Heavy Versus Light Reading: The Decipherment of Literary and Non-Liter

Heavy Versus Light Reading The Decipherment of Literary and Non-Literary TextsIn attempting to discriminate in the midst of the nature of a literary text and a non-literary text, a metaphor from Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being comes to mind. Especially in considering this same novel in contrast with a novel such as Danielle Steeles Vanished, the idea of lightness versus heft presents itself, and with it, a new way of approaching the decipherment of any elevated/low dichotomy of literariness. When the literary text is imagined as heavy and the non-literary as light, an interesting illumination is cast upon the scene, and parallels emerge alongside ideas originally presented in the writings of A. Easthope and Wolfgang Iser. In the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera (in writing a weighty novel himself), presents a distinction between the light and the heavy. The lightness of gracious existence resides in the idea of a life being lived only once - deci sions being made only once. The singularity of such an existence seems to fancy it unbearably light, or insignificant. An existence which is eternally repeated has, on the contrary, more weight to it in its substantive inexhaustibility. There is a seemingly illimitable array of different possible choices to be made - multiple paths which could be followed. This plural brand of existence seems to carry more significance in its heaviness. Easthope, in Literary into Cultural Studies, suggests that a high cultural (literary) text such as Heart of Darkness (or The Unbearable Lightness of Being) possesses current characteristics whose antitheses are found in a popular (non-literary) text such as Tarzan (or a novel like Vanished).... ...eaning. Repetition of this kind of heavy study of a light, insubstantial text, is no more than the repetition of a particular existence - the same life and the same death each time. A referee has one choice to make in experiencing the non-literary wor k to either read it once (to experience the set lifetime once), or to read it multiple clock (to become reincarnated into the same body and destiny time after time). This could very well be the reason that a text which is considered to be literary is and then thought of as better or more fulfilling than a non-literary text. It is the literary text with all of its afore-mentioned characteristics which makes possible the reincarnation of the reviewer - which carries the potential for a reader to enjoy countless different experiences of lightness, no longer unbearable in such lightness, because of their plurality.