There are an awful lot of interpretations out there that have so little connection with the text that one wonders if someone didn't attach something that was meant for a different text.Originally Posted by Neely
There are an awful lot of interpretations out there that have so little connection with the text that one wonders if someone didn't attach something that was meant for a different text.
I haven't read Farenheit 451 but I find it ironic that it is intended as a denunciation of the increasing influence of television and pop culture when, according to Wickipedia, Ray Bradbury is an author of science fiction, fantasy and horror, three of the staples of television and pop culture.
Not a maths scholar JBI?
Yes I know that there is a lot of pretty poor stuff around criticism wise. I remember once reading a scholarly piece on Wilde which tried to make a case that Wilde's poor early writing could be explained by the fact that he had not yet had a true homosexual encounter until he met Robert Ross. It wasn't until he had this relationship that he could fully realise his potential as a writer (or something like that).
The thing is though whether or not we agree with an argument or whether it is phrased well is not really the issue. We can argue against a case, and may be able to do so in better terms, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is an exact right answer, nor should there be unless we want to reduce art to mathematics, heaven forbid.
As for the absolute dross, as in your example, we can just ignore it.
Agreed. It's like the person reads one book, loves it, sees some passing similarity and then tries to take the interpretation of one book and stick it onto another.
I think we can all agree that a good book has to be open to interpretation and not merely dictated to us. Maybe I'm just saying that as a theatre fanatic but the most interesting books are open to interpretation: Lolita, The Great Gatsby...
It's a quality of being vague, but not too vague, allowing the reader to decide.
Was the last line directed at my botched grammar - I don't know what happened when I wrote it, but I must have been out of it (I was studying Chinese, so perhaps that is why the grammar makes absolutely no sense).
Yes absolutely. The same thing goes for all the arts of course, its just that we often think of interpretation as relating to the book only, but naturally you can analyse anything (or almost anything) to the same degree.
Not vague, I would argue, but open, in the sense that certain elements give opportunity for the audience to create their own meanings and interpretations. I wouldn't, for instance, call W. C. Williams' Red Wheelbarrow vague, but more open ended. Likewise, Pound's In a Station of the Metro;
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Invites the reader to form meanings, yet isn't exactly vague, since vague implies there is an intended meaning. Hamlet isn't vague, he is merely elliptical, and doesn't tell people what he thinks (and if he does, he often seems to have thought that out, as to dupe them, and the audience as well). The openness comes from the fact that there is far more going on than what is seen before the audience.
The sense of negative capability that seems referred to in your post is only one aspect - that sort of leaving things out is a method, but even if you are Zola, and try to hammer in all the details, there is still going to be an under layer to everything, which will not easily be understood, and which invites room for interpretation.
No, no, not at all. I merely meant the example you gave "the words chosen here are beautifully written and evoke wonderful images" I didn't even notice any error of grammar. Would you think I could possibly have it in me to be so caustic?
Yes, the good ones leave something for the reader to do. Then there are the ones where everything is laid out for the reader, if the reader can notice it; I am think particularly of The Name of the Rose, in which everything was there. There was no mystery, but other people have indicted that they didn't see it.
You got a nice discussion going, cynara.
Interpretations are inevitable, welcome, and don't make me shirk from literature at all, even if a reading is particularly terrible - in which case I just disregard it, or read it for laughs.
Beckett famously wrote at the end of the Addenda in Watt, 'no symbols where none intended'. That sounds great, but it's probably the most disingenuous thing he ever wrote - to refute its plausibility, look no further than the novel's characters' names (Watt -> What; Mr Knott -> Not / Knot; etc).
And what a great thing that there are so many different readings; were books to be so base and meaningless as to not elicit interpretations, what would be the point of reading them, anyway?
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EDIT: I've reread the OP and realised I didn't really answer it, my post was more based on the discussion that ensued. I have gone through that horrid experience of putting every single detail in a chapter under a microscope for a week or so. It may spoil the reading of a couple of novels then, but the idea that they keep hammering into your head in school is worth a thought: think twice before taking things at face value. An important lesson too, which I sadly ignore most spectacularly every now and then.
Last edited by Mr Endon; 06-06-2009 at 05:49 PM.
you can be both meh and bad at the same time. I could have said, for instance, 40% meh, 40% bad, but the meh ones are often overlapped with the bad ones. Perhaps what I should have said; 80% are meh, with 40% of those being flat out bad.
Last edited by JBI; 06-06-2009 at 06:20 PM.
I think what hurt Gatsby was how much time we spent on it. We were reading and analyzing minutely for about three months. I don't mean to say having a group of fresh opinions can ruin a book, or that translation ruins a book, it's more to do with finding meaning in every phrase. I can literally recite whole chapters of the novel. Instead of remembering the book in a sequence of events i can only picture it in jerky episodes.
Fantasy, horror and science fiction all existed long before television. Pop culture refers to whatever is currently popular, so in older times classics like Dickens and Shakespeare would have been considered the pop culture of their era. So there's nothing wrong with the aforementioned genres or anything ironic about him writing those genres.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for thelips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.
Kyd perhaps, but pop culture as a form never consisted of theatre - keep in mind geographically where the theaters were - generally around municipalities or people with money at least - certainly sea ballads and drinking songs would be closer to "popular" culture, and even folkmusic and dancing in their own silly way - though things were far less text-heavy, so culture as a popular medium, that is, a periodical medium, was less common perhaps than it is today. We could, for instance consider Beowulf pop culture, but I think that doesn't understand the context of its composition - if it was popular, it was popular over time, rather than over geographical space, and popular over time is rather oxymoronic - the power of the text over time is very different than popular in the sense that the most people have experienced it. Dickens clearly was a popular writer, but being removed, we read him very differently today, and hardly as a popular writer (I think people, for instance, at the academic level tend to like books like Bleak House over the more popular Christmas Carrol or Tale of Two Cities). In truth, Zola was a popular novelist, but even he has conquered time in terms of appeal, and has been appropriated into a sort of "artist" chic rather than populist voice. I know, for instance, a specialist in 19th century French Fiction (she is a leading scholar on Zola) who has read countless books that were beyond popular yet nobody today really knows them.
Popular in the sense we have it today, as a textual form rather than oral, a spatially bound rather than time-bound form originated really with the ease of production. Generally, the emergence of printing helped create a more textual society, but what really set off popular culture was the introduction of pulp into the printing world. Instead of loaning libraries controlling the distribution of texts (which around 1800 would go for 300$ a book in today money, often more if the book had many volumes). Keep in mind also, that literacy was also a relatively new phenomenon. Popular culture, in reference to texts ultimately is a second half of the twentieth century phenomenon, unless you count bourgeois romance reading girls as the "mass market".
I don't know, it sounds pretty cool to me, the fact that you can recite whole chapters of the novel is quite an impressive result you have to admit. You don't have to hold on to all the possible ways of reading particular lines in the close readings you did, you can still stand back and enjoy it for what it is, same as I can still read Little Red Riding Hood to my kids and not worry too much about its sexual signification!I think what hurt Gatsby was how much time we spent on it. We were reading and analyzing minutely for about three months. I don't mean to say having a group of fresh opinions can ruin a book, or that translation ruins a book, it's more to do with finding meaning in every phrase. I can literally recite whole chapters of the novel. Instead of remembering the book in a sequence of events i can only picture it in jerky episodes.
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