Literary Rant – Part the first

One of the reasons I started this blog was so I could air some of my rants to people other than The Heather (who’s heard them all before).

By way of background, my academic studies were in Comparative Literature. I usually say I have 2.5 degrees in the subject, as I completed my Masters, but ran away screaming a few years into my PhD. My abortive thesis would have been on images of the sacred in contemporary children’s fantasy, which hopefully gives you a bit of a sense of what I like to read.

And here’s what bugs me: people don’t know how to read. I don’t mean they’re not literate, I mean they don’t know how to understand what they’re reading.

A good example of this is the criticism often levied at works like the Harry Potter series. One of the popular complaints against the books is that they contain magic, that magic = occult, that occult = evil, and that therefore Harry Potter = evil. Now I’ll be the first to agree that there are valid criticisms you can level against J K Rowling’s work, but this is not one of them. It also strikes a nerve with me because it’s hard to make the argument above without indicting all of fantasy literature.

Literature builds worlds. Even the most realistic of novels isn’t actually set in the real world; it’s set in a fictionalized version of the world where the events of the story happen. Fantasy (and indeed all speculative fiction) makes this more explicit by creating worlds that differ markedly from the one we live in. Magic is there to set the world of the story apart, to make it clear that this is not our world. There is a great advantage to this, as it lets us see with fresh eyes, and to approach familiar things in a new way.

Whatever else magic may do in a story such world-building is one of its primary functions. When the reader is aware of magic functioning in this way, I think there is little danger that the magic in a story like Harry Potter will lead someone into real occultism.

Readers need to be aware of the genre of what they’re reading because it’s impossible to effectively interpret a work without understanding how it uses its own conventions. Just as we wouldn’t read poetry and prose the same way so we shouldn’t read The Lord of the Rings the same way we read Sense and Sensibility.

This problem doesn’t just effect how we read fiction; it also has a huge bearing on how we read the Bible. Some critics of Christianity, and indeed some Christians themselves, argue that the Bible in its entirety must be taken as literal historical fact. According to this view the moment one attempts to interpret one biblical text as figurative one invalidates any possibility of reading another biblical text as literal.

But the Bible isn’t a monolithic text; it’s composed of 73 books written in a variety of literary genres and forms, each with their own conventions. We need to understand how these genres and forms (some of which are very foreign to a modern reader) use language before we can start to figure out what they mean. Just as we wouldn’t read Psalm 23 the same way we read Romans so we shouldn’t read Genesis the same way we read Luke.