Reading as a collective cultural experience

Everybody reads in a different way. We have our own intersectional identities based on our upbringings and our identity categories, whether they be gender, culture or faith. So we can’t all be expected to read in the same way.

What’s our entry point when we read literature? Do we enter it from an angle which is already convoluted, with lots of prejudices? When we read Shakespeare, particularly something like Romeo and Juliet, we might already have prejudices from popular culture. When we read something from a culture that’s not our own, we might have a prejudice about that other culture. Are we coming into it biased or not? Are we coming into it wanting to learn or wanting to criticise? This presents the issue of cultural imperialism. We do have a hierarchy of culture, not just around the world but even within one culture.

While studying Milton and Paradise Lost, which is an epic poem about the story of Adam and Eve, I realised that the way I was reacting to it was different to so many other people. I saw it as a part of universal culture – mythical culture but also scriptural culture – and I started to think of the way in which, for example, people in the Middle East believe in the day-to-day existence of Satan. The thought of the existence of a demon-like figure affects their lives almost daily. It’s an idea that obviously existed in Europe for many centuries as well – a figure that is antithetical to the divine.

In Paradise Lost, I began to see the deepest interpretation of the Satanic figure that I’d ever read. He has psychology and tactics, and a certain way of thinking and speaking; he’s a great orator. I linked that with many aspects of the culture in the Middle East but also many aspects of authoritarianism, including the way in which populists use oratory. That’s when I realised that this text has to be read at multiple levels. It’s a text in which we can keep renewing our interpretations and linking them to our lives and the lives of those around us.

Literature is always affected by the markets and the economy around it. Shakespeare began in private theatre. Very few people, perhaps a few hundred, could attend a theatre like Blackfriars. The tickets were expensive. Some people even sat on the stage, particularly the ones that wanted to show off their new feathers on their hats and their clothes. It wasn’t necessarily an inclusive process. Then Shakespeare and his partners started the Globe Theatre, which is a public theatre, and suddenly it became more democratic. You could pay a penny and stand in the pit to watch. Thousands of people were there.

Another example is the printing press. Before the printing press, we had to struggle with something called versionality. Which version of a text is the most authentic? What does it even mean to have an authentic version? That’s a question that applies to translations as well. During Chaucer’s time, there was no printing press, meaning a scribe had to write, often making mistakes from one version to another. When the printing press comes to Europe, it makes texts more accessible. It makes ideas spread faster. That’s the kind of renewal that we have today with the digital world.

The digital world is giving us opportunities to read more, to find different information, to watch things from different cultures – but it’s a double-edged sword in the sense that we don’t necessarily know whether what we’re seeing is authentic or by experts. Memes often have more authority than experts. There’s also the market of self-publishing, but is self-publishing democratic or dangerous? These questions make the reception of knowledge perhaps easier than ever but also more difficult than ever.