Henry Oliver: belief

Transcript context

…Yes. Now, when two readers disagree about what a novel means or how good it is—you could take the two of us. Our worldviews are not diametrically opposed as people go in the broader universe. What’s your theory of what accounts for that difference? You can reference me specifically just to give this some bite. We disagree about something in Swift or Shakespeare or Jane Austen. What’s likely at the root of that disagreement? Well, one thing is that fiction is intentionally ambivalent, by which I mean Swift in Gulliver’s Travels does not want to express his own opinions. He wants to set out a polyphonic set of different views. You can take a few natural readings from it, but he also is giving you room to get it wrong, and he’s doing that on purpose. Most of the novelists are doing that most of the time. The second thing is that we lose context for these books so quickly. We very often are reading them so far out of their context that we can’t help but bring ourselves to it. The third thing, Tyler, is that some readers want to find more controversial readings than others. I suspect you might be like that. [laughs] I am like that. I think a lot of the differences in readings come from temperament. That one is born with, essentially.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.