The Tyranny of Framework in Literary Interpretation

It is with a heavy heart that I say that there is no greater enemy of literature than the modern university. This is not, as one might assume, because of some overt, jackbooted censorship of novels, poems, or plays. Young minds are not forbidden from reading great works of the past; they are merely discouraged, by sleight of ideology, from understanding them on their own terms.

To read a novel today under the watchful eye of a literature professor is not to immerse oneself in the mystery of human behaviour or the moral ambiguities of life. It is to apply a set of interpretative bolt-cutters: postcolonial, postmodern, queer, eco-critical, neurocritical, Marxist-feminist-decolonial-psychoanalytic, to cite but a few of the unlovely children of this intellectual inbreeding. With these tools, the student is encouraged to “unlock” the text, though the unlocking usually involves dismembering it and discarding anything that resists ideological simplification. It is as if Hamlet had been reduced to a case study in Danish patriarchy and Miss Havisham a metaphor for global capitalism’s failure to satisfy feminine desire.

What is lost in this academic ritual is the reader himself. Not the “reader” as imagined by Roland Barthes and his ilk—the abstract figure who co-authors the text through his social positioning—but the real, unrepeatable, thinking human being who might look into the abyss of Macbeth’s ambition and find, uncomfortably, a part of himself. This is not encouraged. It is too dangerous. 

It is not that these interpretative tools are wholly without value. Far from it. A colonial reading of Heart of Darkness, for example, may reveal layers of meaning invisible to the 19th-century reader. But the problem lies in what I like to call the tyranny of framework. Literature, which ought to be a messy, human, ambiguous, and deeply personal experience, is transformed into a mechanical exercise in identifying which ism the text either supports or subverts. The student need not think—only classify.

The young, of course, are naturally susceptible to dogma. But the tragedy of our current university system (and this is the case even in non-Western countries) is that it rewards conformity to theory over intellectual independence. But literature, if it is anything at all, is the record of individual perception. It is what one person saw, felt, remembered, regretted, hoped, and turned into words. And the reader's duty—or rather, his privilege—is to respond to that individual voice with their own. Interpretation, in its best and oldest sense, is an act of communion, not colonisation. It is not the business of extracting politically useful readings from a text, as if it were a mine from which ideological ore is to be dug. It is the business of listening, noticing, responding—of cultivating, in short, attention and sympathy for the human condition.

Of course, one must not be naïve. Literature can and should be read in historical context. But to limit one's interpretation to categories such as colonial guilt or gender performance is to deprive literature of its most enduring quality—its ambiguity, its refusal to reduce life to merely one or two perspectives. In real life, as in good fiction, no one is wholly hero or wholly villain. But to say this now is to risk being labelled an apologist for structures of power—whatever that means.

It is my opinion that a proper education in literature should begin not with a theory, but with humility. It should train the student not to assert, but to observe; not to suspect, but to listen. It should teach that a novel is not a treatise, a poem not a manifesto. Above all, it should remind the student that the purpose of reading is not to bolster one’s moral superiority, but to deepen one's understanding of the human experience—even, and especially, when it makes one uncomfortable. True literary education does not hand students a lens—it breaks one. It should challenge them to see not what they are told to see, but what they can discover for themselves. It should, ideally, awaken them to the astonishing variety of human experience.

What the young reader must learn is not how to apply a template, but how to notice what is not being said. To hear the hesitation in a sentence, the odd metaphor that does not quite fit, the laughter that conceals a fear. These things are not captured by academic categories. They require judgment. And judgment cannot be taught by a rubric. It is grown—slowly, painfully, often incorrectly—in the encounter between one human mind and another.

It is not that we need less theory, but that we need less submission to it. If a student, after reading Kafka, sees only bourgeois alienation under industrial capitalism, rather than wonder what part of himself recoils from the grotesque yet familiar fear of a family’s dwindling affection in the face of uselessness, we have failed him.

The cultivation of individual insight—the ability to read a book and respond with thought rather than doctrine—is no small matter. It is the foundation upon which culture, dialogue, and civilization itself rest. For when we teach the young to see the story of humanity—which is, in essence, what literature offers—as nothing more than a power struggle in disguise, we are preparing not scholars, but cynics. And of those, the world has already had its fill.

Image source: The Ancient of Days by William Blake.