition ever happen for him in this one-equus caballus burg where the but affair that matters is how much money your old homo has. Either that or Kip has a vision of St. Abillard (any saint will do, only our imaginary author picked a comparatively obscure one), whose face appears on 1 of the red, xanthous, or blue balloons. For our purposes, the nature of the determination doesn't thing any more than whether Karen keeps laughing or which colour airship manifests the saint.

What just happened here?

If you were an English professor, and non fifty-fifty a particularly weird English professor, you'd know that you'd but watched a knight accept a not very suitable encounter with his nemesis.

In other words, a quest but happened.

Simply it only looked like a trip to the shop for some white breadstuff.

True. But consider the quest. Of what does information technology consist? A knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail (whatever ane of those may be), at least one dragon, 1 evil knight, one princess. Sound nigh right? That's a list I tin live with: a knight (named Kip), a dangerous route (nasty German shepherds), a Holy Grail (one grade of which is a loaf of Wonder Staff of life), at least one dragon (trust me, a '68 'Cuda could definitely breathe p. 3 fire), ane evil knight (Tony), one princess (who can either keep laughing or end).

Seems like a bit of a stretch.

On the surface, certain. Simply let's think structurally. The quest consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b) a place to get, (c) a stated reason to get in that location, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. Item (a) is easy; a quester is just a person who goes on a quest, whether or not he knows information technology'south a quest. In fact, usually he doesn't know. Items (

b) and (c) should be considered together: someone tells our protagonist, our hero, who need not expect very heroic, to go somewhere and do something. Go in search of the Holy Grail. Go to the shop for bread. Become to Vegas and whack a guy. Tasks of varying nobility, to be sure, but structurally notwithstanding. Go at that place, practice that. Annotation that I said the stated reason for the quest. That's considering of particular (due east).

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, generally, the quester fails at the stated task. So why practise they go and why practice nosotros care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that information technology is their existent mission. Nosotros know, nonetheless, that their quest is educational. They don't know enough about the just bailiwick that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always cocky-knowledge. That's why questers are so oft young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-5-yr-sometime men either have self-knowledge or they're never going to get it, while your average 16-to-seventeen-year-one-time kid is likely to take a long way to go in the self-cognition department.

Allow'south await at a real instance. When I teach the late-twentieth-century novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of the last century: Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Start readers can notice the novel mystifying, irritating, and highly peculiar. True plenty, in that location is a good bit of cartoonish p. 4 strangeness in the novel, which tin can mask the bones quest structure. On the other mitt, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen (1596), two of the corking quest narratives from early on English literature, too have what modern readers must consider cartoonish elements. It's really only a matter of whether we're talking Classics Illustrated or Zap Comics. So here'south the setup in The Crying of Lot 49:

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