Two ways of reading

One way of reading something is to ask what’s wrong with it: what’s missing, what’s out of place. Another way of reading something is to ask what one might learn or benefit from it.

It’s a mistake to see the first as “critical” reading. This is the perennial academic error. Finding fault with a piece of text—whether an op-ed, an essay, a journal article, a monograph, a novel, or a poem—for being imperfect (i.e., human) or finite (i.e., limited) is absurd. We know in advance that every text we ever read will be both finite and imperfect. This is not news. Nor is “critical” reading the smirking discovery of whatever a given text’s limits or imperfections are. Who cares?

Roger Ebert liked to admonish Gene Siskel for being parsimonious in his joy. The principle applies to reading and indeed to all intellectual activity. Why should what is flawed take priority over what is good? Why not approach any text—any cultural artifact whatsoever—and ask, What do I stand to receive from this? What beauty or goodness or truth does it convey? How does it challenge, provoke, silence, instruct, or otherwise reach out to me? How might I stand under it, as an apprentice, rather than over it, as a master? What does it evoke in me, and how might I respond in kind?

Such a posture is not uncritical. It is a necessary component of any humane criticism. It is the first step in the direction of genuine (rather than superficial) criticism, for it is an admission of need: of the limits and imperfections of the reader, prior to mention of those of the text.

In a word, humility is the condition for joy, in reading as in all art. And without joy, the whole business is a sad and rotten affair.