When someone reads a book (or plays a game, watches a movie, etc) they inevitably have some first impression: the book is an allegory for X, the moral of the story is Y, character Z is a hero, etc. When they read the book a second time, or just think about it more deeply, they might realize that the text contains elements that contradict their first impression. Maybe the allegory doesn’t quite fit. Maybe there’s a subplot that seems to conflict with the overarching moral. Maybe the heroic character turns out to be a bit more morally grey than they first realized. What should the reader do?
I think the answer is obvious: you revise your first impression. If the book doesn’t work as a simple allegory for X, then maybe the book isn’t an allegory for X after all! Maybe the moral isn’t Y. Etc.
But what a lot of people do, and this drives me absolutely fucking nuts, is they say something like “Wow, this allegory about X doesn’t work. The author obviously doesn’t understand X.” or “Wow, this heroic character is an asshole. The author must be a terrible person if they think this is what constitutes heroic behaviour.”
The most cartoonish example I’ve seen is Ben Shapiro’s review of the Barbie movie, where he keeps wondering why are there adult jokes and themes in a movie that he’s preemptively decided is supposed to be for children, but I see the same pattern everywhere.
This is especially true of adults who revisit books they read as children. They compare the actual substance of the text to their terrible, immature, literally juvenile first impression, and are shocked to discover that the book doesn’t seem to be doing what they thought it was doing. But instead of thinking “huh, I guess I missed a lot of the nuance when I was a child” they think “Wow, in hindsight this book is terrible. I can’t believe the author thought this asshole was a hero!” No. You thought the asshole was a hero. That was your mistake, not the author’s.
Thats because people do not understand that books are not necessarily there to give you an answer to what is right or wrong in the world. Books have topics or themes but not necessarily a hashtag massage meant to propagade a greater cause. Take an author who writes about rape and does not have the prepetrator punished for his crimes in the novel he writes about. Now some people will say: Hey, does the writer support rape? Why does he not condem the happens? Because the writer might want to show how sometimes rape might happen and is never being actually punished in our society due to reasons…like the prepetrator being rich, the people not believing the victim etc.
The real good authors do not give you the answer to morally complex situation on a silver platter…that is what interpreation is for. A good writer does not throw you over the head with is opinions but allows the reader to discover his own truth through the text.The problem of our society is that some people want to turn books into the bible meant to teach people what are the right views and what not, but that is not what books are for. Books are not the bible or the Torah meant to brain wash people they are there for entertainment and expression of art.
Another problem I see is that some people are just completely unable to give proper criticism: Criticism is not good crictism if you go personal like calling the writer a pedophile, going on twitter and pointing out single passage taken out of context and claiming this is homophobic or sexistic. That is harassment and soiling the reputation of a real life person who has feelings, kids, a family and a livellihood. I hope at one point one of these authors loses his patiences and sues the these people if they go too far.
Real criticism takes the context of the text, the era and proves that criticism based on the text and not based on your personal bias. And now to the most important point: self-importance and hinsight bias. Many people do not understand that their personal experiences as a gay person might not be the only truth there is. There are many gay people who have different experiences and just because some person might write about issues in a way the other person disagrees with does not mean he or she is homophobic or wrong. The arrogance to think that your experience is the only experience is not a valid basis for literal criticism just just arrogance of the highest level. At last, hinsight bias which is one of the worst ways to interpret a text and something people have been doing for centuries. Take for example Franz Kafka. Many people know he had a bad relationship with his father so they interpret every little shit about daddy issues into his text without ever actually making the effort by trying to find their own interpretation. Kafka was a real life person with a far more complex life than just his father being an asshole and his texts are far more interesting to be read without reducing everything to this one point. I am also gonna make the same point about JK Rowling and how some people are now trying to do active revision of her work because she has fallen out of favour with people due to her toxic opinions on trans people. Claiming now in hinsight that she always was a transhobe and that it can be found in her text needs more than just personal opinions. You need to prove it by the text, but most of the time it is just a flimsy text passage taken out of context. And that is the real problem: many people simply cannot seperate the voice of the author from the voice of the character.
Another thing, I think some people are actively trying to discredit authors and take a joy in doin so by going through books and pointing out problematic passages. They are a common mob and they should not be catered to because they ruin the joy of writing and reading in equal measure. They are just common bullies and should be ashamed of themselves and find a different hobby.
At last, I have come to the point where I say: Writers should write anything they want and do not deserve personal attacks for it even when it comes to topic like rape and pedohpilia. Nobody should be personally attacked for writing a fictional book because at the end of the day it is not real.
I completely agree with you, but just for the record using Ben Shapiro’s review of the Barbie movie as an example of bad literary criticism is like using Fox News as an example of bad journalism, lol. What did you expect?
People who treat the author like a bad person because they wrote a character who does bad things has always annoyed me.
