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.

  • GlenGrail@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.

    • pseudoLit@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.