I was a literature major in college. I enjoyed writing (thinking, erroneously, that I could make a career out of it) and reading, so it seemed like a logical choice at the time.

By the time I graduated, I came to loathe the subject. I still believe that there is immense value in the exploration of literature, but for me that value results from a personal and intimate relationship with the subject matter, not from engaging in a dissection of it with some literary "expert."

I think the way we teach literature (and the arts in general) is misguided.

[0] http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/misunderstandin...

Most of my colleagues in my English program went on to law school, which dovetails nicely with that analytical type of mind but as you say, endless dissection robs the work of what attracted me to it in the first place. After graduating, it took me a few years to get back into fiction (longer still to poetry).

Here's the thing... why even worry about the artist's intentions? Once she has written the piece, her involvement is over as far as I'm concerned. Personally, I adhere to the school of thinking that says the meaning of piece of art belongs entirely to the reader/viewer/listener/whatever. Now, that may not be the consensus position, but it's not exactly something I pulled out of the air either. Roland Barthes had some similar'ish thoughts, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author

All of that said, I'd also prefer to spend my time working with issues that involve hard data, as opposed to mostly subjective interpretation and heavy dependence on cultural norms, memes, etc. I love reading, but don't give a whit about academic literary criticism.

I can decide for myself that "road" is a metaphor for "apple" and treat the poem as advice to make brandy from the apples that have rolled the least distance from the tree when they fell. But does that really mean anything to other people? Can you in fact discuss this interpretation, or is it so absurd as to boggle the mind and defy rational discourse?

The other thing that bothers me is, with Death of the Author, you end up with an echo chamber. You don't try to understand somebody else's idea, you're trying to make his/her words say your ideas. Which sounds absolutely counter to the very purpose of writing things down. Why would you write if people won't read what you've written? If you won't put new ideas in their head, but only become a vessel for their current thoughts?

Socrates said he didn't see the point of writing for others, given that you won't be there to tell them what your words mean. Well, someone wrote that he said, since he himself didn't write. In any case, I find these words highly prophetic.

Frost's poem is probably a good example: Clearly it has a pervasive meaning in our culture in a way that the author didn't intend. Would it be intellectually honest to ignore that alternative meaning?

My favorite introduction to a book is the one Tolkien wrote for The Fellowship of the Ring. I can't find the exact quote, but basically he says the book is meant purely for the enjoyment of the reader and shouldn't be interpreted.

A million literature teachers cried out and were suddenly silenced.

Not really:

> I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Really he's saying that complicated things are much more interesting than simple ones, and invites discussion. Whether or not everyone's literature teachers did a decent job of that is a wholly separate question.

The Lord of the Rings has been read by many people since it finally appeared in print; and I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meaning of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. As a guide I had only my own feelings for what is appealing or moving, and for many the guide was inevitably often at fault. Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer. But even from the points of view of many who have enjoyed my story there is much that fails to please. It is perhaps not possible in a long tale to please everybody at all points, nor to displease everybody at the same points; for I find from the letters that I have received that the passages or chapters that are to some a blemish are all by others specially approved. The most critical reader of all, myself, now finds many defects, minor and major, but being fortunately under no obligation either to review the book or to write it again, he will pass over these in silence, except one that has been noted by others: the book is too short.

As for any inner meaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical. As the story grew it put down roots (into the past) and threw out unexpected branches: but its main theme was settled from the outset by the inevitable choice of the Ring as the link between it and The Hobbit. The crucial chapter, "The Shadow of the Past', is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted. Its sources are things long before in mind, or in some cases already written, and little or nothing in it was modified by the war that began in 1939 or its sequels.

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dûr would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

Other arrangements could be devised according to the tastes or views of those who like allegory or topical reference. But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead. Or to take a less grievous matter: it has been supposed by some that 'The Scouring of the Shire' reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does not. It is an essential part of the plot, foreseen from the outset, though in the event modified by the character of Saruman as developed in the story without, need I say, any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever. It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender (for the economic situation was entirely different), and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways. Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the last decrepitude of the once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.

Surely you mean Tolkien said you can interpret it as you wish, ie. that there's no canonical/right/word-of-god interpretation (I get so furious when people have that idea).

Also see: Death of the Author

I think you might appreciate degree as you age, or pursue other interests? I know tech desperately needs people who can convey thoughts, or concepts.

Before I read books/articles on tech; I jump right past the introduction, and look for clues that the author can put thoughts together in a logical order. If it's filled with run-on sentences, paragraphs that are out of order, a bunch of unessary words I move on. If you know this material, knowing how to write well will be valuable. If I was hiring a programmer, I would love to see an English major on the resume--especially if hiring for a large company?

Perhaps you just had a bad teacher?

I suspect people who whine about "what the author intended" or that "you can make it up as you go along" really lack the mental/creative flexibility to wrestle and dance with art and miss the point that the act of interpretation is a purpose in and of itself: you express art/ideas by interpreting another's work; your interpretation is art itself since art is a conversation. It's the job of artists to create a work that's deep and flexible and inspiring enough to generate many possible interpretations.

Not everybody has to like it but don't just dismiss it out of hand, recognize that brilliant creative people find value in it and the value is there, it just takes work to get at it just like it takes work to find beauty in well-written code or a system of complex equations, and it's a wholly different kind of satisfaction and beauty you find in the humanities; if you took the time and effort to honestly try it you might like it and like it or not that kind of expansion of the mind is something everyone could use a little more of.

