Lit Crit and Scripture

This week I've been reading Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind. It's a book of essays. To be fair, I should say that I am a bit of a Zadie Smith fan. I like her novels and her writing. So I am probably quick to embrace the things she says.

So with that in mind, I am interested in talking about something a little theoretical today. Are you ready to think about this with me? Okay great. Did you all take a lot of literary theory classes in college? Well, neither did I. But I suppose I did encounter some of this theory in Gender Studies classes. Anyway Smith's fourth chapter is called "Rereading Barthes and Nabokov." It begins with a quote from Barthes: "The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author" (pg. 42). Smith uses this quotation to talk about the way that this is a rather liberating thing for a reader. As the reader you don't have to think about what the author intended, or how it is related to their life, or what the writing meant in the context of it's time. Rather your experience as the reader is privileged.

I am wondering about what sacred texts bring to this conversation. It seems interesting to me to think about this Barthes quote when it comes to reading words that we believe are from God, and words that we understand to be a continuing revelation of God's relationship to humanity. First of all, of course, the author cannot be dead.

Smith writes that as she has gotten older she is less and less enamored with Barthes. She liked the idea of the freedom and power of the reader when she was younger. But she says things changed. "Still, I am glad I'm not the reader I was in college anymore, and I'll tell you why: it made me feel lonely. Back then I waned to tear down the icon of the author and abolish, too, the idea of a privileged reader--the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning. Which was a powerful feeling, but also rather isolating, because it jettisons the very idea of communication, of any possible genuine link between the person who writes and the person who reads" (pg. 57).

And this is why I think sacred texts, and those of us who read and study the Bible have something to say in this conversation about Literary Theory. We are people who read a book not only alone, but in community. We are in our nature not lonely readers. And we are readers who read with an understanding, and a desire to know better the link between the person who writes and the person who reads. In fact, we hope that by our reading, we are both solidifying and exploring that link. Very cool.