Irony Becomes Her

Charlotte's web

Jane Eyre has been one of my favorite books for about a decade; I first read it in 1999 as summer preparation for my AP English Literature class, and new layers of its genius open up in each successive perusal, expanding with my experiential capacity to understand it.

I cannot read this book without longing to share it with others. Readers, you are my latest victims; I expect to write several posts springing from Bronte passages in the weeks to come. If you plan to read the book in the future and do not already know the basic outline of the plot, these posts will be spoilers for you.

You've been warned. And it wasn't even in tiny print at the bottom!

There are many who have read the novel who do not share my good opinion of it; I respect yours and do not expect to convert you to mine through these reflections. So much of personal experience is necessary to resonate meaning into literature that I only ask for a fair hearing. If, as Lewis might say, you respond with "you too?", we'll have the joy of building on our friendship through this commonality. If you aren't there, I will still respect and admire your willingness to give it a try.

For today, bear with me for a short preface.

In conversations with my roommate and my writer friend, we discovered that there are (at least) two ways of reading literature, and it probably explains why neither of them pursued literary criticism as a large part of their education and I did.

It has to do with the capacity for and nature of "critical distance." Reading literature, for my friends, is a participatory experience wherein the full appreciation and understanding of the story involves a loss of distinction between the reader and the characters. Imagination actually turns them into certain characters, in sort of a Catholic transubstantiation of their essence when they are turning the pages. Thus, stories in which characters endure painful trauma are difficult and highly unpleasant for them to read. They actually experience the same trauma at some level. No wonder my roommate didn't like Jane Eyre!

The way I read literature is subtly but substantially different. It is always a moving, emotional experience when I find abstract or concrete parallels (which are everywhere in good literature) to my own experience. Critical distance doesn't necessarily mean emotional distance. I do participate with the characters in both griefs and joys which are familiar.

It could be asked why we even read literature when griefs and joys, in some proportion, are plenteous in "real life." In my view, the benefit of the literary versions (and the kernel of difference in my style of reading from the transubstantiation I described) is these are experienced in the known context of a whole story. Holding a book, I am privileged to be in a godlike position with regard to its timeline. I know how it will turn out. For books I read for the first time, I know there is an ending which is somehow different from the beginning and middle -- otherwise the intervening pages would be blank. And that difference might, and will, if the work shares my worldview, redeem the sufferings and the joys, connecting them visibly with an overarching meaning and thus giving them value. If the work doesn't share my worldview, I have the privilege of knowing -- and being instructed by -- the contrast.

This is invaluable to me in reading books about sufferers. I need their (my) suffering to be meaningful, and literature gives me a chance to see it as such within the parameters of the world the author created.

It gives me hope that there is meaning to my own (heretofore minor) sufferings within the parameters of the world the Author created.

Whether Charlotte Bronte felt the same or not I cannot tell. But her work consistently connects with what I know is true, building a trustworthy bridge over that critical distance.

Stay tuned, now-sleeping readers, for how.

Labels: Jane Eyre

posted by Lynn @ 8:10 AM