Two Strategies for Reading Fiction

My latest reading project has been completing the fiction of Jane Austen. In order to organize my thoughts about Austen’s works themselves, I found myself needing to clarify, as a sort of preparatory exercise, my thinking on two different, but interrelated, strategies of reading. If you are interested in theory or abstraction, may you find this helpful or at least of mild interest. If you aren’t, expect some writing about Jane Austen in the coming weeks.

Although it’s probably an oversimplification, I often entertain in my own thinking a distinction between two strategies of reading fiction. This distinction helps me make sense of not only my own reading, but also the proliferation of discussion of it in our times.

The first such strategy I call reading as a technology of identity consolidation. This strategy of reading centers upon the reader’s wants, desires, wishes, social location, and agency. The questions to which it seeks answers in fiction center partly on satisfaction—Am I enjoying the experience of reading this book? Do I like the characters? Do I identify with them? Do I find them “relatable”? Does the work help me to confront, or perhaps to escape, aspects of my own reality I find oppressive? Do I think the author is someone I might like? Some of what this strategy seeks to get out of fiction, though, can involve personal aspiration or improvement: Does this book provide role models to help me shape and direct my ambitions? Is the author telling a story that, for political or ideological reasons, I think needs to be told to a wider audience? Is the author exploring some aspect of identity that is underrepresented in fiction, and doing so in a way that supports ideals of dignity and increased understanding?

The common thread running through this diverse set of questions and expectations is, I believe, a singular preoccupation: How can fiction help me be the sort of person I should be, by helping me figure out who I really am, how I should act, what I should do, what I should believe? In other words, its preoccupation is the reader’s sense of their own identity, and the critical touchstone it recommends is the extent to which a book helps or does not help achieve that goal. (Also, by implication, it can evaluate books based on the extent to which the book or its author are compatible with the sorts of political or moral aspirations we should have, which lends this attitude towards a certain censoriousness about books that is no doubt familiar to anyone reading this on the Internet in 2025.)

I call this sort of reading a technology because, on this view, the work of fiction is a sort of tool or device the reader uses to achieve other goals that go beyond the work of fiction itself. What’s more, reading fiction is not even the sole means to achieve those goals; other people who aren’t devoted to reading achieve them by watching movies or television, chatting up strangers on the Internet, backpacking across the American West, or some other thing. Perhaps reading fiction is the best way to figure out who you are and who you want to be, or at least has certain advantages over other ways[1], but it isn’t the only way.

Although the most recent public site where this strategy of reading is on full view is undoubtedly #BookTok and its related social media communities, the strategy of reading as a technology of identity consolidation is by no means new. The explosion of the novel as a popular literary form in the 18^th century in Europe, and its appeal to young, impressionable people living through the upheavals of the crumbling of absolute monarchy, Sturm und Drang pre-Romanticism in culture, and a general transformation in how the world appeared to intellectuals[2], led to a sense of moral panic not dissimilar to those that swept post-World-War-II America. When novelists of the 19^th century incorporated the pitfalls of this kind of subjective investment in reading fiction within fiction itself—Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary are two salient examples—they were already taking place against the backdrop of a social debate with a long history. By the mid-20^th century the cultural place of the novel was well cemented, but Vladimir Nabokov, himself no opponent of fiction, was lampooning what he polemically took to be the excesses of “bad reading” (reading aimed at identification with characters, concentrating on the “socio-economic angle,” etc.) among his students and contemporaries.[3]

While I agree that a singular focus on fiction as a technology of identity consolidation is limiting, I don’t reject it entirely or think that it is an illegitimate way of reading across the board. For what it’s worth, I think that this strategy of reading represents something ineliminable from anyone’s experience of, and interest in, reading fiction. I will return to that point below.

For now, I will be content to contrast this strategy of reading fiction with another I call reading as an inquiry into cultural artifacts. This strategy of reading tends to bracket the reader’s personal identitarian investment in, or response to, the work of fiction and instead seeks to appreciate the work of fiction as an artifact embedded in its own multilayered context. The implied metaphor of an archaeological dig is deliberate, as the work of fiction’s contexts are numerous, interrelated, and take sometimes dirty work to decipher if one is to do it well. Reading fiction as artifact can, for instance, dwell on the author’s broader aims: Is the author preparing a brief for a moral or political case? If so, what is it, and does the work forward that goal of persuasion? How does the work relate to other work by the author—as a departure, a continuation, a repetition? Does the work reflect the author’s inner state or personal biography, and if so, how? Some of its questions are the familiar territory of academic literary criticism: What are the work’s structural or formal qualities, and how do these qualities relate to other works? What are the inherent aesthetic qualities of the work, and on what standards might we judge its quality? How does the work relate to similar works produced in a historical time, place, or era? Some of the questions this strategy of reading asks veer off into history, philosophy, sociology, economics, and other social sciences: What factual information does the work of fiction tell us about its time (even if “its time” is right now)? What does it convey to us about what it was like to be a subject in its time and place: the characters’ sense of their own agency and choices for action, how they imagined themselves and their world (and sometimes the distance between their imaginations and reality), what sorts of radical options were open to them or foreclosed?  How was the book read (or misread), received or rejected, in ways that illuminate both the work itself and its subsequent history? Does the book illuminate or provide unique traction on a philosophical problem, like free will, the nature of justice, or religious belief?

