The rock musician — and overall musical genius — Elvis Costello once said that if 250,000 people heard one of his songs, he hoped they heard 250,000 different songs. What he meant was that the listener is an active, rather than a passive, participant in the artistic process. Each listener brings to the song his or her own past experiences, artistic prejudices, and wealth of knowledge; and these affect the meaning of the words and music. Costello’s songs are often just cryptic enough to allow a fair amount of wiggle room for creative interpretation by his more perceptive fans.

In a recent article in the Opinion Pages of The New York Times, novelist Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, asserts that every piece of creative literature is a translation of sorts: “Translation is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well … the reader represents the final step in a book’s life of translation.”

I try to bring this idea across to the students in my community college literature classes.

If they can think of themselves as part of the creative process when they read, a new measure of understanding and enjoying fiction — and all writing, for that matter — might open up for them, and thus a new realm of intellectual experience and perhaps even a more fulfilling life may be within reach.

Cunningham says that books “are deep, elaborate interactions between writers and readers.” This is essentially what makes reading a more transcendent experience than watching a video. When reading, all we are doing physically is looking at black squiggles on white paper or, more and more often today, a white screen. Through convention, we understand that every particular series of squiggles represents something other than itself, whatever the particular word means. But that meaning is created for the reader in his or her own brain. The reader is translating the words on the page into images in the mind. That is a profound and amazing process that we too often take for granted. I want my students to let the words take their minds to where their minds want to go with those words. It will be a different place for each individual.

We should not fear to engage with whatever text we are reading on as many levels as possible — the more levels, the deeper and more satisfying the experience. Reading shallowly is to reading deeply as eating at McDonald’s is to dining at Chez Panisse.

(Image via NYT)