Two Modes of Reading
When you encounter a foreign idea from a text, whether its unfamiliarity is a result of time, geography, culture, age, gender, religion, or something else, should you focus on what connects the text to you in a spirit of brotherhood or honesty (“There’s nothing new under the sun”), or should you highlight the differences in a spirit of respecting the other? Whether we consciously choose one approach or the other, we’re generally doing one or the other ─ and if we're not reflective of which we do (and why), we’re unconsciously going with our default.
I thought about this a lot while reading Alan Jacobs’s Breaking Bread with the Dead, a terrific and delightful defense of reading very old books. In respect to texts from periods long past, Jacobs says this about the question of sameness & difference:
The project of increasing temporal bandwidth that I recommend here requires the opening of our minds and hearts to people from the past so that they stand before us three-dimensionally, in all the ways they resemble us and all the ways they do not. (27)
Jacobs helped me reflect on some common interpretive pitfalls I’ve noticed, both in my 10+ years in the high school English classroom and my experience with the academic world. To be honest, they’re pitfalls I’m prone to as well. I’d like to examine two opposing ways of answering the question I began with, and through the process, I’d like to argue that these two extremes are both problematic and necessary ─ and, importantly, that the value of each is only fully realized when done in tandem with the other.
The first approach to dealing with texts that present us with obvious (at least initially obvious) differences is to highlight these “oddities,” what I might call reading for difference. The younger the high school student, the quicker and more forceful this reading happens, e.g. “Wow, these people from olden times were just stupid.” These responses are particularly ironic when the students are responding to obviously allegorical texts, such as The Crucible. However, it is not only sophomores who focus almost entirely on difference; there are nuanced and seemingly positive versions of this interpretive move. One is the “exotization” of differences: the love for a text or idea or place or time because of how different and unique it is, how so entirely different from our world. The Ibo culture from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is wonderful insofar as it is in direct opposition to the Western culture the second half of the novel so scathingly criticizes.
The second and opposite reaction is to emphasize only the similarities of these texts, what I might call reading for sameness. Donald Trump is simply Macbeth born anew. Implied in these interpretations is that certain things seem not to change, whether it’s human nature, psychological motivations or politics (even if the same readers desert an overt affirmation of any such “universal” claims). There’s a generous version of this interpretative move, that takes what the sophomore calls “stupid” and connects it to the present, by either explaining away the stupidity (“See, what you call stupid is just that culture’s way of doing what we do”) or by humbly applying the stupidity to the current time-period (“OK, but then isn’t our culture stupid by doing X, which is essentially the same thing?”). A less generous (and less honest) version of this approach is to read (or assign) only those texts that we can use to confirm our ideological positions.
The problem with reading for difference is that it blinds us to the continuity (or at least possible continuity) between the world of the text and our world. Whether we do this in order to dismiss the text (remember again “Wow, people from olden times were stupid”) or to praise it (“Wow, Nigerian tribes are so cool because of how un-Western they are”), we aren’t engaging the fullness of the text because we’re closed to the ways in which “olden times” or “Nigerian tribes” may in fact, behind the trappings of textual form, be very much like our world. And the problem with reading for sameness is that it blinds us to the genuine uniqueness, the otherness, of the world of the text. In our egotistical conflation of text with us, we never truly encounter the other.
You can see both impulses in religious and secular circles. For Christianity, the question of how to deal with pagan or secular literature has long posed problems. For some, those emphasizing the differences, most if not all of non-explicitly Christian literature should be abandoned as, at best, a waste of time, at worst, downright dangerous. The literary corollary to Tertullian’s famous “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” is Jermone’s “What has Horace to do with the Psalter? Or Virgil to do with the Gospel? Or Cicero with the Apostle?” Augustian dismissed his reading and studying of Virgil’s Aenead, pointing out that it taught him to love and feel in a defective way. The argument that most, if not all, secular art ─ from books to film to music ─ is to be avoided at all costs is so strongly assumed by some modern Christians as to not be questioned.
For Christians reading primarily for sameness, ancient literature is mainly proto-Christian theology, as if, had Odysseus quoted the Scripture here and there, he would hardly have made clearer the Christ-figure he so obviously is ─ ignoring the absolute strangeness of both Odysseus as a person and the entire moral framework of Homer’s Greece. Certain Classical school models lean hard in this direction, partly, I think, because they’re trying to teach young minds whom they assume are not mature enough to simultaneously encounter the beauty of Homer and recognize the violent and sexist moral world of ancient Greece, a world that clearly doesn’t admit even the possibility of the dignity of the individual person. I admit that when I dove into Greek literature on my own in high school (Oedipus and The Odyssey being quite significant for me), I didn’t know exactly what to do with these odd figures, who in some ways expressed certain Christian virtues, while being totally unconcerned with others.
