Cameron's advice on reading

Probably the worst offense a reader can commit is inserting himself into a text. By this I simply mean the persistent refusal to take a work on its own terms, ignoring the questions it raises and pursuing instead ones own. This can take a number of forms.

The most pernicious in modern academia are the various political theories of literature. Marxist, feminist, the lot of them. Critics of these schools assert that a feminist reading of a work is a valuable use of time and intellect. It's certainly entertaining, I'm sure, to scour Aeschylus for feminist themes, which are there if one wishes to find them; but in doing so, you will gain nothing from Aeschylus himself. You will see what you want to see, and take from the text only what you put into it. It's like betting on the only horse in the race. Certainly, you will win your bet, but when the odds are absolute, you can only break even.

One wonders why this sort of literary criticism is so fashionable nowadays. I suppose it has something to do with the relative ease of the thing. Searching for real answers to real questions is a daunting task. Much easier to invent questions for which you already have neatly pre-wrapped answers.

This sort of misreading is manifest in all other instances of violent self-insertion into a work. In another instance--perhaps more widespread though lacking the benefit of a formal academic title--the literary rapist insists that he is endowed with the privilege to judge any and every work that he reads, usually with a negative eye, with special emphasis on received classics. By "judge", I do not mean the application of critical theory. I mean the black and white moralism of the iconoclastic undergrad who insists that Twain was racist and that Shakespeare was a misogynist. Instead of striving to understand, they seek only to pass judgment, to declare every classic trash and every author overrated. It is of course within the rights of a reader to judge an author and their work, but only once they understand the damn thing. Understanding, in the sense of absolute grasping of what the text is saying, is not an easy thing to come by; it is, perhaps, impossible. The difficulty of the task does not give the reader a free pass for ignorant maleficence.

(A related misstep, which only needs to be noted in passing, is the judging of characters. Until one understands Achilles and his motives, one is not permitted to call him (to quote a handful of my classmates) a crybaby, a hypocrite, a liar, or, a "weeping existentialist fuckass," as one friend memorably put it. Achilles is none of these, but the casual reader (eg, many professors of literature) doesn't take the effort to find out just who he is.)

The last act of self-insertion I'll mention, related to all the previous ones, is raising questions that the text has no interest in. Asking how many children Lady Macbeth had, for instance, or asking about liberty in Republic, or the size of Jean Valjean's left testicle. This, like all the other examples, is the easiest thing in the world: what's more difficult is discovering what the text itself is asking, and seeking the answers within it.

I am not an ideal reader, and I don't know how one ought to go about reading a given work. But by refusing to indulge your narcissism, by refusing to violate literature in the tradition of child molesters, and by refusing to take the easy way out, you will certainly have a more fulfilling reading experience, or at any rate, you will see something other than a mirror in words.