Reading Against the Grain

The most productive encounter with a text is not agreement but resistance. This is one of the things that distinguishes reading as an intellectual practice from reading as information retrieval. When we read to be confirmed in what we already think, we are not really reading — we are foraging. When we read a text that challenges our assumptions and allow it to do so, something more interesting can happen.

The critic Roland Barthes distinguished between what he called "readerly" and "writerly" texts — those that position the reader as passive consumer of a fixed meaning, and those that demand active participation in the construction of meaning. The distinction has been criticised as too neat, but it captures something real about the range of demands that texts make on their readers.

Reading against the grain is not quite what Barthes had in mind. It refers, more specifically, to reading a text for what it reveals against its own intentions — what its silences, contradictions, and anxieties expose about the historical and ideological context it inhabits. This is the method associated with symptomatic reading in literary theory, developed by Louis Althusser and applied most influentially in Fredric Jameson's analyses of literary texts as responses to unresolvable social contradictions.

Whether this method is always illuminating is debatable. It can produce readings that are more interesting than the texts they describe, which raises questions about what has actually been found and what has been imposed. But the underlying assumption — that texts mean more and differently from what they explicitly say — is supported by the most basic observations about how language works.

What we say is never only what we say. This is as true of the texts we write as of the conversations we have, and learning to read for the gap is among the more valuable skills available.