Read, Be Read, and Read Again – Betsy Howard

ABSTRACT: Reading classic fiction is an exercise both in reading and in being read. Great works of literature — commonly identified as classics because of their enduring longevity, distinct quality, and moral insight — have the power to capture readers’ attention, enrich their imagination, and form their character. Reading and understanding these works is, therefore, not only a matter of analysis but also of immersion, both a looking along and a looking at that is best undertaken in conversation with fellow discerning readers.

For our ongoing series of feature articles for pastors and Christian leaders, we asked Betsy Howard (PhD, University of Minnesota), assistant professor of literature at Bethlehem College and Seminary, to offer guiding principles for reading classic literature.

Let’s say we want to start reading “the Classics.” And let’s say, being the aspiring discerning readers that we are, we first set out in search of a set of principles that might help us do so. We might begin by asking what we even mean when we say “classic” literature — assuming we mean more than “that which people with a sense of literary style read” — and why we feel the urge to read such literature. Much like the descriptor “Great Books,” which carries inside itself an implicit assessment distinguishing “great” from “good” or “fine,” the term “classics” carries inside itself unstated but recognizable criteria — like a work’s ability to endure over time or its distinctiveness. It wouldn’t take long to find at least three often interrelated categories by which we might accurately label a book “classic.”

Classifying ‘Classics’

The most obvious criteria we might use when we say “classic” are longevity and influence on later generations. Even as late as the early twentieth century, studying the “classics” or the “greats” primarily meant “great works of Roman and Greek literature.”1 But the term has widened to welcome all kinds of seemingly “enduring” literature, including the fat nineteenth-century novels of Alexander Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Charles Dickens, such that when one says they are now reading “the classics,” the book list is as long as the criteria for inclusion are vague.2 Any story, song, poem, essay, speech, or sermon — or any smaller excerpted part of a work — might become a part of the shared vocabulary of a culture, and that for a variety of reasons: a whole range of technologies of reproduction (like printing presses), vulnerability of storage (did it survive the burning of the library of Alexandria?), historical migrations of people and routes of circulation (when did it move from Medieval Muslim Iberia into the rest of Europe?), language access (is it still stuck in Latin?), and the varied communities of readers (who kept reading it to whom?).3 These works often shape the works that come after them, such that identifying “classics” as defined by their relationship to earlier works and their influence on contemporary and subsequent generations really recommends a metaphor of a dynamic and expanding river rather than a moldering, antique catalog.4

Another criterion we often assume when we say “classic” is an aesthetic distinction in two ways. By distinction, we could mean its quintessential quality; a classic novel in this sense would be one that is a representative of the genre to which it belongs because it shares the same essential elements.5 The generic or shared features of a Chivalric romance, for example, would be not only wandering knights on a quest but also the strong likelihood that anything can happen — magical or otherwise. When describing Una’s rescue by the we-can-hardly-believe-it-they’re-well-behaved Satyrs, we would call the scene from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene a classic romance plot.

By distinction, we can also mean that a work is exceptional among others like it — one that stands out because it seizes our attention and stays with us long after we have finished reading. Perhaps it is something about the feistiness of Chaucer’s Allyson from Bath and her red stockings or the “pirateness” of Stevenson’s one-legged Long John Silver or Alcott’s depiction of vindictive selfishness in Amy March’s burning of Jo’s manuscript. As humans, each with an individual soul, we are drawn to plausible examples of “this-ness” — that stunning particularity of an action or trait. Seventeenth-century Puritan allegorist John Bunyan calls such things “burrs in the brain” because they stick with you and thereby contribute to the work’s ability to endure in memory — both individual and shared.6

In addition to a memorable atmosphere or moment, “classics” also often contain insight, moments when a character turns outside of himself to see the world more accurately, creating an opportunity for epiphany in the reader as well. This moment of turning parallels classical anagnorisis in tragedy, where a character like King Oedipus comes to see things as they truly are too late to remedy them (or so he concludes), or Christian repentance, in which, by the work of the Holy Spirit, one turns from self to God. Literary turns may be huge plot arcs or sudden pivots; they encompass everything from the transcendent shock accompanied by a bullet to the head in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” to the warm flash of memory in Anton Chekhov’s “The School Mistress.” When we read, we (subconsciously or not) grade a story’s world against God’s reality, just as we grade our own private fictions against that same reality, not in terms of the historicity of the details (did this actually happen in time?) but in its preserving the integrity of reality in all its stunning diversity and coherence, in the tensions between the world’s fallenness, the everywhere generosity of common grace, and the miracle of redemption. Albeit in a fictional frame, classics amplify and underscore realities that we have become desensitized to, with the end result that we can see more clearly — if often more painfully — the human condition.

