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

by Thomas C. Foster

Take the word “arbitrary” as an example: it doesn’t mean anything inherently; rather, at some point in our past we agreed that it would mean what it does, and it does so only in English (those sounds would be so much gibberish in Japanese or Finnish). So too with art: we decided to agree that perspective—the set of tricks artists use to provide the illusion of depth—was a good thing and vital to painting. This occurred during the Renaissance in Europe, but when Western and Oriental art encountered each other in the 1700s, Japanese artists and their audiences were serenely untroubled by the lack of perspective in their painting.

When lay readers encounter a fictive text, they focus, as they should, on the story and the characters: who are these people, what are they doing, and what wonderful or terrible things are happening to them? Such readers respond first of all, and sometimes only, to their reading on an emotional level; the work affects them, producing joy or revulsion, laughter or tears, anxiety or elation. In other words, they are emotionally and instinctively involved in the work. This is the response level that virtually every writer who has ever set pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard has hoped for when sending the novel, along with a prayer, to the publisher. When an English professor reads, on the other hand, he will accept the affective response level of the story (we don’t mind a good cry when Little Nell dies), but a lot of his attention will be engaged by other elements of the novel. Where did that effect come from? Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? Didn’t Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard) say that? If you learn to ask these questions, to see literary texts through these glasses, you will read and understand literature in a new light, and it’ll become more rewarding and fun.

Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.

Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise. We ask, Is this a metaphor? Is that an analogy? What does the thing over there signify?

nemesis. In other words, a quest just happened. But it just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread. True. But consider the quest. Of what does it consist? A knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail (whatever one of those may be), at least one dragon, one evil knight, one princess.

The quest consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there.

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered.

but once you get the hang of it, you see that it follows the conventions of a quest tale. So does Huck Finn. The Lord of the Rings. North by Northwest. Star Wars. And most other stories of someone going somewhere and doing something, especially if the going and the doing wasn’t his idea in the first place.

whenever people eat or drink together, it’s communion.

And in literature, there is another reason: writing a meal scene is so difficult, and so inherently uninteresting, that there really needs to be some compelling reason to include one in the story. And that reason has to do with how characters are getting along. Or not getting along.

But what is this expression of desire except a kind of communion, very private, admittedly, and decidedly not holy? I want to be with you, you want to be with me, let us share the experience. And that’s the point: communion doesn’t need to be holy. Or even decent.

He discovers he has something in common with this stranger—eating as a fundamental element of life—that there is a bond between them.

Or take Dr. Jekyll’s other half. The hideous Edward Hyde exists to demonstrate to readers that even a respectable man has a dark side;

Because there was so much the Victorians couldn’t write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms. The Victorians were masters of sublimation.

ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman.

In those works that continue to haunt us, however, the figure of the cannibal, the vampire, the succubus, the spook announces itself again and again where someone grows in strength by weakening someone else.

That’s what this figure really comes down to,

exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else’s right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particul...

My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.

it’s a matter of learning to look. Not just to look but where to look, and how to look. Literature, as the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye observed, grows out of other literature; we should not be surprised to find, then, that it also looks like other literature.

there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.

the story is no longer all on the surface but begins to have depth. What we’re trying to do is learn to read this sort of thing like a wily old professor, to learn to spot those familiar images, like being able to see the elephant before we connect the dots.

And what all this is about, finally, is myth. Which brings us to the big secret. Here it is: there’s only one story. There, I said it and I can’t very well take it back. There is only one story. Ever. One. It’s always been going on and it’s everywhere around us and every story you’ve ever read or heard or watched is part of it.

And of course there’s the Bible: among its many other functions, it too is part of the one big story.

The devil, as the old saying goes, can quote Scripture. So can writers.

For one thing, it has to do with how you attack a text. When you sit down to read a novel, you want character, story, ideas, the usual business. Then, if you’re like me, you’ll start looking for glimpses of the familiar: hey, that kind of feels like something I know. Oh wait, that’s out of Alice in Wonderland. Now why would she draw a parallel to the Red Queen here? Is that the hole in the ground? Why? Always, why?

What we mean in speaking of “myth” in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can’t. That explanation takes the shape of stories that are deeply ingrained in our group memory, that shape our culture and are in turn shaped by it, that constitute a way of seeing by which we read the world and, ultimately, ourselves. Let’s say it this way: myth is a body of story that matters.

In all these cases, what the artist is doing is reaching back for stories that matter to him and his community—for myth.

No matter how large or small the actions, though, the most important thing that characters can do is change—grow, develop, learn, mature, call it what you will. As we know from our own lives, change can be difficult, painful, arduous, possibly dangerous. Sometimes even fatal.

The plot needs something to happen in order to move forward, so someone must be sacrificed. That “someone” is rarely the protagonist. Oh, the unfairness of it all. In truth, it’s worse than that.

E. M. Forster, whose name you see a lot in these pages, had to say on the subject in his book Aspects of the Novel: the fictive world (I’m paraphrasing here) is divided up into round and flat characters. Round characters are what we could call three-dimensional, full of traits and strengths and weaknesses and contradictions, capable of change and growth. Flat characters, not so much.

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?

So 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. Here’s how allegory works: things stand for other things on a one-for-one basis.

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.

The only thing we are sure of about the cave as symbol is that it keeps its secrets. That sounds as if I’m punting, but I’m not. What the cave symbolizes will be determined to a large extent by how the individual reader engages the text. Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees,

Ask questions of the text: what’s the writer doing with this image, this object, this act; what possibilities are suggested by the movement of the narrative or the lyric; and most important, what does it feel like it’s doing? Reading literature is a highly intellectual activity, but it also involves affect and instinct to a large degree.

We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means,

That is to say, we can’t simply invent meaning without the writer, or if we can, we ought not to hold her to it. Rather, a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

Here as elsewhere, one does well to remember that writing literature is an exercise of the imagination. And so is reading it. We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all its possibilities; otherwise it’s just about somebody who did something.

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

but it needs saying again, so here it is: there’s only one story. One story. Everywhere. Always. Wherever anyone puts pen to paper or hands to keyboard or fingers to lute string or quill to papyrus. They all take from and in return give to the same story,

On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible. Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before. Think of it this way: can you use a word no one else has ever used?

The basic premise of intertextuality is really pretty simple: everything’s connected. In other words, anything you write is connected to other written things.

asked him how he could come up with all those tunes. “They’re all around us,” old Willie said. “You just reach up and pick them out of the air.” Stories are like that, too. That one story that has been going on forever is all around us. We—as readers or writers, tellers or listeners—understand each other, we share knowledge of the structures of our myths, we comprehend the logic of symbols, largely because we have access to the same swirl of story. We have only to reach out into the air and pluck a piece of it.

everyone, Durrell seems to be saying, is damaged in some way or other, and no matter how careful or fortunate we might seem to be, we don’t get through life without being marked by the experience.

Are deformities and scars therefore always significant? Perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes a scar is simply a scar, a short leg or a hunchback merely that. But more often than not physical markings by their very nature call attention to themselves and signify some psychological or thematic point the writer wants to make.

So if a writer brings up a physical problem or handicap or deficiency, he probably means something by it.

What we have discussed is absolutely true: when literal blindness, sight, darkness, and light are introduced into a story, it is nearly always the case that figurative seeing and blindness are at work. Here’s the caveat: seeing and blindness are generally at issue in many works, even where there is no hint of blindness on the part of windows, alleys, horses, speculations, or persons.

if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large), introduce it early, before you need it.