Did I dress up for Halloween? Not really. I always wear black and I’m wearing black today, so I basically look the same as I do every other day of the year. My costume is on the inside.
I had a couple of interviews published over the weekend, and in the comments of one, a reader tried to inform me that I was in error to have a “personal” interpretation of a piece of literature. This reader informed me that I was missing or ignoring the “universal meaning” of the book in question. Well, holy shit. My surprised face, let me show you it.
This idea is not new to me. After all, I have a couple literature degrees, so I’ve spent plenty of years in intellectual servitude to the “universal meaning” of literature that any given professor espoused. When it was for a grade, I could regurgitate the meaning I was supposed to have absorbed from a novel, play, poem. I could reproduce the meaning traditionally ascribed to the author of the piece.
Once I got free, however, I started having my own interpretations of meaning that didn’t require me to check in with anybody else, including the author. It was a pretty radical experience, even inside my head, to not check in with the dominant cultural point of view as I read. Having been trained to view books from that POV, though, it’s easy to slip back into that mode. To have discussions about literature based on the perspective of middle-aged upper class white men.
I almost let it happen this weekend, but then I remembered that I hadn’t read Lolita as a middle-aged upper class white man. I read Lolita as a working class pre-pubescent girl. While it’s all well and good for Nabokov to have had specific intentions, I was under no obligation to feel what he wanted me to feel. I experienced the book from my own particular perspective, one distinctly different from the received wisdom about the “meaning” of Lolita.
So today, on the inside, I’m the default reader. My interpretation of a book’s meaning is valid. If you want, you can join me in being the default reader. It’s easy and it doesn’t require grease paint. Just go through the day feeling confident that your perspective and interpretation of any piece of literature is correct. If we make it through today, we’ll try again tomorrow, until it’s not a costume.
And if you’re curious, my two interviews are here:
My November newsletter goes out tomorrow with more deleted scenes from All the Ugly and Wonderful Things. There’s still time to sign up.
Bryn Greenwood 
Flashbacks of grad school flooding my brain!
1) I think it was Stanley Fish who said it doesn’t matter what the author intended or even what literary scholars think: it’s reader(s) and their community, their cultural context, who determine what a work of literature “means.”
2) Postmodernism laughs at the idea of “universal meaning.” Fuck that! There is no universal meaning! We each bring our own experience to a book and read it through that lens of meaning. (See Fish.)
3) I’m guessing the reader who suggested you were ignoring the “universal meaning” of the book was over 50 and took his last literature class back in the 70s-early 80s. (I also use the masculine pronoun deliberately: this sounds a lot like mansplaining, aka “I know more about your book than you, little lady.”) French deconstructionism turned literary theory on its head and it hasn’t recovered since. That said, I did have a couple of professors who snorted in contempt and told me I wasn’t much of an English literature scholar if I knew nothing! Nothing! about The Faerie Queen or Chaucer. (Which I did know a fair amount about: I just wasn’t interested in focusing on them—what was the point, when the library was packed with works about those texts, and I had already said I was reading in American literature?)
Every work of art, whether visual, musical, or literary, lives in the heart of its audience. If a reader loves a novel for entirely personal reasons, it’s succeeded, maybe more so than the novel lauded by literary critics who once wrote theses in Spenser or on Beowulf.
I thought it was so funny to have “personal” interpretation given lesser importance, when really, our own personal response to literature is pretty much what makes art special.
Enjoying this discussion. Especially when HG said “Fuck that.” I thought I was the only 60 year old saying that. 😛
No, no. I know that is wrong.
I read read read read. So much, it’s probably an addiction.
Hahaha. Laughing at Bryn’s “My surprised face, let me show you it.”
I should have gotten some literary degrees. But, I just don’t express myself all that well. I’m better off reading and working in the lab. 🙂
It sure is interesting to listen to you guyses, though!
I just finished reading A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman. Fun!
Lauri, I think we’ll redefine what turning 60 is about. I’m going to punk shows and listening to new music now. I swear, in moderation, mainly because I’m aware my grandkids pick up on everything I say: otherwise, why hold back now, especially when everyone dismisses us? (I get pissed when I see fashion articles saying “Women over 50 shouldn’t wear….”) Ana Navarro, the GOP commentator on CNN, is kinda my hero now for yelling “pussy” at a Trump supporter on TV.
A degree in literature is overrated, but I’m glad I went to grad school. It made me think harder and write better, thanks to the great advisor I had while I was a student. But it did ruin me somewhat as a reader: it’s hard to just sit and enjoy a book. I always feel like I should be analyzing it and tearing apart. 😦
If anyone says to me, “Sixty is the new 40,” Imma gonna smack them upside the head. I have more confidence and strength at 60 than I ever did at 40, when I felt guilty for not volunteering more for my kids’ school events (total waste of time!). I know now there are times where it’s valuable to volunteer, and other times where it’s just fuckery. Hah, I said it!