Now, we can pause here to note that just because something is influential or memorable doesn’t make it a “classic” or “enduring” in the third — most serious but least common — moral sense of its being rooted in what is true about the nature of God and the world he has made. It is very possible for a work to endure as a “classic” in one sense (still popular) but not in the sense of making reality more legible.

The Priority of Principles

Happy now to have our definition of “classics” sorted, we feel ready to enumerate those principles to structure our reading. But if we continued on to map for ourselves a set of principles that might guide an approach to classic literature, we would soon discover that we had seriously hamstrung ourselves in our noble quest, since our very starting point assumed that reading is an activity that ought to be governed by making distinctions according to specific principles. In other words, we have assumed that discerning readers begin by identifying principles that they then apply to what they read.

Bound up with privileging an analytic approach to literature, our original question — what principles should the discerning reader use to approach the classics? — itself obfuscates a possible world in which the first task when reading literature is something other than identifying principles. The question justifies itself with ethical authority: The discerning reader would begin with principles — as opposed to, say, an average Joe reader who (shudder) does something stupid like diving headfirst into the book without first gauging the depth of the craggy pool below.

The adjectival ethics of “the discerning reader” anticipate the need for something before reading. In other words, you’d read this article as a bit of “reading-before-reading” to pack principles fit for a Boy Scout’s backpack so you don’t die out there. Isn’t the exploration of worlds, especially ones framed by complex fallen human longings, a fraught task? Wouldn’t preparation be prudent? And dangers aside, isn’t understanding undergirded by guiding principles?

I will be the first to affirm that literature is powerful, disruptive, even mercifully devastating. German novelist Franz Kafka finds in literature the power of an “ice axe” to break the “frozen sea” of the soul.7 But if we primarily fear stories’ potential weapon-grade power, that fear will move us toward safety in reading, away from literature that is “not safe” but still formatively good. Let me ask instead: How can a good story jump out, daze you in a flash of recognition, and whip you away from the world, the flesh, and the devil, if you’ve waddled into that story, padded in so many layers of analytical criteria that the story cannot get close enough to actually touch your heart, soul, mind, and strength?

What about the excellent question “Isn’t understanding undergirded by principles that make legible a story’s parts?” Yes, of course, knowing the parts of a story — how stories are made, what they are made from and with, and to what end (more on these categories in a moment) — will, by all means, lend insight. Nonetheless, starting with a regimen of assessment threatens to cut against the nature of stories themselves. It is in the nature of stories to be immersive first; they so often begin in medias res, “in the middle of things,” because that rush of narrative disorientation simulates the story’s immersive quality. Even stories that borrow the language of careful orientation, like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), with its opening lines “Marley was dead: to begin with,” are mostly bluffing about disclosing the story’s inner workings from the get-go;8 that very narratorial sense of “order” is mostly a ploy to heave-ho, shove off, and get you in “there.” You can figure out where precisely “there” is later. Unlike IKEA furniture assembly, stories, as made things, are designed to be the kind of thing you should want to take a wild, running jump into.9

Immersive Reading

Analytical orientation is often a second-order priority in reading classic literature, second to entering into the world of the story since stories are little worlds that reveal themselves over time.10 Inseparable from the activity of reading is the reader’s labor of recognizing how the story has framed the passage of time and how the characters will change in it. The thickest definition of reading includes not only the sensory and neurological work of translating the words into plots, but also the labor of coming to know a new world, with its formative pressures for the characters, and then letting it shape you as you come to know it. In other words, reading is sustained attention — a willingness to enter the world of the story so that we can think with the story.

This immersive disposition toward reading is a way of knowing that C.S. Lewis defends in his essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” (1945).11 Using the metaphor of a beam of light, Lewis argues that there are at least two epistemological modes: the analytical (which he calls “looking at” something) and the experiential (which Lewis describes as “looking along” something).12 In addition to distinguishing these ways of knowing from one another, Lewis defends the latter against the creeping domain of the former; he complains that it has become intellectually commonplace to privilege the analytical mode and “browbeat” the experiential as less essential and therefore secondary: “We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along.”13 Here Lewis defends the two epistemological approaches as complementary insofar as each offers the other an additional way of coming to know beyond its own criteria.

