Tyler Cowen: disagreement

Transcript context

…I would get a small selection of the poetry because you’ll see just how vicious and sharp and wicked he can be and how much he enjoys berating prostitutes. You see a little bit of the double-edgedness of what he’s doing. Then I would maybe read The Journal to Stella because it’s very lively and very, very good observation. I love that book. Then the normal pamphlets that people read. Everyone’s going to tell you to read the one about eating the babies, but there’re a lot of other good pamphlets. Drapier’s Letters—some of the best work he ever did, right? 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]…

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