When was the last time you used the word relatable to describe the characters in a story you enjoyed? 

As both an English major at Cal and an editor for Berkeley Fiction Review, I hear the term relatable thrown around at least once a day with little to no thought given to the consequences of reducing writing to images of the fictitious people who occupy it. Sentiments like, “I had a hard time getting into this book because the protagonist is hard to relate to,” or “I like this story because of how real and relatable the characters feel,” are common given the current literary market that prioritizes relatable characters. Doing so understandably keeps stories comforting, palatable, and, moreover, vendible. Protagonists who act as reader stand-ins capture the audience’s emotional investment, in turn ensuring a story’s longevity in a competitive marketplace. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with putting your brain on cruise control to wind down after a tiring day alongside characters who mirror parts of yourself, this type of approach places emotional identification at the crux of a story. Forgotten are the rich textures of the threads and patterns that compose a tapestry of tales in lieu of a clear, pleasant image that satisfies. 

I teach a student-led class at UC Berkeley on Bakhtinian literary theory called Spectral Dispersions: Bakhtin and the Novelization of Media. I know, I know. Long, fancy name. It’s relatively simple, though—I’m bored of the traditional approach to reading. The idea for this course came to fruition after taking a class on narrative voices taught by the brilliant Celeste Langan, in which she made it a point to urge us to avoid evaluating prose based on decorative elements, including poetic stylistics (simile, metaphor, personification, imagery, alliteration, etc.) and character-relatability. We’ve grown so used to paying heed to the aesthetics of a narrative and what it does for us as consumers that we’ve lost the ability to be challenged by literature. I don’t mean that literature doesn’t challenge us on an emotional level. There are plenty of stories that tug at our heartstrings or force us to face a part of ourselves we are too afraid to. In fact, what I’m talking about has nothing at all to do with how we feel about a text and everything to do with what we think of it.

Let’s return to our tapestry for a moment. What do you see? For convenience’s sake, say the tapestry is of a white snowy owl nestled in the boughs of a dewy winter balsam. It reminds you of something from your childhood. Drawn to this beautiful image, you take a step closer, only to find that the owl is donning a pair of upside-down sunglasses and is perusing a copy of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. This baffles you, so, naturally, you want to figure out its meaning. You take another step closer to the tapestry. Now you can see the threads are made of paper, and the stitching resembles a pattern of feathers. By this point, you’ve completely forgotten about the presentation and relatability of the owl that charmed you in the first place. It’s the foreignness and instability of the meaning of the whole thing that’s earned your intrigue. 

However, we no longer read literature in the same way we just observed our curious tapestry. In our current culture, literature’s main function is to validate our personal experiences, and, consequently, we’ve become readers who take things at face value. As characters are reduced to psychological profiles, fiction becomes a form of affirmational therapy. But what if we learned to enjoy discomfort and disagreement? What if we learned how to play with foreignness?

Take, for instance, Valdimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita that’s been banned from curriculums across the nation. At face value, there isn’t much to relate to. The narrator is a pedophile, and his victim a young child. It’s disturbing to say the least. Although when you keep reading, you quickly learn that the author and the narrator are separate entities and that the whole thing is a dark parody—a performance—of how narrative authority can distort a reader’s perception of reality. It’s a simulation that uses an offensive gimmick to distract us into thinking one thing when, really, it’s proving the opposite. This clash of multiple conflicting voices that cultivate tension and open-ended interpretation would be missed if we limited our reader experience to trying to see ourselves in a character. 

A contributing cause to our habit of taking someone else’s writing at face value is that we, as readers, are too focused on what the author intended. I notice this often as an editor for Berkeley Fiction Review. As we sort through writer submissions, there is a tendency to question the author’s narrative credibility regarding accurate depictions, world-building, and characterizations. When we place the author above the plane of the reader and the subject matter, we create a linear system of trickle-down information, in which the singular authority we defer to is the author themselves. This approach to readership makes it so that we strive to solve the puzzle of the narrative through the authorial subjunctive, rendering us but passive readers whose sole job is to receive and decipher information. 

But what if we remove the author from their position of power and place them on the same plane as us, the reader? What if we thought of ourselves as co-authors in meaning-making? In other words, this approach shifts our role as readers from receivers and decipherers to meaning-makers, with just as much authority as the author. We activate the text by imbuing it with our own experiences and perspectives, and, as a result, our voices clash with the author’s intentions. The reader can learn to ditch relating to information the author has presented in favor of relaying new meanings to it. There is what we see, and then there are the stories we create when we take a step closer—a double meaning, if you will. Only then can we enter dialogue with the stories we read as holders of interpretational power. 

And here’s the thing with approaching a story from a single-meaning, linear perspective. They’re predictable. Traditionally character-driven stories (I am specifically referring to stories that place a relatable character at the forefront) follow a formula in which they must progress according to an arc that usually leads them to some sort of resolution by the end of the story. You have to be able to root for these types of characters, and that tends to come in the form of relatability. Characters that remain unresolved, trapped, and in tension with the world are frustrating and discouraging according to this logic. We want them to do better because we see ourselves in them. We’re emotionally invested.  

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And here’s the thing with approaching a story from a single-meaning, linear perspective. They’re predictable.

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Unfortunately, this means we miss out on stories that challenge us with despicable characters who are shown no compassion by the author but are mercilessly put through the ringer until they become the worst possible versions of themselves. These types of stories can be hard reads as they reveal to us a type of relatability that hinges on the what-if. What if we settled for mediocrity? What if we entertained an intrusive thought? What if we lived by flesh? We see ourselves—not through a mirror but through a window into a subjunctive future. 

Another alternative—we may never see any version of ourselves in an unrelatable, unresolved character. When this happens, our attention is drawn to the social energies at play in the text through the characters’ speech patterns, accents, and interactions. We start paying attention to the threads woven through the tapestry, what they’re made of, and where they might’ve come from.

Back to our tapestry of the upside-down glasses-wearing snowy owl cloaked in balsam boughs as it reads The Prelude. You rip out a couple strands of your hair, pull a string out of your sweater, and rip the button out your jeans. Next, you add these artifacts to the tapestry. The hair is woven into the wind, the string added to as a bookmark, and the button is placed over a lens. Then, you call a friend over to evaluate your modifications, but they shake their head. They hate what you’ve done to it and add their own tweaks. And it’s in that moment when yours, your friend’s, and the creator’s intentions clash with one another that the tapestry reaches its fullest potential: multiple meanings, equally valid, vibrating simultaneously.

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