Praising careful observation while reading, my colleagues love to retell the story of Louis Agassiz and his tenacity in examining a fish at his professor’s command.14 Certainly there is something to applaud in the substantive efforts made to “Look at the fish!” analytically and then to translate such observations into a kind of knowing. But it is also true, as Lewis reminds us, that there is something inherently lacking in giving attention to the fish this way, not because of any failure of effort but because looking at the (dead) fish is only one mode of inquiry and not, therefore, a comprehensive one.

If the glory of the fish fully alive is its swimming, it stands to reason that the little fish cannot be fully known dead on a table or in a yellow jar of preserving alcohol.15 Agassiz’s efforts are ominously reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor’s defense of her own short stories: “In most English classes the short story had become a kind of literary specimen to be dissected. Every time a story of mine appears in a Freshman anthology, I have a vision of it, with its little organs laid open, like a frog in a bottle.”16 How differently might we come to know a fish — and, by analogy, a story — by entering its natural element, imaginatively placing ourselves inside “the beam.”

Formative Stories

When we give ourselves to a story, it has a way of shaping us in the act of reading. A brief early modern literary example of one of Lewis’s favorite works might help us more clearly understand immersive knowing as a design feature and not as a flaw or a failure. In most editions of The Fairie Queene (1590), editors append a letter Edmund Spenser wrote to explain to his Elizabethan friend Sir Walter Raleigh that he had framed The Fairie Queene to delight his readers so that they would be formed toward virtue.17 Everyone loves the romance tales of the knights of King Arthur, he reasons, so setting knights to wander through his books would draw his readers into a process of formation that would happen to them while reading. Spenser’s project of formation relies on a prior assumption that his readers will get sucked into the story. To long for holiness in the Spenserian project is to get carried away in the quest of Redcrosse Knight only to encounter yourself at the end.

In the final stanzas of Book I, when the evil Duessa’s plot to sabotage Redcrosse’s marriage to Una fails, Spenser is certainly writing about the Knight of Holiness and the impotent record of his past sins. But the knight is also a shiny medium, a literary sleight of hand through which Spenser draws the reader toward holiness; through Redcrosse Knight, Spenser demonstrates to you that although in this life you are beleaguered by a foe seeking to work you woe, no such foe can ultimately triumph if you belong to Christ through faith. The very work of lavishing your attention on Redcrosse’s wanderings draws you into the story far enough for the story to read you.

Now, granted, not every story — not even every classic — invests in your sanctification. But it is in the nature of stories to capture a span of time in a set of characters’ lives in which some development is mounting — some pressing revelation or change — and that orbit includes the reader if, and only if, the reader will join imaginatively and volitionally in the action, only if they let the story “get them.”

Lessons from the Toolshed

But I must pause. I have been unkind to my kind editors who asked me to write on principles that might guide discerning readers through classic literature. Of course, discerning readers will seek out and welcome principles as they read; all of us bring a catalog of principles to our reading, visible or invisible as they may be. If we pause for just half a second, we recognize that the complaint, “Oh, good grief! Just leave me alone and let me read,” privileges immersive reading to the exclusion of analytical reading. And those still reading this article — yes, those discerning readers — will notice we have been picking up a nice little catalogue of principles for our own reading for many paragraphs now, including the need to distinguish between reading immersively and reading analytically; to recognize that stories are designed to make themselves known by immersing the reader in their own unique worlds; to respect that the maturation of the reader is tied to the willingness to “be gotten” and taken along with the story’s own movement and transformation.

I would not burden readers with principles that would confuse them into mistaking reading primarily as an analytical activity. I’ll gladly echo Lewis that a discerning reader’s first distinction is to read, not by making distinctions from outside the story, but to enter through the wardrobe into its vibrant world. Of first order, I submit, discerning readers must maintain a “bothness” in their reading, lithely bouncing between reading immersively and analytically. Whether they prefer losing themselves in the whole of a story or neatly researching the parts before they get started, they will not grumble or cast suspicious sidelong glances at the other way of knowing; they will show readerly hospitality, welcoming both analytical and synthetic ways of reading. Lewis lauds this attentional ambivalence; after all, “One must look both along and at everything.”18

Bunyan makes a similar argument toward the end of his opening poem, “The Author’s Apology for His Book,” intermingling the good goal of looking along and looking at his spiritual allegory:

