In Praise of Bad Readers

In a time of war, there is a danger in surveying the world as if it were a novel.

- ANDREA LONG CHU

LAST YEAR, the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. That talk has now been collected in a short book, published in September, called Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. As a novelist, Hammad tells us there, she finds herself drawn to the “turning point” of a story, the moment when a fateful truth suddenly dawns on a character, often with tragic results—what Aristotle called “anagnorisis.” She points to perhaps the most famous instance of this in all of western literature: the scene in Oedipus Rex when Oedipus realizes that, by trying to defy the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother, he has ended up doing just that. “When a character realizes the truth of a situation they are in, or the truth of their identity or someone else’s, the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience,” Hammad writes. “Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.”