Reading is co-creative …

… The University Bookman: The Book Doesn’t Change, But the Reader Does. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What’s so interesting is that this pattern of initial confusion or misreading and then reconsidering O’Connor’s work mirrors what happens to many people when they read her stuff today. I’ve had dozens and dozens of students read “The River,” for example, and come to class thinking that O’Connor is trying to satirize “religious brainwashing” or something like that. Then when we talk about what she called the challenge of “documenting the sacrament of baptism,” they get very uneasy. One of them once joked during class, “Can I have my paper back?” And when many people read The Violent Bear It Away, they assume for the first hundred pages or so that the old man, Mason Tarwater, is flat-out insane and that Rayber is the “rational” and “modern” one. But by the end of the book, many people find themselves switching sides, or at least not choosing one, or not knowing what to think. That’s O’Connor’s favorite authorial maneuver and one that the critics replicated through the years.