I see what OP talks about with the Name of the Wind books. People get an impression of the main character as a mary sue, or the author obsessed with sex, and somehow their brains seize up and they become unable to understand anything about the book that contradicts these impressions.
People really get dismissive because of their own personal failures to understand what they read.
I’m confused. If you revise your first impression, it’s no longer your first impression.
Why not just keep going?
This is my first impression. Upon a second watch, or further consideration, I would adjust that in these ways.
I guarantee you everyone at Mattel was worried about adult jokes in a Barbie movie, and they should be. I haven’t seen it, nor am I exactly sure who Shapiro is, but I would be worried about the movie being inappropriate for kids and I find it hard to accept that kids wouldn’t assume the movie was for them.
That’s what you get for laying attention to Ben Shapiro.
That stuff drives me insane, it’s like the continuous harping on and on about Tolkiens work being a reflections of industrialization, Frodo’s journey being PTSD after war and so on.
It’s a fantasy world, sure you can see the inspirational dots cause he lived in that era and experienced war, but I really dislike people needing to find a RL connection to fictional worlds and their problems, and make the author out to try and send a message through them or that their work reflects their stance on RL. There obviously are such books and authors, but it feels like a trend sometimes that if you dig far enough or you think yourself clever enough, you can “crack the code” behind all fiction.
I’ve wanted to write a fantasy world and novels myself for a fair few years, and sure there’s inspiration everywhere and themes that reflect RL issues, but foremost I just wanna write a neat fictional world, not sit there trying to send some deep hidden message I feel the reader needs to learn and that analysing my work will crack the person I am.
So I feel rather than try find meaning and teachings in a book not about that and try connect the dots to the author, just enjoy it for the journey and story. That way you’ll likely find less criticism for them, less personal issues and just enjoy them more for what they are.
I’ve seen this happening because of marketing too, something marketed as “the x Bridget Jones” and gets bad reviews because it isn’t like Bridget Jones. Something marketed as a mystery that got bad reviews because there wasn’t a big mystery element. I liked both books myself and usually go in without expectations.
Well, Ben Shapiro is generally a cartoon (an opinion I don’t plan to revise), but I take your point. A lot of times people decide on a thesis or an interpretation and then cherry-pick evidence to fit it; when the evidence (in this case a text they’re interpreting) no longer fits, they discard the text instead of the interpretation. It’s absolutely backward.
There are a lot of critical approaches that attempt to address this problem semi-systematically. Classical hermeneutics is one; this is the tradition associated with people like Hans Robert Jauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and E.D. Hirsch. What’s sometimes called “ethical criticism” is a more deconstructive version of a similar approach. In any case, the antidote seems to be a recognition that initial interpretations are going to be flawed and a critical awareness of the assumptions that we bring to texts. Rather than using texts to advance our agendas, on this view, we need an interest in getting them right, in doing them justice, in treating them ethically. A text is an inert object on the page; a reader has to be careful not to impose an interpretation on them. It’s a kind of violation.
we need an interest in getting them right, in doing them justice, in treating them ethically.
Ah-fucking-men.
I’m reminded of what Nabokov wrote in his essay Good Readers and Good Writers:
In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.
Beautifully selected. It’s hard to put it better than Nabokov.
You can thank schools and universities pumping out ideology that makes students incapable of thinking outside of this paradigm for this outcome. The Ben Shapiros of this world are equally guilty of it, even though they are reactionaries to the ideology being pumped out by the education system.
We have lost the ability to simply read a book and enjoy it for what it is and not some projection of what it should be. This too shall pass, but it is unlikely that it will pass in our lifetimes.
Personally, I’m not interested in the meaning or morals of a book, I’m just interested in a good story. That’s all I’ve ever read books for.
Tolkien once said something I find quite funny. I can’t remember the exact quote, it was during an old interview with him that was recorded so I am paraphrasing here.
“I receive a lot of mail from people. But hardly anyone has read the books…”
He also, funnily enough, suggested that people don’t know what allegory was in the first place and most of what is claimed to be one, is just people seeing things. Which does make some sense, given that at least some definitions of allegory imply a conscious purpose, which a reader will never be privy to unless they can read the authors mind. He really took issue with people claiming TLOTR contained an allegory for the H-Bomb.
So I don’t think it’s a very new phenomenon.
Merlin didn’t believe in writing for exactly this reason. He read, but druids don’t write. Once you write your name sea, it becomes rigid, unyielding.
Instead, whisper your ideas ecna the wise.
This is exactly how I feel about people’s criticism of Babel by R.F. Kuang. It’s literally not about convincing the reader that colonialism or racism are bad. Those things are giving. It’s taking the reader on the main character’s dilemma on the cost of his privilege. It frustrates me to no end how the point of the books gets discussed.