The World Upside Down
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passionately, to the classic works they read as individuals and then describe to
the group. In effect, the characters popularize classic literature through their
discussions. We hear the Guernsey Islanders declare their simple and/or
complex literary opinions to a community of friends, in a world of color and
transparent emotions, even if these feelings are silent, undeclared, or delayed in
their expression. Through reading, the Guernsey Literary Society members offer
each other hope, diversion, and sanctuary from the isolation and stoicism they
endure from the German occupation. Reading is their bridge to the universal
meaning of life.
But in The Reader the concept of literary sanctuary is much different—
intimate, self-absorbing, a precursor to the sanctuary of sexual desire, longing,
and fantasy that the young Michael desires. Early in their relationship, Hanna
wants to know what Michael reads and learns in school. In secondary school,
Michael reads literature from Homer and Cicero to Hemingway and modem
European works. The more modem books are associated with adolescent
learning and education, a backdrop for the sexual awakening Michael
experiences from his lover. Reading becomes one means of transitioning into
adulthood, finding meaning in school assignments that would have been
cavalierly submitted for a grade. Within this intellectual heritage, Michael’s
reading is enveloped by dissolving colors, the song of a blackbird, and lighter
and darker shades of gray. Reading is personal. It requires duality of thought.
The morality of reading is also associated with Michael’s father, a professor of
philosophy whose colorless existence is compatible with endless dialectics:
“thinking was his life—thinking and reading and writing and teaching” (30).
Michael’s reflections on reading—and literature—are derived from his
experiences as a young lover and adolescent life. He reads both classical and
popular German and European novels—romantic and “coming of age.” He
imagines his relationship with Hanna to be similar to Julien Sorel’s affair with
Madame de Renal in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (Scarlet and Black).
Similarly, he is enamored of Goethe’s reported relationship with Madame von
Stein. Thus, literary references are personal, romantic, and reflect Michael’s
longing and desire to escape from a colorless, passionless, intellectual
adolescence. Michael reads Emilia Galotti, a late eighteenth-century, five-act
German tragedy by Gotthold Lessing that portrays the challenges of love among
the emerging bourgeois class. The reference to Lessing’s play symbolizes the
inherent class struggle that Michael later experiences—the clash between the
untutored, older woman and the young lover from an academic background.
Later references to Friederich Schiller’s Intrigue and Love, another popular late
eighteenth-century play, reflect the themes of bondage, power, and loss of
freedom, both societal and personal. Clearly, Intrigue and Love symbolizes
Michael’s struggle with being possessed, possession, and the personal power
and autonomy of adulthood. Schiller and Lessing also wrote about the implied
sacrifices that the protagonists made in their lives, certainly an unspoken issue
for the young Michael.