They responded: Of course, this piece of shit on the plate symbolizes what people are fed throughout their lives - either literally eating unhealthy foods (shit) or more theoretically through the bullshit they encounter throughout their lives. The artist was trying to convey a message about life: everything can be, or is, shit being fed to you on a platter.

Disclaimer: I made all of this up on the spot, but I have seen shit on a plate being passed as art before. So it was partially inspired, which I guess makes the dog shit on a plate art. By some standards.

(In Poland we have this urban legend about granddaughter of Stanisław Lem getting a bad grade on an assignment about interpretation of Lem's work, even though she went to his grandfather, asked about "what he intended" and wrote what he said verbatim.)

Interpreting works of art is fine, seeking new meanings, getting inspired, etc. is also fine. Just call a spade a spade. Otherwise it's just a particularly insulting intellectual dishonesty.

My experience is of being an analytical whiner throughout school, and then suddenly understanding the point when it was explained to me by a fellow analyst in university. I can't help wondering how much more I (and others) may have enjoyed English if someone had explained it sooner.

And I think you're completely missing the point -- the author's intention is not unknown, it is irrelevant, since the purpose of literature is not to explicitly convey a simple intention, it is to provoke a reaction in the reader; we first experience the art and second analyze which pieces of it are effective to make us feel how we feel. Intention of the author isn't interesting or meaningful. And to misunderstand that is to misunderstand art itself, which is why we see here people suggesting we "call a spade a spade" -- whatever that means.

And realistically your teacher probably knows a lot more about what the author intends than you do. There is a lot of historical context and other works that put the novel into context. But that's not even relevant; you're being taught to think and look for examples, it doesn't really matter if they were put there intentionally. When you develop your abilities and are good enough to think about literature past the high school level then you can start thinking for yourself, just like in every field, but when you're intellectually a child in the field, you need to listen and learn. Unfortunately most children are petulant and whine and decide since they don't understand it yet, it must be nonsense, and everyone who is an expert and has dedicated their life to it "didn't have any clue" and give up. Like you see here.

Everyone has a perspective, and all perspectives are fundamentally interesting in their own right. Is that not the humanist idea? Is that not what a liberal education is supposed to teach?

You're correct I come off as a little defensive, but this thread is full of obnoxious condescending engineers who think since they know some math and science they are better than everyone at everything, and that everything they don't understand is because it's not worth understanding. It is full of people attacking art because "it's useless, I didn't get it so it's trash and anyone who pretends to is a liar and I'll have fries with that English major scum LOL" And I'll attack that attitude with the ferocity it deserves; it's disgusting and a disservice to all of us.

I'm a scientist as well so I'm of course sympathetic to those who aren't particularly interested in the humanities and I think that's just fine but in a toxic environment like this I'll go out of my way to defend them aggressively since far too often I see people just roll over.

Nice little trick, equating people who disagree with you to Nazis and Klan members.

It is like a theory that, while explaining the results we saw, would just as easily explain any other results. Such a theory wouldn't be worth any further consideration unless the supporters are able to give it more sound structure so that we can actually have a reasonable way of saying 'no, that is wrong' or 'yes, that is right'.

As it stands, if there is a boat, I could say the boat is representing something feminine because boats are like sheathes and provide protection from the harshness of the sea like a mother or I could say the the boat is representing something masculine because it is piercing the water and representing historically masculine ideas of exploration and conquest. Any such analysis is largely useless as I can get what ever result I want.

But they do respond to some kind of underlying rule or rules, which can be teased out, most of the time. That can be fun in many cases.

To me, all the lit stuff seemed completely arbitrary and made up. There were no testable hypothesis, no experiments to run. "The author was trying to tell us that ..." - well unless the author actually documented that later, how do you know that with any degree of certainty?

The only English class I liked was journalism, where we were taught how to clearly and effectively communicate the facts known about something, and were rewarded by keeping things brief and to the point, rather than filling up pages with BS.

I'll take a leap and suggest that you and I can agree that much of what is called "news" these days does not merely transfer facts from the news organization to your brain. When you read a news article, you interpret it with context. You ask, what is the reputation of the agency reporting this news? Do they have a history of factual reporting? Do they bring a particular political bent or agenda to bear on their reporting? What words are they using to tell the story? What does it mean when someone refers to the "War on Terror" - how do you understand that metaphor? What memories, emotions, experiences does it evoke? How is that phrase intended to be interpreted?

There is so much more to write about this, but bottom line for me is: language drives human interaction. Understanding how others interpret language (through metaphor, shared understanding, history, etc.) is important for navigating that interaction. It helps us call bullshit on politicians who use words to conceal ignorance, or maybe on teachers who don't actually understand the literature they are presenting ;)

I imagine you were never rewarded for "filling up pages" with actual bull shit, so you picked up metaphors at some point along the way.

Very much so - and another reason I am all the more bitter about the waste of time that lit classes were: they also soured me to the whole thing for a long while.

That journalism class was great because, indeed, we also discussed how a story can misinform, even given the same underlying facts. I thought that was very useful and interesting. It was, like you say, about communication, its uses and misuses. The lit stuff never seemed to be about that, it was about obfuscation and the teacher's (?) interpretation of whatever.

I had a math teacher in high school who, when I asked why I had to learn the quadratic equation, answered with an asinine anecdote about someone asking her to recite it in a social setting. Mathematics felt similarly arbitrary to me at that point, and I was turned off to it for an unfortunately long period of time.

One of the ones who was also held in fairly high regard in the school once got into 'time being relative', and trotted out, in the same sentence, something about experiments showing time being different at the poles and the equator, as well as something about time in "latin" cultures. That drove me up the wall!

