Some readers indeed do this automatically (and can’t comprehend without it). Some readers claim to experience no visual imagery when they read. Some critics (I’m thinking of William Gass) insist that readers not create visual imagery, so they can stay firmly within the verbal structure assembled by the author. If you feel like visual imagery helps you comprehend or enjoy a work, or increases your neurological contact with it, great. But know that it’s also perfectly all right to imagine in less vivid or more abstract ways; a lot of readers imagine spaces or settings, but not specific details. Look up “reader response criticism” if you want some empirical studies of how different readers read, cognitively and phenomenologically.

Beautifully selected. It’s hard to put it better than Nabokov.

I don’t think there’s any work too bad or low that we can’t learn something from it, or have an interesting conversation about it. Deciding what’s good and bad has historically been inseparable from questions of power, and it’s important in thinking through what we value in literature to be explicit about our assumptions. Not just what principles we’re using to inform our judgments, but what affects us, what moves us, and how. There’s no objective method for doing this, luckily, although there are more and less nuanced, more and less creative, more and less capacious ways to proceed.

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.