“What does Poe mean?"
“What
is Dickinson saying?”
“What’s Shakespeare’s purpose?”
“Is
that Plath’s intention?”
You’ve
heard it all your life in classrooms: questions that assume to speak for an
author, that imply that we can somehow discern what she or he Really meant, that urge that there is
some ultimate interpretation that will forever tie up the poem in a bow. It’s an antique way of speaking about
literature—patriarchal, limiting, and false.
It turns the class into a séance: “Put your hands on the table. We call on you, Will Shakespeare. Tell us what you want.” And the table
trembles under the note-taking that the teacher, as medium, channels from the ghost of William Shakespeare, entering the room.
Let’s
step back a moment to appreciate how intricate the process of literary
interpretation is, here analyzed into discrete, although non-definitive steps:
(1) We identify an experience as
coalescing into “object.”
(2) We reach out to touch it.
(3) We pick it up. It might be a
doorstop. It might be something to turn into
a Christmas tree. It might be a log for
the fire.
(4) But we identify it as book.
(5) We turn it this way and that. What
shall we do with it?
(6) We look at the ink marks.
(7) We identify a language. If it is Hebrew, we lay the book down with
the ruffly
edges to…What shall we call it? Our left.
…
And so on. All this happens intuitively, speedily for
most 21-year-olds. For a 2-month-old,
there will be a preliminary process of gumming, ripping, crumpling, throwing, and
growing into a 2-year old—who, by that time, might have learned to assume the
culturally-correct book reading position.
By
the time we come to call those marks words
on what we discern as page and
start to interpret it as poem, an
infinite series of sophisticated, enculturated, interpretive choices have been made. So why is it that we suddenly turn the
process into a supernatural mystery, a séance?
True,
we hope that by this time in the 21st century teachers will acknowledge
that interpretation is subjective. But they and their students continue to use
the discourse of divination and fortune-telling—to the extent that teachers
make-wrong any but their own “official version” of what, let’s say, Shakespeare
is saying. Why continue to commit this intentional
fallacy?
According to Britannica.com,
“Intentional fallacy,” is a “term used in 20th-century literary
criticism to describe the problem inherent in trying to judge a work of art by assuming
the intent or purpose of the artist who created it.” Shakespeare is dead, and
his gravestone curses anyone who would exhume his bones. We have found no personal records discoursing
on his plays and poems. You’d have to believe in Shakespearean witches and
ghosts to argue your teacher qua medium
knows what he meant. Prolific novelist Vladimir Nabokov said never to ask what
an author is trying to say—because (s)he already said it. And poet Robert Frost said “I own the first
reading. I’ll take a mortgage on the second.
The rest is up to you.”
More often that not, when readers,
critics, audiences voice an interpretation of my poetry, songs, essays, they
offer interpretations that I did not consciously work into my writing. I find them compelling. I am fascinated by
the plasticity of literature, mine and others’, to inspire vastly different,
and not infrequently contradictory readings.
And if there isn’t this plasticity, then the piece of work is not a
piece of literature. Creativity (discussed
in other posts on this blog) is a process of dipping into that 99% part of our
minds—intuitive, universal, visionary—which we share with all other human
beings. Memorable writing dips
into the greater mind where we all exist—the better the author, the more
intuitive her or his process. That’s why we look into the dictionary—a compendium
of shared meanings.
A séance is always a group activity,
often orchestrated by either a charlatan magician or an intuitively sensitive
actor. The pointer on the Ouija board
does not move without the participants relaxing into their 99% minds, by
believing that the process works. But
interpretation is just the Oui
(French for yes) ja (German for yes) credulity
of the participants—just as interpretation is a process by which we turn marks
on an object into lived experience and ideas.
And Shakespeare does not
exist without us picking up that object and naming it a soliloquy or enacting
it in a production. We are Shakespeare,
and it would be more appropriate to ask “How do I interpret these marks on a
page?” “What do I make of this?” "What do these words mean to me?" When we read, we're looking into a crystal ball: we see
ourselves.
Notice the language used
in your classrooms and how the teacher becomes the medium at the séance. Report
back here.