The most common question out of a student's mouth is "But why do we have to learn this?" And that's a pretty good question.

Unfortunately they're asking the people least likely to know. Teachers don't even know why most of these things are important. They learned them at school, and then they grew up and taught them, but they never passed through the stage of actually putting them to use in any other context.

This seems like a pretty common complaint. You seem to assume that literature should work like science. But the purpose of literature is not to rigorously refine a certain predictive model of the world. I don't want to claim exactly what it is, but maybe the telling of human experiences (and the analysis thereof) provides insights that help people better understand the muddier, less quantitative dimensions of the human world? And to that end, it doesn't matter at all whether a claim is based on what the author intended, as long as it provides some useful insight. (Yes, you _could_ use this to justify any claim at all about any piece of literature, and that's part of what this article is about. A lot of people may be "wrong" about what Frost intended, but it's insightful for them anyway, and that's just fine. Typically, academics expect that claims are based on evidence in the text, but that's still subjective and open to many interpretations.)

Similarly, the most effective way to communicate an idea is not always to present it logically and directly. There's the proverb: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." IME, it's almost always more effective to communicate an idea by causing the reader to come to it themselves. That's why narratives can be much more effective at communicating truths about human experiences than simply stating it outright. That's (one reason) why the story of Macbeth is more compelling than just telling someone "your obsession with power may make you miserable".

My humanities-professor friends today are very good at taking the former approach, at least when talking with me. But the latter was definitely how literature was taught in all of the schools I went to. The green light on the dock was X. Or in another class, it was clearly Y. Or, in a third, it was X, and Y, and Z, and Ƶ and Ź and Ž and ζ, at which point the explanation seemed to be more akin to improvisational poetry about a Rorschach blot than any serious attempt at unpacking a metaphor or understanding an author. But it was still framed as authoritative analysis, which mainly made me think that the teachers were not so clear on what actual facts were.

In the same HS, I had an art teacher who was great. I gained an appreciation for abstract, 'modern' art, even if I didn't necessarily like everything I saw. She focused on how things made us feel, and if, for instance, they evoked images of other things. Stuff like that, which was all about suggestion and how elements in the image worked together, but without wrong answers or D's if we disagreed with her.

I can accept that Literature is not about science as much as it is about defining the (intentional or non) meaning a literary work carries for its audience, but at university levels it certainly likes to present itself as if it were a science (rather than an art in itself) and embraces an obscene cargo cult effigy of what real science sounds like -- exactly like new age pseudo-science.

Furthermore, by presenting itself as a science, it gives undue authority to other social "sciences" that seem to get away with asserting falsifiable claims with no attempt to provide empirical evidence, which in turn transfers that false authority to political interest groups.

The world could do with a good amount less woo than it has now.

It's unfortunate because there is actually a lot of beauty to be found in literature, and each reader is free to find his or her own.

Beyond beauty literature helps establish empathy by exposing you to the inner-thoughts of different types of people, and it inspires creativity, both of which are useful in any field.

It's possible that purely accidentally he wrote something boring about boats that causes readers to think interest things about things that are not boats. This will cause the poem to become popular by itself, without help from the author.

From a memetic perspective, this can be worthy of study.

What I have a problem with is ascribing these to the author without any evidence that they actually meant it that way.

E.M. Forster said "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" Poker players have unconscious tells that reveal intent that is not verifiable by simply asking what their hand is, and they certainly wouldn't intentionally reveal what the subconscious reveals for them.

I've written fiction and while there's certainly intent in much of the crafting of a story or novel, there are also emergent themes, feelings, evoked emotions, and connections that go beyond anything I could concretely articulate as explicit intent. It's not surprising that when those emergent properties are interpreted by others that similar feelings are produced, connections made.

Can those evocations of emotion be "ascribed" to me independent of evidence? Well, they wouldn't have been evoked had the work not been created, so yes, they can be.

I suspect, as others point out, that your problem is more with academic conformance imposed by a lit instructor. But your tone seems to conflate those issues with the merit and value of literature, and the discussion of hypotheses about meaning.

You can form hypotheses about the intent of writing, and support it with evidence inside the text. It's not that far afield of rhetoric and debate. It's okay not to spend your time on that (just as I decided my analytical skills were better spent on investing, with a return, than fantasy sports). But I also don't begrudge those who decide they want to spend their time on endless mock drafts and fantasy sports leagues.

I'm glad you (and it sounds like davidw) had a great experience with other instructors though.

Its purpose is not to just communicate, and that's fine.

There mustn't. They can also be expressed inside the text, or at least hinted at.

> It's not surprising that when those emergent properties are interpreted by others that similar feelings are produced, connections made.

Sure, and saying "this work evokes in me these feelings" is fine. Saying "the author here is symbolizing X with Y" is not.

> But I also don't begrudge those who decide they want to spend their time on endless mock drafts and fantasy sports leagues.

I don't have a problem with people saying "I think that this may be symbolism for X", because then I can just say "well, I don't think it is, but sure". I have a problem with people expressing their hypothesis as fact, basically.

I'll try to find the artist - but they wrote a song and the fanbase didn't "get their message".

The lyrics were supposed to be face-value but people found metaphors where no metaphors were meant to be and devised an entire story around the song that didn't exist. How it related to his childhood growing up and the struggles of his teenage years, overcoming an addiction, etc.

The artist said in an interview (Paraphrased) "That's not at all what I meant when I wrote this song - but it does sound better. So I'll take the credit."

"There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is the old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are sharks, no better, no worse."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceberg_Theory

Separate from that: There's plenty of literature with no plot.

