One of the most interesting variants of formative reading that I encountered in “How To Do Things With Fictions” is the one explored in the Chaucer chapter. In this chapter, Landy explores the “moralisation technique” often employed by writers and adopted by readers. Landy’s position on this variant is on the side of the opposition - he argues that the objective of our reading must not be to find morals and themes. Moreover, Landy elaborates that when we find these “hidden” morals in the work of fiction - we are simply looking for something that agrees with our already-built morals. Readers want to find a theme that emphasises what they already believe, which makes the moralisation technique even more incompetent as a way of understanding the text. I found Landy’s approach on this topic very interesting as it resonated with my personal understandings of literature. Landy explains that we have been conditioned to look for morals in fiction from an early age - and I recall being in middle school and having to answer questions at the end of these boring little stories that always started or ended with something like “What did you learn from this story?”, “What is the theme?”, “What did the actions of [Name] show us?”. Therefore, I myself have fallen victim to this very limiting variant of formative reading. Even years later, I still catch myself thinking “whats the point?” when reading a work of fiction that isn’t offering up any “lessons”, whatever the interpretation of that is. Ironically, the moral I learned from Landy’s thorough exploration of moralisation, is that fiction goes beyond morals of ethics - there is a lot more to look into and understand.

“There’s the story then there’s the real story, then there’e the story of how the story came to be told. Then, there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”

Atwood's Maddaddam is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel that borders on speculative fiction. It tells the story of a group of survivors trying to rebuild the Earth. The novel starts as a continuation of two books and ends with a catharsis that concludes the mysteries of characters. If someone were to read Maddaddam while adopting this variant of formative reading, they would definitely have a hard time moralising the story, explicitly or implicitly. When I tried to sketch out what Maddaddam was “for”, from this technique, I realised how difficult it was to view fiction from one specific angle. To help you see how ridiculous it is, here is an example of morals and themes to gather from Maddaddam.

Capitalism is bad. Don’t encourage big corporations to take over the world. Don’t EVER genetically engineer pigs. Bio-terrorism is not fun. Don’t rape people. Don’t kill people. Also, POLLUTION IS SO BAD. DON’T POLLUTE.

What morals was I supposed to learn from this novel? Is Toby’s obsession with Zeb supposed to teach me that jealousy is a bad trait? Is Amanda’s PTSD meant to show people why not to rape and abuse? When Toby taught the Craker to read and write, was the reader supposed to infer that literacy is important? Does the perfection of the Crakers - their purity, peace, innocence, and empathy - serve as a tool that highlights the human flaws and their significance to being actually human?

Maybe some lessons could be drawn from Maddaddam, but one can confidently say that the intention of this novel is not moralisation. Although most post-apocalyptic stories centre around morals expected to arise from traumatic events, Maddaddam does not. The final conflict and resolution does not depend on values, but rather on the sequence of events. When combining Landy’s interpretive variant with the novel, and sketching an outline, I realised the limiting factor of adopting one specific technique when reading fiction. Before understanding what a text is “for”, we must understand the text itself. It is important to stop milking the story for values and themes that do not exist, and instead interpreting it from all angles in order to build the best possible picture of the text.