War & Peace Quote by Anatole Broyard

Misunderstanding, Broyard suggests, is less a failure of communication than a kind of literary bruise: proof that the writer touched a nerve. The line flips the usual hierarchy. Readers like to imagine their confusion is the author’s incompetence; Broyard implies it may be the reader’s defensive reflex, a snap-back when prose trespasses on comfort, identity, or settled opinion.

The craft here is in the moral reframe. “Punishment” makes misunderstanding sound almost judicial, as if the culture enforces an order: disturb the peace and you’ll be tried in the court of reception. That word also hints at a critic’s world, where writers get sentenced by reviews, misreadings, and reputational shorthand. “Disturbed the reader’s peace” is doing double duty. Peace can mean complacency (the easy pleasure of recognition) but also psychological equilibrium. Literature that demands self-revision feels, to many, like an attack. Misunderstanding becomes a coping mechanism: reduce the threat by translating the work into something smaller, safer, more familiar.

Broyard’s second sentence turns the screw with a clean, almost mathematical escalation: greater disturbance, greater misreading. It’s a quiet argument for ambitious writing and a warning about its costs. The more a writer pressures a reader’s assumptions, the more likely the reader will reach for caricature, ideology, or a single “message” to contain it.

Coming from a critic who prized intimacy and sensibility over doctrinaire readings, the subtext is pointed: criticism often mistakes its own discomfort for clarity. Sometimes the most faithful response to a book is admitting it unsettled you.