When I was younger I loved writing stuff with no plot. My best grades were on works with no plot whatsoever. I wanted to write a novel-length work with no plot, in part because of the challenge, in part because I immensely enjoyed reading stuff with no plot.

I haven't read "Hills like White Elephants". Maybe it's full of intentional symbolism. Maybe not. But the absence of a plot is not the evidence of symbolism.

> When asked about the use of symbolism in his work, and particularly in the most recently published Old Man and the Sea, he explained: "No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in...That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better....I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea, a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

After reading the wiki more closely, I think there's a middle ground. It seems the Iceberg Theory operated on Hemingway's omission of explicit symbols. Hemingway never outright mentioned the larger themes in his works. But the holes left were suggested by the context.

I think it's like instead of painting a mural of a deer in a forest, he'd paint a mural of (what appeared at first glance to be) an empty forest. Except on closer inspection, there would be a trail of disturbed vegetation, accompanied by fresh deer tracks.

The deer clearly exists somewhere in the scene's vicinity even though the audience never sees it. Similarly, I think Hemingway let the themes influence the story, but never let those themes manifest themselves as symbols the reader could easily point to. Instead, the themes manifested as a vibe the reader couldn't explain on a conscious level, or manifested as a series of convenient coincidences. Maybe we can compromise that Hemingway achieved symbolism without the symbols.

-----------------------------------------

I suspect much of our disagreement concerns the definition of "plot". In my mind, I can't see a short story or novel without a plot that would be very interesting. It would be equivalent of watching a film which showed nothing but paint dry for the entire duration. Even if there's no physical action, any halfway interesting movie is bound to have at least some sort of psychological action.

If there's no plot, then I would probably classify it as poetry (which "Hills like White Elephants" clearly isn't).

Maybe a better idea would be to point me to an example or two of successful stories which omit symbolism.

Letter, Sept. 13, 1952, to the critic Bernard Berenson, in Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (1981).

The symbolism in Superman Returns was pretty obvious. In addition to the patriotism carried by the colours of his costume, he's obviously a kind of modern-day Superjesus: he's a superhuman only son sent to Earth to protect (save) all of mankind. There's even the entire death and rebirth aspect: he is beaten, then stabbed as the final blow with a lethal weapon (like the spear of destiny), he falls (in a posture reminiscent of Jesus on the cross) and (nearly) dies before being rescued. Then he dies again, staying in coma (for days?) before rising again.

The symbolism is there, it's easy to spot if you are looking for it but it blends in nicely enough that you can watch the film without paying any attention to it. It's subtle enough that you can argue whether it's symbolic or not and what is or isn't intended to carry a metaphor. After all the film is intentionally corny and mostly sees itself as a sequel to the famous Superman series that preceded it by a few decades.

Then there's Man of Steel. It doesn't even try to hide its symbolism. Kal-El asks a priest in a church for guidance whether to surrender himself in front of a stained glass window showing Jesus asking Yahweh for guidance whether to surrender himself. Kal-El drops out of the spaceship to save mankind in a static Jesus pose. His father's hologram ("His" "Spirit") says that he sent his only son to save mankind. And so on and so forth. Not to mention the facepalm-inducing moments where Kal-El points out how all-American he is despite being an (immigrant) space alien. The American/Christian symbolism is so obtuse it was even used to market the film to Christian audiences. It's less of a hidden allegory and more of a religious pamphlet.

What I'm trying to get at (other than Superman Returns clearly being the superior, if underrated, Superman movie and Man of Steel being a US-Christian circle jerk) is that there is a range. Some works of literature go out of their way to rub their symbolism in your face. In others it is present but more nuanced. In some it is subtle put still easy to find if you look for it. And in some any symbolism is merely a projection of what you are trying to find in it.

I would agree that most of the symbolism students of literary criticism tend to spend their energy on falls in the last category where you can show a work to handful of critics and get a lifetime's worth of different interpretations.

But as much as I personally despise the field as a whole, some works do carry intentional symbolism. And some works unintentionally provide symbolism when read in certain contexts.

When you look at "old" literature (i.e. literature that has long outlived its authors), most of the literature that has survived to the modern day is literature that provided meaning across the various generations. It's a legitimate question to ask "why" and "how" -- even if literary studies as a field tends to be more obsessed with the "what".

Superman has been an allegory for Jesus and/or America in many of his appearances over his long life.

One of the rules of studying literature is that you're always welcome to disagree, but that you need evidence if you want to go against the prevailing opinion. You're welcome to think that Howl is about an acid trip Ginsberg had where he thought he was a wolf, but if you want an A, you better have some letters he wrote to Kerouac about it. :)

English classes, especially at the University level, would be so much more useful if, instead of saying "the boat trip signifies x", professors went into the reasons they believe that. In some cases, it is personal opinion. In other cases, it is personal opinion based on 30 published articles. And, in still other cases, it is their personal opinion because if they believed anything else, they'd be laughed out of conferences.

Just because everyone claims pigs can fly doesn't mean that they can, not unless you can show me proof.

Often in literature, the prevailing opinion is backed up by material published in journals or highly cited books. And generally to get published in a journal, you need some compelling evidence. So, if I want to venture that T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land as a response to his own struggles with mental illness, I can back that up with citations from journals, or published books. If I want to go even further (and get an even better mark), I can go into the letters where he first hand talks about his struggles.

Just because I can back up my opinions with published material, it still doesn't mean that my opinions are correct.

