Popular Culture Review Vol. 23, No. 2, Summer 2012 | Page 61

The World Upside Down 57 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.