Stop Asking “What Does It Mean?”
“What does it all mean?”
This question causes a lot of headaches for literature students. An assigned text in a class could sometimes be difficult or downright unintelligible if the reader isn’t prepared. Preparation is a keyword here, and in this letter, I’ll cover an important distinction in literary studies: form vs. content without using any jargon. Hopefully, this will guide you when reading texts beyond your comfort zone.
It’s hard to convince people that different books need different reading strategies because all texts more or less look the same. They’re just words on a blank page. But if we stop there and assume reading is just tracing our eyes across words, we’ll set ourselves up for frustration and confusion.
For the purpose of this post, I’ll focus on two types of reading strategies: reading for understanding and reading for aesthetic pleasure, and explain why it’s important to tell them apart from each other.
Reading for understanding
As a generalization, reading for understanding is about working with what’s behind the text (arguments, evidence, logical conclusions). The reader is hunting for the content behind the form of writing. The entire process is about explication, and the end goal is to convince the reader that the author’s worldview is cohesive and justified.
One of the prime examples of this category of reading is philosophy. And frankly, philosophy is the home of bad writing because the focus isn’t on the form but the content. While philosophically rigorous, Kant’s famous three critiques are absolutely tedious to read (even for practised readers). The same can be said about Hegel, Adorno, Benjamin and Jameson. These philosophers will leave you scratching your head at 2 a.m. in the morning, wondering why you even bothered with them in the first place.
Philosophy gets away with bad writing because it focuses on content, not form. Form is merely a tool that guides readers through philosophical insights. The pleasure of reading philosophy doesn’t come from enjoying the words per se but from sudden visions of enlightenment after doing the work of parsing through tedious writing.
However, not all philosophers are tedious writers. Some take the time to master their form to strengthen the content of their arguments. In rare cases, writers like Nietzsche, La Rochefoucauld, Wittgenstein and Byung-Chul Han crafted philosophically profound and pleasurable works to read. This leads us to the second orientation of reading.
Reading for aesthetic pleasure
You can quickly tell someone’s reading level after you get them to read a passage from a literary work. Are they irritated at the writing style because they think the author’s being purposefully opaque? Do they ask you to explain to them what a certain imagery means? Or do they reject literature outright because they don’t see the point?
All these are symptoms of confusing reading for understanding with reading for aesthetic pleasure. Unlike philosophy, not everything needs to be explicated when reading a novel or a book of poems. If literature is there only to provide understanding, then all novels will be written in lists, not paragraphs. The knee-jerk reaction to get to the bottom of a text barricades readers from the most important aspect of reading a work of literature: appreciating the beauty of words.
One of the exemplars of literary aesthetic pleasure is poetry. According to Byung-Chul Han,
“a poem - a form made of signifiers, linguistic signs - is a thing because it cannot be dissolved into meanings.”
The form exists in its own right. The readers linger near the poem's surface and appreciate its formal beauty (tempo, imagery, oxymorons, puns, rhymes). In this case, words are not bearers of meaning. There’s nothing to “get behind” to set an analysis in stone. The point, in Francis Ponge’s words, is to
“gain as much pleasure as possible from [words] beyond their meaning.”
Unlike philosophy, literature and poetry reveal their profundity in ambiguity. The joy doesn’t come from sudden visions of enlightenment but from slowly building a sophisticated and malleable worldview. The more shades of ambiguity we can tolerate, the more open we are to the unknown and the Other. This is how reading fiction builds empathy.
Applying the distinction: ways of reading
In summary, reading for understanding and aesthetic pleasure requires different reading orientations. One is about developing the analytical mind to arrive at conclusions efficiently, while the other is about cultivating the sensibility to recognize the beauty between the lines.
Cases in both literature and philosophy mix both modes of reading. Thomas De Quincey, for example, mixes excessive displays of erudition with manic opium-fuelled dream visions to disorient his readers. On the other hand, Borges breaches the limits of the intellect and reaches into the realm of fantasy with his short stories. At times understanding disguises itself as aesthetic pleasure and vice versa, and the hallmark of an intelligent reader is the ability to distinguish which is which.
Like any other skill, practice makes perfect. Next time you pick up a book, ask yourself: am I trying to understand this work, or am I trying to derive pleasure from the reading experience? And over time, the fog of confusion will clear, allowing readers to see a literary world beyond ordinary concerns.