To reverse your metaphor, let's say that you think pigs can fly and I think they can't. You say that pigs can fly because you saw it happen. I say that pigs cannot fly because of these respected books on physics and pig anatomy. You might actually be correct, but I should still win an efficiently run debate.

Strikes me as laziness and a basic unwillingness to even engage with something, basically a defense mechanism. It would probably be better to just admit that it’s not for you and leave it at that instead of claiming it to be sucky always forever and for everyone.

Also, don't forget, we inflict this process on people as part of basic education in the States. Ask 100 people what they think of classics like The Great Gatsby or The Catcher in the Rye, and more likely than not the answers will be mostly negative.

Literary analysis is a subjective affair and turns quite a few people off, moreso when you are being graded on things like having the same opinion as the instructor. You can read something into a piece that may or may not be there, and in any case is more likely than not to be the product of your own experiences and biases, not the content of the work itself.

If you tell me that author X said that the boat is meant to be a metaphor for the protagonist's life, I will be the first to be excited and read the text looking for all the little easter eggs that the author put in, but without any evidence at all it's just your opinion.

This is also exacerbated by the lengths that people go to stretch their theory, which makes it even more obvious that they're grasping at straws in the face of evidence to the contrary.

On the other hand, I think that an allergy to overextended metaphors and other woolly thinking is a handy bias in an engineer. And a lot of the flights of literary analysis would be much more palatable to we more literal-minded if it were framed as, "When I read X I enjoy thinking about it as Y" rather than "X is Y". Yet another case where a little E-Prime [1] would prevent a lot of argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime

Not something I did at all. I just don't like one specific kind of literature and how it's presented.

Unfortunately it's often taught at school as if it's some kind of exercise in decryption.

Only 2 problems with that:

1) the message in the symbolism is not the same message in the "straight up message" -- it has more nuances for one. It's not because you can't just "say it" that you go to symbolism, it's because the thing, said straight, doesn't really capture what you want to say.

E.g. "life is beautiful in a sad way" -- that's the clear message. OK, but nothing much. A short story/poem with the right words/symbolism/etc can not only tell you that, but make you feel it in your stomach, and in several different ways.

2) most people bypass said message when you "come straight out and said it" as it often sounds simplistic and naive deprived of its artifice.

E.g. say straight up "Don't do drugs" and most teeanegers will laugh at you. Tell it with a story/song/poem and they might get the message that there's something dark there. Or tell a different story/song/poem and they'd might like to go try some.

> 2) most people bypass said message when you "come straight out and said it" as it often sounds simplistic and naive deprived of its artifice.

People ignore "don't do drugs" not because it's straightforward, but because it is trying to command you to do something without making a persuasive argument why.

It is simplistic and naive for that reason, but that has nothing to do with the lack of symbolism, but with the lack of reasoning.

Language is ambiguous, but not THAT ambiguous. People generally understand symbolic cues, unless we're talking about some extreme "avant guard" kind of art.

Most of these clues after all have been honed for millenia, and are part of the cultural landscape.

And if people are at least partially involved in art/literature etc, they learn even more of classic tropes and symbolic use of words (or images, in cinema).

And if the miss a few symbolisms, they can still get others in the same work, and have a general grap of the message. One of the joys with songs/poems/fiction etc is discovering new levels and depth you didn't see at first (e.g. as you gain more experience with life to relate to them, or as you learn some cultural information that helps you decipher a clue).

In the end, it's also up to how good the poet/writer/storyteller is, and how opaque or transparent he wants to make his story.

>People ignore "don't do drugs" not because it's straightforward, but because it is trying to command you to do something without making a persuasive argument why

Not really (from the point I come from). Even combined with a 8 page detailed pamphlet, with what can happen to you, side-effects et al, most young people still sneer at it and ignore it. For one, they think those things don't apply to them (they are industructible, they can control it, etc) and second they aren't cool.

Reasons are the uncoolest things to try to convince teenagers with.

It's when you spice up the story, make it cool, or make it impactful, that they might pay attention and think "hmm, maybe drugs aren't so good after all". That's what drug songs like "Needle and the damage done" can do, or books like "Less Than Zero". But at this point you're into symbolism and artifice too.

My experience is that the moment people start trying to interpret symbolism in literature, all bets are off and you can't assume they'll even apply basic logic.

> Most of these clues after all have been honed for millenia, and are part of the cultural landscape.

... most of the time without taking feedback from actual evidence. When faced with actual evidence (such as, e.g., asking the author) it all too often crumbles into nothing. I'm not questioning that people can sometimes pick it up. But I don't for a second believe that people are very at good at it, because I've seen all too many time how people supposedly good at it totally butcher works.

> And if people are at least partially involved in art/literature etc, they learn even more of classic tropes and symbolic use of words (or images, in cinema).

Part of the problem is that people massively over-interpret. The presence of something looks like a classic trope or symbolic use of words does not mean the author intended it, or was aware.

> Even combined with a 8 page detailed pamphlet, with what can happen to you, side-effects et al, most young people still sneer at it and ignore it.

That's because describing what can happen to you and side effects is not a persuasive argument for not taking drugs because it totally ignores why people take drugs in the first place, and because they don't provide any reasons to trust.

It's not like the author is the ultimate source. The text is.

An author can add symbolism also subcosciously, since its part of how we think in general (a symbol is a shortcut, a compressed metaphor/idea), and part of the cultural landscape too.

>The presence of something looks like a classic trope or symbolic use of words does not mean the author intended it, or was aware.

Might not mean it sometimes (it can be over-interpretation). Sometimes a banana is just a banana. But we've also have works were the majority of critics agree on their interpretation, including the author.

