The main problem with thinking and writing about books all the time on one hand, and access to (in some cases) the writers’ blogs and interviews on the other, is that it’s very hard to take any sort of literary achievement seriously because it all seems to boil down to a simple formula, namely:
(tea42 + vocabulary) x (few distractions) x (necessity) = art
I can respect that this is not always true – no doubt many authors prefer a steaming espresso or a cold glass of water to tea. But it seems to hold.
However, once you realize that not every single word on every single page was deliberately placed there in the exact order – and depending on the age of whatever it is you’re reading, typeface – in which it appears, it’s very hard to say anything at all about the deep and intense feeling generated by a stray Oxford comma. As a result, there are three things to remember when trying to talk about, or write academically about, literature:
1. Forget what you know about the Author as a human being. Humans have flaws. They forget things, and do things by accident. The Author (please note the capital) is not a human being. The Author is a robot, and does not make mistakes, or do anything by accident.
2. Therefore, assume that the Author did absolutely everything in the book on purpose. This is doubly important for poetry, and even more important when reading the type of poetry that involves 500-page tomes with one word per page. In a novel, if the word “red” appears at the top of both pages 27 and 72, it is not a happy coincidence. It is because the Author has the divine power to determine every single quality of their book, and you must discuss it accordingly.
3. The discussion need not have anything to do with the actual work itself, however. Whatever the book is apparently about, whether it’s a young servant girl or a serial murder or a bird with a one-word vocabulary, it isn’t really about that. And whatever it appears to be about next – oppression or the human condition or madness – is also wrong. The only way to discuss a book and be taken seriously is if you say nothing about the book itself at all, and instead take one small apparently insignificant aspect of the work and stretch it until it means something else entirely. This is a process which normally goes well with 42 cups of tea.