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."
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.