On what the author is trying to communicate, the author is the only source we can rely on.

> An author can add symbolism also subcosciously

He could, but since we can't reliably say anything about that, it is meaningless to make claims about it.

> Sometimes a banana is just a banana. But we've also have works were the majority of critics agree on their interpretation, including the author.

Whether or not a majority of critics agree is totally irrelevant to me. If the author agrees, that is a different matter. The problem is that so much of literary criticism happens without bothering to even try to check with the author. Unsurprisingly, authors quire regularly express surprise or exasperation at how literary critics interprets their works.

That's half true. Or wholly true if we put emphasis on his explicitly "trying to".

Because his work could also communicate other things that he wasn't trying, but are nethertheless apparent in the output.

Consider a racist writing his autobiography, and trying not to sound like a racist and avoids any open remark, but it still comes out in the text. In the same way, an authors beliefs and feelings on all kinds of things, even if subcoscious or hidden from himself, can also come out in the text, despite him not actually trying to communicate them.

If we don't consider just what the author explicitly tried to communicate, but all that's present in the final output, the author is not the "only source" anymore. We can also use other knowledge we have, of cultural norms, ideas of his era, symbolism, etc.

>Whether or not a majority of critics agree is totally irrelevant to me. If the author agrees, that is a different matter.

That's quite an inflexible view of literature/poetry etc, which has been shown to be lacking for near a century. Heck, even authors frequently say in their interviews: "I just put put these images and they are up to the reader to understand them in one way or another", or words to that effect. (Songwriters also are of this school very often: "my songs have no defined meaning, are open to interpretation etc".).

In the example of the racist author, how about if the author doesn't "agree" that his work is racist, but his working and portrayal of black characters makes evident that it is? It doesn't even need to be because he's lying, could just be that he considers the kind of attitude he has to blacks "objective" and "normal" and not racism.

The author is hardly the "only authority". If not for anything else because people have subconscious feelings, people hide things from themselves (even when they're not subconscious, they might downplay their importance when you talk to them, but come pouring down when they write), and of course, people lie.

The answer all along was simply "I like it". I like the way it sounds in my mind, the way it tastes with spaghetti. The way it rolls off the to tongue when read aloud. That's it. And that's enough.

Humans so desperately want to apply meaning to everything even when there is none. I've seen this in interviews where an excited fan asks a musician the deep meaning of some song and the response is along the lines of 'it sounded cool'.

But no arguments would sway him, because past authorities had said otherwise, with no evidence whatsoever to support their interpretation (I could not know that my interpretation was valid either, but that was part of my point - mine at least had the advantage of not assuming the author had made a massive grammatical error right there in that one poem that he'd never made anywhere else, that just happened to totally change the literal reading of his poem).

It pretty much shattered my respect for that teacher, and strongly contributed to by burning hatred for literature analysis.

Diane: Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!

[cut to Thornton's dorm suite]

Thornton Melon: [on the phone] ... and another thing, Vonnegut! I'm gonna stop payment on the cheque!

Whereupon said author thought about it for a bit and told the interviewer something to the effect that he thought that was fantastic, and wish he'd thought of all of those things, but he'd just thought the image was nice.

When at school I got exasperated by the same thing, as I wrote a lot of poetry at that age, and for me it was all about the imagery and emotions it evoked. Anyone who'd tried to analyse symbolism in any of what I wrote would have already missed the point. You might find something in there, but it would not have been "mine". And generally I feel that while you may pick up on some interesting things now and again, you also lose a lot when you start picking everything apart. Analysis got close to killing my interest in literature.

The one time I wrote something intentionally full of symbols, it was a sarcastic response to analysis, with a very clear message to my Norwegian teacher about what I thought about analysing poems. He didn't appreciate it (the rest of my class did, though - it's the only time anyone applauded a poem in any of my classes..)

Doesn't mean that there aren't authors that delight in putting symbolism into their works, or who does it subconsciously, of course, but to me it greatly reduces my pleasure in reading to look for it.

1. The king has no clothes. 2. Semantics isn't important in the humanities; it's just playing with syntax and vocabulary.

I wished they taught it more like another sense of humor. Like funny things, authorial intent can make it better or worse, but the thing itself has most of the inertia. Also like funny things, requiring explanation deflates it. When you're just watching a movie or a television show, or reading a book, and it hits you, it makes the narrative so much more rewarding.

As for why authors don't just come out and say their points: nobody likes being told what to believe. It makes audiences irritated, suspicious, bored, etc. (which is how people react to ham-fisted symbolism). But when the pieces are left out for you to discover "for yourself," you'll be a lot more receptive.

My highest scoring exam in literary studies was about a book of which I had only read the plot summary on Wikipedia. I scored higher by literally making things up than by trying to apply logic.

BTW, her life story is pretty amazing - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25027090

"Because that's what the author wrote."

We need a way of helping people jump through those hoops because rejecting the premise of litrature analysis is unlikely to go well for powerless children.

Changing it from analysing[1] the literature into hacking te teacher may work. "Your teacher has these cognitive oddities. How many can you discover?"

[1] I suspect a bit of programming with plenty of graphs of sentiment analysis or character interactions would not be well received in those classes.

That said, symbolism generally is constructed deliberately. When I write fiction it's almost impossible for me to start at the beginning and proceed to the end - I start out with fragmentary ideas of momentary images, snatches of conversation and so on, and traverse them in sort of random fashion until the outline of a sequence emerges which suggests a plot. Various symbols will suggest themselves along the way, and one or two may 'click' by encapsulating or paralleling the story structure particularly well. Once I've identified one of those then it acts like structural reinforcement, so I'll go back and add it or emphasize it in various parts of the story where it seemed to fit well.

