Half of literature is advertising. Half of literature is real life.

If you were educated in the English school system, you may have commented in an English lesson, ‘the writer never meant all these things we are reading in their work. Sometimes the curtains are just blue’.

I like memes.

“Why did the writer write this?” Let’s not let kids see the possibility that the writer merely had some kind of mad-genius-drive to minutely record social situations without really getting lost in them themselves.* No, they must have really meant to say something more than what they wrote down. They had a secret, coded within their words, meant for the cleverest readers to unlock (and it could be you!). A zeal for metaphors and connotations, for symbolism and contextual links, fills our GCSE training in this country. If you can write a series of paragraphs each linking one quoted sentence to a hundred other things that are, in fact, not it, top marks await you. We are taught to read into things to death.

Later, at university, this becomes a wonderfully whimsical practice called “close reading”, which is basically the construction of a massive network of meanings around a text, directly inspired from the well spring of your own genius. It is whimsical because its success requires no solid foundations or provable hypotheses — it can also be completely original. You want to argue that reading 15th century French porn through a postmodern deconstructivist lens gives us new routes to modern feminist activism? Now, you can! It’s probably bollocks but there are some good long words in there and yes, no one ever said it before! Mmm. Feels nice.

There are long reaching roots to this proud (with a small “P”) tradition. I wont get into the religious stuff too much. You may have heard of some of the most famous texts we tend to read a lot into. We did it with the Bible and the Koran. We like stories and we like to use them to promote a way of life. This has seen a lot of men, tongues dripping with vocabulary, writing a lot of explication of texts referencing a lot of men who said something similar, then they get referenced, ad nauseam…

There are more recent roots, too, upholding the old fashioned religious stuff and keeping it alive and well in our ostensibly secular society. In 20th century Europe and the USA, the most popular way of scholarly reading was “suspicious”.** Critics believed there were hidden political and social messages to be drawn out of any text, drawn from beneath, below and inside. Nothing was obvious; nothing lay at the surface level. Every nugget of information was hiding, ready to be mined by a shrewd mind.

OK, with me so far? The way we study literature is suspicious and assumes hidden truths. It is modelled on a police officer extracting a confession from a suspect, or a psychoanalyst trying to get at repressed memories and desires with certain techniques. It is no coincidence the growth of suspicious critique pretty much coincided with the growth of Freudian analysis. Look at the meme again. This probably rings true to your experience in school. Why do we do this, though? Well, big egghead French philosopher Michel Foucault suggested critique has historically been a way to question authority. Look at his lovely head. For example, early Christian interpretation of Scripture meant a critic could find their own personal truth in their faith, not simply obey what the Church ordained. It was about finding natural, universal truths, better for everyone than the rules of illegitimate rulers, monarchs and fathers. It was about demanding explanations for truth claims, not just accepting them with a servile ignorance.

So, it’s good to be suspicious. It isn’t only ads that advertise. Literature, including Scripture, laws, poetry, plays, novels and children’s fairytales, often sends out a particular message. A word of advice. A model for behaviour. A warning. Women and children in particular have been the targets of these messages. Fairytales such as those retold by the Grimm brothers have most famously described the violent consequences of not adhering to social rules. When Little Red Cap let herself be seduced by the pretty flowers and wandered off the straight and narrow path, her lack of timeliness and dutifulness found a rather uncanny grandmother in her grandmother’s bed. The stranger in the woods exploited her stupid, sensual nature to, erm, “swallow” the good ladies of the family — only a huntsman’s massive weapon was able to bring them back into the light. Better do what you’re told, girls. Being female is like wearing a big red sign saying “I’m asking for it!”.

All of literature transmits a narrative of how our world is. Half of literature is advertising — a writer manipulates characters, settings, allusions and meaning-rich semantic fields to present a certain outplay of life. Through plot, it provides you with a carefully charted out dream of what would happen, complete with a domino-effect of consequences that follow every moment, every choice. This we may choose to read suspiciously, and being a suspicious critic can prove a very good way to question the powers that be. What is this text trying to tell me and do I want to listen?

However, even I believe there is some literature that is just…real life. There are records here of how somebody moved, what they wore, what they said. There are some books that give you serendipity, that specific joy found in surprising places.

An example can be found in The Princess Casamassima, written by Henry James in 1886:

Over the door of the church hangs an old battered leather curtain, polished and tawny, as thick as a mattress, and with buttons in it, like a sofa; and it flops to and fro, laboriously, as women and girls, with shawls on their heads and their feet in little wooden shoes which have nothing but toes, pass in and out. […] I bend a genial eye on the women and girls I just spoke of, as they glide, with a small clatter and with their old copper water-jars, to the fountain […] dressed in thin, cheap cotton gowns, whose limp folds make the same delightful line that everything else in Italy makes.

How can we close read this passage? We have the value judgments of “genial” and “delightful” to suggest contentedness in our narrator, but the rest of the long sentences, gently meandering around commas, simply observe and record what is visible and audible on the surface of life. The women are objectified, I suppose, because they have no characters. The attention to detail, however, avoids really advertising anything.

It is usually the books that are faithful to the truth that are “real life”. The books without an ending and without a hero. Critique is great but we should be careful not to expect lessons from everything.

Last thought from Tim O’Brien, Vietnam war veteran, in his 1973 memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone:

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyse them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

*Henry James, novelist, once said, ‘this fiction proceeded quite directly, during the first year of a long residence in London, from the habit and interest of walking the streets’, claiming ‘a mind curious, before the human scene’.

**“suspicious” is a term many contemporary philosophers have used to describe the way we approach reading now.

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