Obviously, what I am calling the strategy of reading as an inquiry into cultural artifacts is a wide umbrella over a vast range of diverse interests, questions, and curiosities. It covers the aims of the hack political pundit’s obtuse commentary on contemporary novels, the integrative work of the cultural critic or public intellectual, and the minute, detailed research of the humanities academic. I know full well that many people whose interest in fiction lies in the general direction I am describing would chafe at being associated even loosely with some of the other preoccupations I am grouping together under this umbrella. This strategy is far too broad to be called a “method”; it’s more a general orientation, a tendency.

I don’t call the strategy of reading fiction as a cultural artifact a “technology” because, unlike the strategy with which I am contrasting it, the work is not being used as a tool or an implement to achieve an end. However, it does share with that technology of reading, though, a certain tendency to lose focus on what we might call, in an old-fashioned sort of way, the “work itself.” Reading as a technology of identity consolidation tends to view the work as a sort of mirror or lens that is trained squarely upon the reader’s selfhood. The properties of the mirror or lens only matter to the extent that they help the self see itself more clearly. Reading as an inquiry into the book as cultural artifact, though, tends, at its extremes, to dissolve the work itself into a mere set of illuminations of its contexts, as one more data point in the service of a broader thesis about whatever historical, philosophical, or sociological interest the reader brings to the work.[4]

Fiction writers themselves have perhaps been less worried about the drawbacks of this attitude towards fiction than about the drawbacks of its contrasting attitude. Certain fiction authors and works certainly portray the dissolution of the traditional novel into other discourses and registers, though. The most well-known examples are the works of modernist authors like Joyce or Beckett, but there’s also Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a fictional work (Tolstoy denied it was a “novel”) which shades over its great length into a work of history and philosophy. At the extreme, we have the French nouveau roman as well as Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy, with long passages that consist of literal cut-up and scrambled texts from newspapers and magazines (and which Burroughs also denied were “novels”).

I must confess that the habits of mind that govern my choice of fiction reading tend more towards the appreciation of fiction works as cultural artifacts than towards identity-consolidation. (Perhaps being a middle-aged man who thinks he is blessed with an adequate degree of self-awareness explains this: I am not looking to fiction as a form of therapy or to figure out who I am, or even to get away from who I am.) But I am not personally above reading fiction that is escapist, or relatable, or blatant wish-fulfillment, or just plain entertaining. In the end I suspect that these two strategies of reading I have identified can scarcely be divorced from one another entirely. For lack of a better terminology, the subjective pole and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, care of the self and concern for the world, can’t be pulled apart neatly. Both sets of motivations and interests confronts all of us when we read fiction to some extent. They are like the charged electrical field in the midst of which we engage with the work of fiction, which then blocks, amplifies, reflects, and redirects those energies into different directions.[5]

When it comes to talking about fiction and literature, what I abhor is the insistence on a single strategy of reading as the only one that is worthwhile, or else the sheer predominance of a single strategy of reading by the volume of commentary and conversation that exclusively presupposes it. (If you haven’t guessed, I endured maybe ten minutes of browsing on #BookTok before abandoning it in frustration.) I am, generally speaking, a maximalist when it comes to reading, a “let a thousand flowers bloom” sort of person. I sometimes intentionally seek out negative reviews of books I love, and sometimes they even change my mind. When they don’t, I still find them instructive as idiosyncratic readings or misreadings. When people present me with excessively rigid reading methodologies or otherwise seem to have a perpetual blind spot in their critical judgment, I just think, “Hm, OK,” and then keep on reading what I want for whatever reasons interest me.

With all that in mind, my next post will reflect on the one author whose public and academic reception in modern times best exemplifies both of these strategies of reading at once: Jane Austen.

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[1] Reading novels certainly entails less physical risk than embarking on a career of libertinage among the demi-monde of Paris. To pick an example.

[2] One of the central theses of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things is the transition of episteme he identifies in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, in the very way that the discourse surrounding knowledge was subtly reorganized and transformed.

[3] Vladimir Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Bowers; New York: Harvest, 1980), 3ff.

[4] Yet another target of Vladimir Nabokov’s critical polemic in “Good Readers and Good Writers” are people who insist on using Jane Austen’s novels as a source of information about “landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman’s parlor” (p. 2).

[5] Without getting too far into it, I suspect that the relation between these two strategies of reading is broadly dialectical (though not in a rigidly Hegelian or Marxist sense). What I will say is that, pace certain cultural critics who have dotted the landscape throughout my lifetime, I am not convinced that either strategy is inherently prone to, or exclusively guilty of, the closed-mindedness, epistemic closure, or sheer obtuseness significant swaths of the reading public constantly exhibit. Reading for escapism or sheer entertainment value can teach one things about oneself and the world that one didn’t know before (maybe even things that one doesn’t really want to know at all), or it can simply reinforce one’s existing feelings and prejudices. Reading for aesthetic merit or for cultural significance can lead one to broader insights about the world and one’s own place in it, or it can devolve into a rigid exercise in policing the boundaries of a canon or an interminable collection of grist for one’s preferred mill. What makes for this difference is a more basic personal disposition on the part of the reader, not the strategy of reading they employ.