The symbol(s) you pick in turn become a source of new ideas for solving other plot/structure problems. So suppose I have a story about some lonely woman and I realize this person likes flowers (I didn't decide this, I just kept picturing her eating dinner alone but always with a vase of flowers on the table so I'll roll with it), and then it hits me that flowers have a short life and wilt and die so that's a good metaphor for my character's situation if she doesn't find love. This isn't a full story yet, though - why is this person lonely? Dunno, don't have any ideas...well I'll think about flowers a bit....vases...you need to water the...do you pick them or buy them...will they attract insects....oh wait, flowers use insects to pollinate, what if my character was stung by a bee and unconsciously displaced a fear of sex onto the incident? Now I have a story because I have a person in conflict with herself, impelled to seek love by the fact of time's passage but afraid of the emotional or physical risks that entails. Hmm, not only does my lead like flowers, but has become obsessed with them - she owns a chain of florists or she's a master flower arranger that supplies flowers for all the best weddings, and has put all the energy that normally goes into a romantic relationship into floral activities instead. Then she meets someone who's perfect, but maybe hates cut flowers, which is a problem because my florist is obsessed with having everything just so and needs to learn to accept other people as they are naturally...well now I have a whole little world here with numerous interconnected symbols and some obvious characters and situations that I can develop, and the name of the flower store and the story is 'Perfect Bouquet,' and it seems like it's going to be a romantic comedy.

Exploring and exaggerating the semantic associations of the initial floral symbol has provided me with a basic plot and a handful of obvious scenes that I can begin writing immediately. Most books on writing say things like imagine your characters, find out everything about them and flesh them out in detail, then put them together and see what they do...' I guess that works for some people but I think it's total crap. I don't know any florists or much about flowers, apart from a summer working for a commercial flower supplier when I was young (which was basically a warehouse job). But taking a generic person, an emotion, and finding some symbol that can embody that were enough to get the ball rolling.

You can do this in reverse too. Sticking with the romantic comedy genre, take You've Got Mail. Meg Ryan is a proto-hipster who owns a tiny local bookstore, Tom Hanks is the ruthless CEO of a bookstore chain that wants to put her out of business, and of course they have to fall in love (via the internet, which ironically has since put a large bookstore chain out of business - see my point above about revisionist readings, because it's interesting to ask whether Nora Ephron even contemplated that possibility when she wrote the film). Now the story structure is pretty generic - it's sort of Beauty and the Beast set in a bookstore, and BatB is in turn a metaphor for mating strategies. But why bookstores? Couldn't Meg Ryan have been a plucky neighborhood grocer being squeezed by the opening of a new Walmart store, or a feisty buggy whip maker fending off an encroaching automobile salesman. But that she sells books rather than vegetables or equine accessories suggests she's primarily contemplative and maybe sensual, as opposed to nurturing or dynamic, that she's a collector/curator rather than a consumer or maker, and so on and so on.

The process of exploring these semantic associations isn't a scientific one, and you're absolutely right that it can degenerate into horse shit that ends up telling us more about the critic's inner life than the work that is supposedly under scrutiny, but the inquiry is itself informative. Why is Jaws about a giant shark rather than a giant alligator or bear? It wouldn't be hard to imagine a story about a village near a swamp or a forest that was menaced by the appropriate animal and have the plot unfold quite similarly - creature features are among the oldest kinds of stories and thus among the most formulaic, but we don't mind because they're so relatable, as long as the personality of the Creature is developed sufficiently well. Symbols work like icebergs; the large part that is submerged (below the level of consciousness)serves as a foundation for the relatively small visible part: the authorial design is to present the reader with something whose significance is easy to underestimate but which will become clear during the development of the story.

Bears have been done too. This is the final scene of Grizzly, which is pretty awesome in its horribleness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgYIH715YeM

I think the grizzly is a symbol of the decline of the Canadian mineral extraction industry and the hardships that represented for many communities.

I think the grizzly is a symbol of the decline of the Canadian mineral extraction industry and the hardships that represented for many communities.

Must be time for a sequel - It Came From the Tar Sands!

That reads as a truism to me. Something in the work that isn't constructed deliberately is not symbolism; if it is interpreted as symbols, it's miscommunication with the author.

But assuming that you mean that "things we believe are symbolism" in an authors work are generally constructed deliberately, I would be very interested in seeing any kind of attempt to quantify how often literature critics gets it right, by e.g. having them analyse works where authors have confirmed their intent.

> When I write fiction it's almost impossible for me to start at the beginning and proceed to the end - I start out with fragmentary ideas of momentary images, snatches of conversation and so on, and traverse them in sort of random fashion until the outline of a sequence emerges which suggests a plot. Various symbols will suggest themselves along the way, and one or two may 'click' by encapsulating or paralleling the story structure particularly well. Once I've identified one of those then it acts like structural reinforcement, so I'll go back and add it or emphasize it in various parts of the story where it seemed to fit well.

And when I write, I don't think about symbols at all, generally. If I do see something that stands out as likely to be interpreted as symbolism, I'd generally remove it, as I find it trite and annoying. Your anecdote is interesting enough, but you can't extrapolate from that to tell us anything about how often people intentionally adds symbols vs. simply intend to e.g. convey images without thinking about how people might try to analyse it to death.

