At the end of my last post, I mentioned that I reread The Secret History for a book club (the book clubs are going great, thanks for asking). Rereading a book is a great way to see how you’ve changed (and you have changed). Bonus points if you re-read the same COPY and it has your old marginalia. It’s been about ten years since I first read the book. Sadly, I haven’t kept my same copy, but I did remember certain things about the book: dark academia, a sleepy New England liberal arts school, and a character named Bunny. I also remembered really enjoying the book, so I expected to enjoy it again the second time.
I did. I marked over twenty notable passages for revision and notation. Some had interesting ideas or posed wonderful questions. Others were simply examples of beautiful prose. And though I enjoyed this book at sixteen the way that I probably enjoyed The Great Gatsby and 1984, re-reading it with fresh eyes and a decade more of lived experience made me appreciate it more.
Here’s why:
Even though I read a lot in high school, I didn’t read very deeply. Nor did I read very widely. I read about a quarter of my assigned readings and then stuck to mainstream, age-appropriate books with the occasional wild card thrown in. Eventually, as I realized that there were more layers to art—not just books, but movies and music and paintings and television—that I was missing out on, I began to look for more of the hidden connections and intentional references embedded in these works. Sometimes they stuck out (i.e. “Blood on the Leaves“, West Side Story) and sometimes they had to be taught (Animal Farm, She’s the Man).
how much do i need to understand to enjoy something?
In a small lecture hall, in a house on top of a very large hill, a question was posed to a room of students. The night before, they were all supposed to have read E. M. Forester’s “The Celestial Omnibus.” If you have a high-school English reading level, you can understand the story. You might even enjoy it. I certainly did.
Our professor assigned us that reading during our second week, titled in the syllabus as “The Audience’s Job.” I pulled up the syllabus now, and one of the discussion questions he had us prepare for was:
“What do these artists (i.e. authors for the assigned readings) seem to expect of the audience? Especially in the case of Forster, we need to look beyond what the stories say to how they engage us as audience.”
That day in class (January 31st, 2018, according to this syllabus), we went into a discussion of how much context should be provided by the creators of a work, and how much is left in the hands of us consumers. “The Celestial Omnibus” itself had a few references that went over my head. Would I have enjoyed the story more had I gotten all the references? Probably. But I probably would have enjoyed it less had it been riddled with footnotes that made the story twice as long. For the uninitiated, it is a fun adventure story. For those who read literature like a professor, there are more dimensions to appreciate: there’s always more fun to be had when you get to the point where you can write and discuss papers on papers on books on books.
Or maybe you just like to read for the plot. And that’s perfectly fine. Don’t let anyone tell you what you should be reading and why.
Did people who didn’t know the extent of Michelle Yeoh’s career still enjoy watching Everything Everywhere All at Once? Did people still enjoy Community and Euphoria without catching all the 20th century film reference?
Often times, even when we don’t recognize the references, these themes/motifs are used because they mean something. They’re imprinted in the cultural consciousness, and some part of us resonates with it, even if we don’t know why a certain artistic choice was made.
but i still don’t understand anything and it’s frustrating
The book mentioned in the previous section, The Secret History is one example of how different readers can enjoy the same books on different levels. As any good dark academia book does, it had a myriad references to the “classics” (e.g. Greek and Latin works) and Western-canon literature. This novel also paid equal attention to detail regarding 90s culture and the American undergraduate experience.
Ten years ago, I took the book at face value. I hadn’t read any works referenced in The Secret History, and I had no experience as a college student. When I re-read the book last month, I caught allusions to The Great Gatsby and Crime and Punishment— and I related to some of the narrator’s college experiences (up to a point—a small college in Vermont is very different from one of the largest public universities in the world). As we get older (and maybe wiser), we become different readers, we relate to different types of characters and settings, we make connections to things that we have seen and felt.
There are times when context is appreciated. But other times, it takes away from the reading experience. For example, when reading Anna Karenina, I became fed up with the copious footnotes. Some were useful, but they mostly detailed historical/political/Biblical information that did not really add to my enjoyment of the book: I was reading AK not as part of a class or independent study but to enjoy a story with great detail paid to description of the human condition.
I had the same experience with Pride and Prejudice. I didn’t get a lot of the jokes, or really understand how rich or poor most of these characters were supposed to be (how do you claim you’re poor but still have servants? still unclear, despite Ms. Austen’s best efforts). However, I didn’t need all of this detail to understand why Elizabeth and Darcy and Bingley and Jane acted the way they did (Lydia’s behavior still confuses me—I’d like to read a version of this story from her point of view).
There’s another book (I won’t spoil it here) that details one character’s desire to piece together the parts of a long-lost legend. At first, the scholar combs through archives, struggles through translations, and goes to great lengths to ensure the rendition is the most accurate and true-to-the-original as possible.
And then, a switch. The scholar realizes that it’s more important to preserve the spirit of the story, so what moves people is what gets passed down to the next generation. So if you have enough to understand what makes the story matter, enough context to be moved by it—or at least enough information to do your homework, that’s good enough.
This week’s top three
- Challengers 🎾 – and its soundtrack
- Chappell Roan ✨
- Ollipop orange soda 🍊