Not the Voice

I just finished reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, and this particular quote stuck out at me:

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear." (p. 135)

There is something about this that just screamed YES! to me. In all of my pre-service readings, we read about and discuss what it is for students to come to a text and decipher it, what it used to mean for students to read "literature" or the "canon" and regurgitate pre-approved interpretations that would get you into an Ivy League university but wouldn't get you thinking for yourself. This is something that, especially coming from an author, is a direct challenge to that long-held tradition of university interpretation - of what constitutes good literature/how we should or should not respond to that literature.

Because it isn't the voice that commands the story. As much as some people will argue this is true, once a novel or an op-ed or a children's book is out of the author's hands and in the hands of the public, the way that piece is received and interpreted and responded to is going to be dynamic. It's going to change. The ears that a text falls on are going to command how that text is interpreted - how it should be read. And since there are any given number of ears for a single text to fall on, well... the interpretations will be varied, to say the least.

I struggle with the knowledge that this approach to reading and literature is so abhorrent to the academic community at large. I know that many pre-service programs these days advocate for such approaches to the teaching of literature, but there still seem to be so many challenges to fully implementing a curriculum that embraces varied interpretation, even when "progressive" teachers are supposedly filling the ranks left by older teachers who cling to the conservative, bottom-up style of instruction.

I start my practicum next Monday. I received my placement today, and all I can think about is how amazing this book was, how it is a book for people who love the look and feel and sound of words... and how I am going to inflict such readings on my poor guinea pig students. By the gods, I'll make them respond... even if the response is to hate the book!