> But that she sells books rather than vegetables or equine accessories suggests she's primarily contemplative and maybe sensual, as opposed to nurturing or dynamic, that she's a collector/curator rather than a consumer or maker, and so on and so on.

Or it was what the author knew how to describe. Or the author likes book stores. Or the author wanted to add in a point about the death of small book stores (personally I'm far more partial to the idea that script writer was being literal and straight forward than what you suggest, but I have no specific basis for this interpretation either). Or (and I have no idea, so I'm just throwing out possibilities here) Meg Ryan was tied to the project from early on and the script writer just happened to think she'd fit well as a book store owner. The options were already limited if wanting to stay realistic once the premise of "owner of small local business falls for big chain guy" was set (e.g. equine accessories was never an option; produce could have been).

To me, absent additional knowledge of what the script writer intended, your suggestion is already well into over-interpretation.

But assuming that you mean that "things we believe are symbolism" in an authors work are generally constructed deliberately, I would be very interested in seeing any kind of attempt to quantify how often literature critics gets it right, by e.g. having them analyse works where authors have confirmed their intent.

I'm going to demur a little on 'things we believe...'. You are right of course about the aspect of deliberation, but there are two other possibilities besides critics simply being wrong: one, that symbols originate with the author but the author isn't conscious of them, and two that symbols don't originate with the author at all(perhaps because they appear to reference things that didn't exist at the time the story was written) but nevertheless offer an interesting new perspective on a work.

Modern critics are not much concerned with objective truths about 'what the author meant' so much as teasing apart the construction of meaning in readers' minds. MY understanding is that this approach became more prominent after the french critic Roland Barthes appeared on the scene and suggested that there might be no limit to the possibilities of interpretation, followed by Foucault suggesting there might not be such a thing as authorship (I'm oversimplifying to the point of absurdity here, mind). One the one hand I have a problem with this approach as a writer, because I do try to construct meaning and I am not enthused about some jumped-up critic who has never attempted any fiction coming along and expounding on 'what it really means' - I frequently find myself reading books of criticism and muttering 'so-and-so is still alive - why not just ask the author about intention?' Then again it's easy to find examples of cultural and symbolic material being assigned new meanings that came to overshadow the original intended ones. Famous examples would be Hitler's appropriation of the Swastika to represent the Nazi party, turning an Asian symbol of good luck and harmony into one of terror and oppression, or the ongoing game in American politics of claiming that 'the founders intended' this or that outcome of a Constitutional dispute. For politicians, what the author intended by something is of distinctly secondary importance compared to what the public can be made to believe was intended, and so (critics argue) we need to consider how works can be understood as well as how they were intended.

And when I write, I don't think about symbols at all, generally. If I do see something that stands out as likely to be interpreted as symbolism, I'd generally remove it, as I find it trite and annoying. Your anecdote is interesting enough, but you can't extrapolate from that to tell us anything about how often people intentionally adds symbols vs. simply intend to e.g. convey images without thinking about how people might try to analyse it to death.

For sure. I'm just trying to give one example of how symbols can be used. I used to be resistant to this approach to symbolization myself and wrote in pursuit of a more messy realism that rejected such abstractions, but eventually I noticed that the more abstract symbolic stuff was what I actually related to emotionally and accepted that I valued a lot of art more for its emotional and symbolic qualities than for its intellectual or mechanical ones.

Or it was what the author knew how to describe. Or the author likes book stores. Or the author wanted to add in a point about the death of small book stores (personally I'm far more partial to the idea that script writer was being literal and straight forward than what you suggest, but I have no specific basis for this interpretation either). Or (and I have no idea, so I'm just throwing out possibilities here) Meg Ryan was tied to the project from early on and the script writer just happened to think she'd fit well as a book store owner. The options were already limited if wanting to stay realistic once the premise of "owner of small local business falls for big chain guy" was set (e.g. equine accessories was never an option; produce could have been).

To me, absent additional knowledge of what the script writer intended, your suggestion is already well into over-interpretation.

Again I would have been firmly in your camp a few years back. Indeed, having worked for a decade in film, I've seen a lot of projects where the semantic content was subordinated to logistics, eg a story being set in a prison rather than a military base because we couldn't afford to rent a location and proprs for a convincing military base, but there was a disused jail going cheap and we made some last minute story adjustments. That's not such an issue for a big budget film but for small budget films of the sort I work on it happens all the time.

However! I also believe in a phenomenological approach to art, ie that when you encounter a piece of art the impression that it makes on you is the most important thing, unmediated by any critic's interpretation, artist's statement, or even knowledge of the artist's identity. To me the essence of good art is that it compels engagement somehow. So for example, I intensely dislike the paintings of Francis Bacon but I think he's a great artist because I feel compelled to engage with them; somehow he's managed to bypass my preferential filters in order to communicate something I find unpleasant but truthful. I certainly don't want to have a discussion with an art critic about his work because while I find it distressing to look at, that experience of distress is something I wish to explore and understand within myself rather than domesticate by locating it within a critical framework - I'm not so interested in understanding Francis Bacon as I am my reaction to his work. Of course over time I have become a bit interested in Bacon himself, but I think it's important not to lose sight of that first impression, when you see, hear, or read something the first time without any clear cultural context.

So for me the value of criticism is (increasingly) not about answering the question of 'what is this art about' or 'what does this artist mean' but rather 'how do people engage with art' or 'how do we construct meaning', which I suppose reflects a personal slide from Platonism to existentialism.

what

WAY

does the author's use of the PRISON

SYMBOLIZE

the protagonist's struggle - AND

how does this relate

to our discussion of the uses of irony?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3YdjD0OyJc