Notes from the Study: Reading Thematically

It is a quiet night here in the library of the maison, silent, even. This type of silence has two options: it can be filled with melancholy or dreams and tonight I want to dream of stacks of books piling high toward the ceiling and notes scattered across every surface. Perhaps it is the beginning of a new semester or perhaps you are joining me in the library not because school compels you but because you have found in your life that time, that empty space ready to be filled and even enriched through reading for pleasure.

I could inaugurate the new year with a book recommendation, but today I want to write about something else. Today I want to write about finding our way into all those new books the new year promises. I imagine entering a book like sinking into a body of water. I close my eyes, take one last, deep breath, and submerge into another world. I open my eyes to find myself on the other side of that clear and glassy substance, perhaps murky or perhaps transparent, perhaps I am alone or perhaps a fish floats by and I draw back in disgust or it shimmers and I watch with fascination. If I look up and I see my world of oxygen and land, but from the other side it looks unsubstantial or perhaps rippling like a too hot mirage. I can’t live in the other world of a book forever, but for a wonderful hour or two it is possible to float here, to bury myself in another perspective.

But sometimes that perspective is too murky, too elusive. Perhaps the voice is too distant from my own. Sometimes it has happened when I was taking a class and had no choice but to finish the book. At other times the novel or book of essays is a necessary part of my research and I don’t have the luxury of walking away from the book, this often happens to me with Henry James. Reading isn’t always compulsory and in some cases, like reading for pleasure, it is possible to walk away from the book, but let’s imagine for a moment that we don’t walk away from it, that instead we are compelled to read it. Whether by curiosity or desire, how do we find our way into a book not simply at the level of reading for plot, but in order to interpret?

When I’m struggling to find something to grasp in a book, or perhaps when I want to engage on a deeper level, I read thematically. In other words, I pick a theme to find or trace through the novel I’m reading. Most obviously, for me, I’m always reading for urban and spatial themes in books, but the theme you look for could be anything. It helps to spend some time considering what you enjoy finding in books or perhaps a subject that interests you in life that can be traced through books. For example, when reading Edith Wharton try thinking about the class hierarchies that are expressed in the text and ask how is class defined in the United States, where there is no firm, impermeable distinctions between one class and the next. My students often like to read The Great Gatsby through the lens of “the American dream,” frequently arguing that the novel represents the failure of that dream (they usually come up with that interpretation independently from my instruction). Likewise, perhaps one of the easiest themes to trace in Nella Larsen’s Passing is race, but I also like reading the novel for its representation of bourgeois New York society in Harlem. In the case of Amalia, I love reading through Doris Sommer’s lens of national allegory, but I also enjoy tracing francophilia in that novel, which is a subject that arises in many novels.

Sometimes a novel becomes meaningful through the themes we trace. When I first read Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light for a world literature class in undergrad I couldn’t understand it. The world of South Africa felt like trying to understand a new language. I knew nothing about the culture, the history, the place itself. The main character was a mature woman, an ill-tempered business woman with no romantic prospects. It was not a book that seduced its reader, and at the time an avid reader of popular fiction I expected to be seduced and pandered to. It wasn’t until I tried rereading the book again, this time reading for a theme that struck home for me, the subject of being mixed race (in my case mixed ethnicity) of grappling with the complexities of identity when all the world seems to offer is stereotypes. Through the question of identity I found my way into the novel in a way I couldn’t through trying to relate to a character whose adult life, to a twenty-year-old, seemed unbearably rigid and predetermined.

When reading thematically keep a pencil on the table beside you, or your reading notebook, and write down those places where you find the theme you’re tracing. Write down anything that strikes you or seems significant in any way. It’s in these moments of reading thematically that we, as readers, often discover our own interpretation of a work of literature over and above what is immediately obvious in the plot. Perhaps at first the practice of reading thematically may feel like jogging for the first time. Perhaps your lungs will begin to feel like they are about to burst and your legs will go shaky, but stick with it and your reading practice will become stronger and you’ll learn to feel more at home with interpreting and finding meaning. I’m convinced that when we read we often already do this at a subconscious level, gravitating to the books that are easiest for us to identify with, but with conscious effort we can begin to engage this muscle in all reading. Perhaps we’ll find that books we didn’t understand before take on new and richer meaning than even the ones that immediately appeal to us. If you’re anything like me you may find yourself more drawn to the books you disliked at first because they present a challenge, a more rigorous exercising of the brain. Embrace it.

Until next time feel free to sprawl across that empty chaise, turn on the lamp and set your notebook on the side table. Can I get you a cup of tea while you read? Or perhaps something stronger? Study a while.