How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

by Thomas C. Foster

“Plot is character revealed in action.”

you keep saying that the writer is alluding to this obscure work and using that symbol or following some pattern or other that I never heard of, but does he really intend to do that? Can anyone really have all that going on in his head at one time?

Yes.

the easy ones—James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and what we could call the “Intentionalists”—writers who attempt to control every facet of their creative output and who intend virtually every effect in their works.

Many of them are from the modernist period,

One of the surest ways to be successful in theater in the nineteenth century was to take a touring Shakespeare company through the American West. If folks in their little houses on the prairie could quote the Bard, is it likely that their writers “accidentally” wrote stories that paralleled his?

Violence in literature, though, while it is literal, is usually also something else.

It’s nearly impossible to generalize about the meanings of violence, except that there are typically more than one, and its range of possibilities is far larger than with something like rain or snow.

Authors rarely introduce violence straightforwardly, to perform only its one appointed task, so we ask questions. What does this type of misfortune represent thematically? What famous or mythic death does this one resemble? Why this sort of violence and not some other? The answers may have to do with psychological dilemmas, with spiritual crises, with historical or social or political concerns. Almost never, though, are they cut-and-paste, but they do exist, and if you put your mind to it, you can usually come up with some possibilities.

some symbols do have a relatively limited range of meanings, but in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing.

If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory.

Symbols, though,

involve a range of possible meanings and interpretations.

If we want to figure out what a symbol might mean, we have to use a variety of tools on it: questions, experience, preexisting knowledge.

We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism.

great work allows for a considerable range of possible interpretations.

Action can also be symbolic.

Much of what we think about literature, we feel first.

reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

most works must engage with their own specific period in ways that can be called political.

the features that make Christ who he is. Whether you do or not, this list may be helpful: crucified, wounds in the hands, feet, side, and head in agony self-sacrificing good with children good with loaves, fishes, water, wine thirty-three years of age when last seen employed as carpenter known to use humble modes of transportation, feet or donkeys preferred believed to have walked on water often portrayed with arms outstretched known to have spent time alone in the wilderness believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted last seen in the company of thieves creator of many aphorisms and parables buried, but arose on the third day had disciples, twelve at first, although not all equally devoted very forgiving came to redeem an unworthy world

YOU MIGHT BE A CHRIST FIGURE IF YOU ARE (CHECK ANY THAT APPLY): __ thirty-three years old __ unmarried, preferably celibate __ wounded or marked in the hands, feet, or side (crown of thorns extra credit) __ sacrificing yourself in some way for others (your life is best, and your sacrifice doesn’t have to be willing) __ in some sort of wilderness, tempted there, accosted by the devil Oh, you get the point. Consult previous list.

In general, flying is freedom, we might say, freedom not only from specific circumstances but from those more general burdens that tie us down.

It’s really pretty straightforward: flight is freedom.

the act of falling from vast heights and surviving is as miraculous, and as symbolically meaningful, as the act of flight itself.

What does it mean to survive certain death, and how does such survival alter one’s relationship to the world? Do the characters’ responsibilities to themselves, to life itself, change? Is the survivor even the same person any longer?

cross a body of water, which is the most dramatic and final sort of home-leaving one can take

often in literature the freeing of the spirit is seen in terms of flight.

The notion that the disembodied soul is capable of flight is deeply embedded in the Christian tradition,

scenes in which sex is coded rather than explicit can work at multiple levels and sometimes be more intense than literal depictions.

When they’re writing about other things, they really mean sex, and when they write about sex, they really mean something else. If they write about sex and mean strictly sex, we have a word for that. Pornography.

sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication, domination, enlightenment, the whole works.

our soggy character. Is he rescued? Does he swim out? Grab a piece of driftwood? Rise up and walk? Each of those would imply something different on the symbolic level. For instance, rescue might suggest passivity, good fortune, indebtedness. The piece of driftwood raises issues of luck and coincidence, serendipity rather than planning.

He’s reborn.

The thing about baptism is, you have to be ready to receive it.

So when writers baptize a character they mean death, rebirth, new identity? Generally, yes.

So in a literary work, does submersion in water always signify baptism? Well, it isn’t always anything.

Is it spiritual, then we can say, sometimes. Sometimes, though, it may just signify birth, a new start, largely stripped of spiritual significance.

The rebirths/baptisms have a lot of common threads, but every drowning is serving its own purpose: character revelation, thematic development of violence or failure or guilt, plot complication or denouement.

Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces inhabiting humans. Who can say how much of us comes from our physical surroundings?

Geography is setting, but it’s also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance, industry—anything that place can forge in the people who live there.

Geography in literature can also be more. It can be revelatory of virtually any element in the work. Theme? Sure. Symbol? No problem. Plot? Without a doubt.

there’s rebirth when there’s a renaming, right?

geography can be character.

What Lawrence does, really, is employ geography as a metaphor for the psyche—when his characters go south, they are really digging deep into their subconscious, delving into that region of darkest fears and desires.

when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.

they run amok because they are having direct, raw encounters with the subconscious.

do they fall under the influence of warmer climes, or do those welcoming latitudes express something that’s already been trying to make its way out? The answer to that question is as variable as the writer—and the reader.

think about what there is down low or up high. Low: swamps, crowds, fog, darkness, fields, heat, unpleasantness, people, life, death. High: snow, ice, purity, thin air, clear views, isolation, life, death. Some of these, you will notice, appear on both lists, and you can make either environment work for you if you’re a real writer.

fall/middle-age cliché