Wouldst read thyself, and read thou knowest not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not,
By reading the same lines? Oh, then come hither,
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together.19

Bunyan here offers four overlapping levels of reading: reading to read yourself, reading what you can’t make sense of, reading to discern your spiritual state, and reading with head and heart. For defining the bafflement that comes with immersive reading (looking “along” the story), I know no better description than “read thou knowest not what,” or, as my three-year-old loves to exclaim when confounded, “What in the world?!” But Bunyan’s disorientation is accompanied by substantial orientation: learning to read your very self, your own heart, which Jeremiah reminds us can be so deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). Bunyan argues that his Pilgrim’s Progress enables two readings at the same time. While the dreamer invites the reader to follow Christian as he moves along the allegory’s idiosyncratic path, the story is also full of commentary — sermon forms, catechisms, footnotes, at the same time swiveling your attention to other parts of the allegory and zooming your attention out of the allegory into other texts.

In a potentially exhausting feat, Bunyan zips his readers through multiple positions in the text at once. While I am sympathetic to the effort, I am suspicious of the final success of being able to read “along” the allegory and read “at” it at once. When we happily embrace Lewis’s admonition that we must look both at and along, we will still find ourselves bound by our own limitations as readers. Self-aware readers recognize that they cannot easily (if at all) travel “along” the beam of a story and look “at” the beam of the story at the same time and in the same way.

Habits of Reading and Rereading

Weighing how much attention to give to analytical reading versus immersive reading is a question of prudence, determined both by what your goals are in reading a particular book and the resources you have available as you read. That Bunyan makes a concerted effort at simulating two ways of reading confirms the double good of Lewis’s reading “at” and “along,” but when I assign a text like Bunyan’s, I invite my students to read “along” the allegory in their first read. We then look “at” it together in our class discussion. After swimming about in a story’s “you know not what,” you can switch to an analytical mode most easily by discussing with others who want to make sense of the work alongside you.

But notice, a temporal catch remains: You would like to proportion your attention to moments of revelation in the story and work backward — making sense of the other moments in the story in relation to that moment, because, whether you recognize it or not, you intuit that a good story puts narrative details to work in service of something beyond themselves. You and I find it deeply satisfying if pages of character description aren’t merely for description but are picked up again to serve the story’s eventual climax, its own moment of revelation or clarification.20 So you’d like to be able to read the compounding details of the story in light of the eventual revelation, but in a first reading you can’t. Such proportioning is only possible in the act of rereading or in following someone else’s footsteps. As the adage goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.

In this regard, reading in sequence is a way to develop patience with the ambition to read “the classics.” Give yourself to reading; then turn and analyze it together with others. Fostering this two-part habit of reading is a gift for understanding. Discussing with others after an immersive reading draws you not only closer to the text and its insight but also closer to others. When two or more read together, both are made more themselves and are more intelligible to themselves by their interaction with one another; one’s good is bound up in another’s. Attention, while directed at some object of study, actually radiates in multiple directions at once.

The others with whom you assess the “what in the world” that you just read might be other books or parts of books: introductions that make sense of the whole work by a generous editor, reader’s guides, appended letters or prefaces (often written after the fact) by the author. These works accompanying a literary work cannot replace the experience of reading along the text; they are designed to facilitate that second mode of reading: the looking at. And they are often full of tools you might take with you into your next reading. If you were interested in reading Russian short stories, and you wanted to practice interpreting immediately after you finished a story, I’d turn to George Saunders’s A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, in which he experiments with sharp pivots from looking along to looking at Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. If you want strategies for reading poetry, you’ll find yourself both thrilled and frustrated by Abram Van Engen’s Word Made Fresh since he refuses to gratify readers’ lust for meaning until he can moderate their attention. He sends you into a poem to first ask how the poem works on you before helping you name how the poem works internally.21

Over many, many rereadings, then, the analytical mode and the experiential mode become harder to distinguish from one another and become something like a contemplative mode sustained and enhanced by palimpsest memories of earlier ruminations. The classics endure in part because they cannot “be gotten” (fully comprehended) or “get you” (form you) all in one go. With every reading you bring a fresh attentiveness that will cause treasures both old and new to stand forth. Discerning reading is less an activity of technique and far more a habit of attention to be generously given to a story over a long life. So, yes, take up and read, but bound up in that reading, embrace the embedded echo: Take up and reread.

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