Secular thinkers too often lean in one of these two directions. When reading for difference, writers get canceled. The Taming of the Shrew is sexist, the Merchant of Venice anti-Semetic, and so Shakespeare, a representative of a cis white male oppressive system, should go by the reading and teaching wayside, making room for modern, diverse, tolerant voices. When reading for sameness, many of these same writers are no longer representative of the oppressive system but rather proto-contemporary, subversive voices speaking out against the system. Enter the version of Shakepseare who speaks out so eloquently against toxic masculinity in Othello. Here’s the Shakespeare who must have been proto-Marxist in order to write Merchant of Venice.
I’d like to highlight two reasons for giving time and space to each interpretative impulse, one more general reason and one more practical. Then I’d like to offer a way of doing both at the same time. But I’d also like to propose that neither interpretive act can even achieve its own goals and fruits when done in isolation from the other. In other words, the most fruitful reading for difference is done with an awareness that not all is different ─ and the most fruitful reading for sameness is done with an awareness that not all is the same.
Reading for Sameness
"Book" by Kamil Porembiński is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.
One of the general benefits of seeing beyond the apparent differences of the world of the text is how it affords us the space to explore universal concepts, such as human nature or the development of human societies. Although we might not agree with how exactly to define human nature, or even whether it remains static to some degree or another, it is hard to read Chaucer or ancient Greek comedies and not be surprised by how similarly people thought and felt or societies functioned. Not all high school students will appreciate the genius of Shakespeare (or, frankly, understand what in the world he’s even saying), but as a reader and a teacher of Shakespeare, I find his plays, especially on the psychological level, more relevant the more I read them.
On a practical level, forcing ourselves to find the sameness opens us up to one of the greatest values of literature: that of being able to reevaluate the here-and-now honestly through the “distortion” of art. If we first see only differences but still find ourselves compelled to care for or think deeply about the text, and then we notice the striking similarities, we are in a place, emotionally and psychologically, to reevaluate our own selves or our own world more honestly. I’ll never forget the student who, halfway through a class performance of Waiting for Godot (he himself playing one of the main roles), stopped reading and said, “Oh wait, this is us!”
Notice how a recognition of difference was necessary (at least first) for the reading for sameness to be effective.
Reading for Difference
The general value of allowing differences to remain differences is a basic practice in human empathy, human respect. The impulse to conform all we read to some metanarrative (whether that is feminist, Marxist, or Christian) is ultimately egotistical. It is monological and, in some ways, totalitarian. Loving the other as other (and not simply because we can connect to him and her through the concept of “humanity”) is the second of the two-pronged Christian imperative to Love.
One of the more practical values of not seeing everything through the lens of sameness is the openness it affords us to seeing how different people, thinkers, and time-periods speak to our own, how they challenge us, and how they offer alternatives. General “open-mindedness,” even when attempted full-heartedly, is limited by the ways in which we’ve been taught to think about things; it is limited by the material conditions of our world. However, when an ancient text proposes a different way of looking or thinking, we are given the chance to, simply put, think outside-the-box. This is especially valuable when older texts offer us perspectives on life that are pre-modern and pre-technical. Modernity and modern technology deeply affect the way we think about the world by limiting what we can think about ─ while texts from “earlier” can allow us to see what these limitations are, what other perspectives might be, and how our assumptions about the way the world works might be challenged.
Notice how reading for difference can only be fully appreciated when sameness is considered first, for we can’t learn much about how Virgil and The Aeneid speak differently about the “relationship between the individual and state” if we don’t first see the text as speaking to this same conversation we’re continuing now.
Final Practicals
I’ll end here with a few thoughts on practically engaging both ends of the interpretive spectrum at the same time. It is rather simple: to find sameness where much apparent difference lies, and to find difference where much apparent sameness lies. Besides counteracting our normal tendencies that lead to flat responses or interpretations, this approach often leads to the more interesting observations. For example: Are those norms about courting and marriage as different as you initially consider them to be? Are they not more similar than initially assumed? And in what ways do our first impressions of those norms, now applied to our own times, help us see today and ourselves better? A second example: Are those political systems and processes initially seen as so applicable and relevant to contemporary American politics actually so similar? Do the essential differences help us see what is particular about American politics? Do the differences, subtle but important, offer a challenge to modern politics?
I think most readers tend to one or the other mode of response. We’re comfortable or more inclined to read for sameness or to read for difference. The solution, or at least part of it, is two-fold: first, to understand the value of the opposing mode and to try and practice it; and second, to do the mode more natural to you while keeping the other in mind, so as to add a richness absent by a monological reading.
