Four pages about Highsmith’s Price of Salt.
Reading with the grain’ and ‘reading against the grain’ are descriptive terms used in literary studies to indicate different styles of interpretation. Reading ‘with the grain’ implies trying to stay close and sympathetic to the logic of the text, whether it is the killer’s perspective or the victim’s. Reading ‘against the grain’ means the opposite: destabilizing the logic of the text and challenging it; an attention to what is unsaid, the unstated assumptions which might make what one is reading suspect in some way. Another way of describing ‘reading against the grain’ is as an acknowledgement of the discomfort one feels while surrendering to the logic of the text, and the kind of resistance it might generate. One might feel unease at the implicit sexism, racism or violence of the characters.
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