The late French novelist and critic Marcel Proust (1871-1922) said, “Every reader is a reader of himself when he reads.” In this sense, are there bad readers? This question is what the French writer Maxime Decaux tried to answer in his book “In Praise of the Bad Reader.”

Dicko wondered, “Do all books make a bad reader? What are the characteristics of that reader? Can reading make bad readers? Is there a prior classification of the bad reader and the good reader? How then does the book praise that bad reader?”

Deviant reading

In this book recently published by Page Seven Publications, translated by: Jalal Al-Ati Rabi, the writer Maxime Deco points out that the term bad reading is what occurs through identification and identification, without taking the necessary distance, nor having clarity of mind and sound senses.

This is explained by the incident of the young man who emptied a fatal bullet into his head because of an impossible love, and there was a group of people in solidarity with the young man who committed suicide with the same type of clothing. The writer Maxime Decaux likens that incident to the hero of the novel The Passion of Young Werther by the German writer. Johann Goethewhich was banned from circulation when the phenomenon of suicide became widespread in several European countries in the 18th century.

This contagion has become known by the term “mock suicide”, coined by the American sociologist David Phillips as the “Werther effect” after the hero of Goethe's novel.

Maxime Decaux reported that the reader of the novel “In Search of Lost Time,” published in 1914, by the Frenchman Marcel Proust, became focused on projecting the novel’s ideas onto him. Which leads us to say that this projection produced a reading based on the fact that its reader does not identify with the text, but rather reads himself through it.

This is another way of bad reading, according to the author, as it is no longer a matter of imitating or imitating the text, but rather distorting its features and making the reader project events onto himself.

But are all these people bad readers? The answer is no, because they miss the meaning of the text, or go the opposite of what it said. Rather, they are bad readers, because on the one hand they read contrary to what the text predicts, and on the other hand they reflect themselves on the text, according to the author.

Reading has two meanings. It refers as much to the interpretation of a text as it refers to the tangible act of reading. From this standpoint, Maxime Decaux defines a bad reader as “one who does not follow, whether in his thought, emotions, or sentiments, the same intimate internal logic of the text, or He is the reader who does not, in practice, read the text as the text wants, meaning that, for the most part, he does not read word by word, line by line.

According to Maxime Decaux, choosing the bad reader as a title “is in fact a general term that covers a wide range of aspects, because there is no bad reader, but bad readers, and on the other hand, I am not wrong in pointing out that bad reading has long been associated with women. Why Because they were considered prisoners of their emotions, and embodied a typical example of the bad, identified reader. Therefore, an attempt was made to frame their readings in the sense that if it is true that educated women are dangerous, then lost women are even more dangerous.

Condemnation of reading

The author of the book points out what is called the privatization of reading, which is that the bad, loud reader is not the same as the bad reader who reads silently. In this way, the self is present, and the individual is no longer directly subject to his human group, but rather to his free will, and thus he has authority over the meaning of the text.

Dicko believes that the apprehension of the bad reader cannot be separated from another apprehension, which is the apprehension of the bad book. The bad reader and the bad book have become real public dangers and subjects of contemplation and thought since the 17th century, at whose rhythm the entire intellectual life moves. Thus, the 17th century will establish that the good book has He creates the bad reader, and the good reader in turn creates the good book. Accordingly, the good reader will be creative and creative, but his freedom will remain dependent on the text.

Maxime Decaux seeks to clarify what it means that the model reader is not in any case an ideal reader, and the bad reader is not always the opposite of the positive reader. He adds, “The text can sometimes develop a mechanism that may turn you into a bad reader, especially in detective novels and misleading stories that will force the reader to misread.” The bad reader is required by the text, he is the model reader. Accordingly, the good reader is the one who pays attention to what the text presents.”

Maxime Decaux asks: Why is bad reading viewed as a curse and a curse, and good reading as a blessing? But what if the bad reader is happy? Raising this hypothesis prompted those interested in literary affairs to confront their point of view, and he explains, “They did not succeed in getting rid of the bad reader. This means that instead of inventing a new method, which is to go to childhood readings and instead of becoming bad readers, they wished to become Bad readers again.

According to Maxime Decaux, “The bad reader has proven his importance in the 20th and 21st centuries, leaving his fingerprints in every corner of literary works. It has now become impossible to lose his trace.”

The reader of the book will discover that it is a form of support and support for the good reader, by trying to identify the characteristics of the bad reader, but who determines the characteristics of the good readers? The text or the reader? Can we read good books in a bad way? Or is there a bad reading, because of the text and not because of the reader?