Reading, the Reader and Readers.

There are several direction one can go in as a reader.

There is that of reading the text carefully and taking into consideration what it signifies or refers to or means and also taking into consideration the author's intentions and motives, as well as what critics have said on a text and its historical context. This is the traditional method and it is one where the reader acts like a truth seeker, trying to please himself as a reader of his analysis that he has got it 'right,' regarding the conclusions he has drawn.

There is that of looking at a text in terms of placing it in different contexts. This is how literary theory comes in. Here we can read a text  by framing it with or by feminisms, Marxisms, psychoanalysis, culture studies, new historicism, modernism, post-modernism, ecocriticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, super-structuralism, formalism, lemon squeezer criticism or close reading, reader response theories, narratology, stylistics, linguistics, discourse analysis, post-colonialisms etc.

There is that of the intra- and inter and transdisciplinary methods of reading whereby we can connect a text not only to itself within or to other texts but also to other disciplines like branches of philosophy of which aesthetics is one, psychology, sociology, eco-aesthetics, theology, eco-spirituality, comparative literature, anthropology, the sciences, new disciplines like design etc.

There is that of studying it in terms of literacies where one compares medium to medium which is really a new approach where, to take but one instance, one would learn to 'read' a book and then 'view' the film based on it in two entirely different ways, and compare the two not in terms of better or worse but on new methodologies of interpretation that are only evolving but are worth following. The beginnings of such an approach can be found in Marshall McLuhan, to some extent.

Jacques Derrida, Franco - Jewish philosopher, deconstructionist, thinker and writer.

In a film on Jacques Derrida made in 2002, the world famous deconstructionist and philosopher was asked about his extensive personal library by Amy Ziering Kofman. She asked him if he had read all those books. He replied 'no, but I have read about four of them carefully, very, very carefully,' or words to that effect. This is similar to T.S. Eliot who once denied having read Marcel Proust as he had not read it with pencil in hand and paper to make notes on etcetera, meaning 'very carefully,' to repeat Derrida again. This also reminds us of Ezra Pound's refusal to read Wallace Stevens and vice versa as it would take too much time. This is true, that great writers and books demand a lifetime of reading from us and it can be very taxing and strenuous, but the gain is immeasurable as ultimately it is the reader who gains most, more even than the writer who often does not know the full significance of his work, of both what it means and what all it may come to mean or stand for.

The reader and the readers are the real kings. Readers make writers great and keep them alive or consign them to oblivion or the trash cans and garbage bins of history. It thus matters that the writer learns to write in such a way that readers come to love his writing enough to want to keep it alive.

To give an example of how to read one can turn to this poem by Barva Paramaz, a Laz poet from Turkey known for being a poet, writer, novelist and writing a manifesto on what world socialist poetry should be like, being anti- Islamic, working with Diamanda Galas, working for the Armenian Christian genocide survivors, criticizing even Marx though he says he is a Marxist  etc. As he told me once in response to my telling him I am a peace loving anarchist, his heart is anarchist but his mind is Marxist. However, this poem of his fits best into psychoanalytic criticism, as a framework for it to be interpreted.

Love Fucked My Mom, Baby

My heart is a swear-word ever after
Which I spit at Love
I vomited my youth to Pain's atlas

Love fucked my mom, baby

My long hopes crumbled up
Mountains tumbled down on my dreams
I kiss Death from its lips

Love fucked my mom, baby

Now shoot me from my verses
Crucify all my syllables
Barbarian cavalcades of my tongue are at full gallop

Love fucked my mom, baby

(c)Barva Paramaz, 2007
(from "Men's Heartbreak Anthology" published in USA, collected by Karineh Mahdessian.)

The love that 'fucked' the poet's or narrator's mom is obviously the Freudian father figure who castrates and that haunts him all his life. This also has biographical overtones. The poem contains in it barely suppressed images of violence towards the end that both historically refer to, perhaps, the poet's own empathy for the Armenian Christians who were killed by Islamic fanatics as well as to an anti-Freudian peace loving desire to be killed rather than to commit the crime of killing the father-figure, though the father figure is hateful. This is the poetry of the quintessential rebel who stands against all forms of authority and tyranny who has a long list of forebear-poets in this like Rimbaud and more recently, the late great Jim Morrison.

In the lyrics of the song found in Francis Ford Coppola's famous American film Apocalypse Now (that is based on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men and the Vietnam War)  in a song called The End, Morrison - the lead singer for the cult rock band The Doors who died mysteriously probably of drug overdose at the age of 27 -, puts it more blatantly, from the point of view not of the castrated 'son' who tries not to kill the father but of the one who does not repress or suppress the libido or the ego.

Jim Morrison, American singer, songwriter and poet and the lead singer of The Doors

"The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
"Father" 

"Yes, son?"
"I want to kill you."
"Mother...I want to...**** you.

(Morrison screams)"

Sigmund Freud

Those who have read Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and his reading of the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles will easily understand both Barva Paramaz's poem and what Morrison is writing. Freud can surely and definitively be called the father of psychoanalytic literary criticism.

This is why it pays to learn how to read. It makes texts easily accessible to us and also explains why certain kinds of art fascinate us. Here what holds us is the expression in the language of poetry of the irrational or subconscious/unconscious sides of ourselves that deal with sex and violence or Eros and Thanatos, which also find an echo in us as they deal with primary and primal relationships and urges, desires and drives that all of us do not speak of but none of us can deny, as they appear in fractured forms in slivers like broken glass that can cut our hands in our dreams and - yes - in our nightmares and from our past wounds, bleeding but transformed and bringing us (at times, salvation) through their re-making into art and poetry.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/doors/theend.html (Lyrics of The End)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_JHeHcjrIg (The video from the movie of The End.)