Wax On, Wax Off

Way back when -- in high school -- I used to butt heads with English teachers when it came to interpreting a given text. In my little mind, I found it outrageous to try to read too deeply into the written word. It made me uncomfortable and annoyed to assign any meaning that may or may not have been originally intended. Most of the time, my argument was something to the tune of "Couldn't the author actually mean what he says?" and "Why must we assume everything is symbolic?"

The whole reading comprehension thing plain old escaped me and I have the SAT scores to prove it. Plus, a stubborn attitude and unwillingness to resort to Cliff's Notes (like most of the kids on the honor roll) probably didn't help me out much.

So, now that I'm older (and working on the wiser), what would I tell my sixteen year-old self about interpreting a text?

Well, for starters, I'd tell her that she was absolutely right to question her authority.

Next, I'd let her in on a little secret that those silly teachers were inexplicably keeping to themselves. It's not that we have to assign meaning to other people's words, it's that we get to. It's our privilege as readers to chose to stay on the surface or dive down as deep as we can go. Once the author has put it out there, the words become ours to understand through the filter of our own experiences. If we want to think about the era during which the text was written, well that's entirely up to us. If we don't feel like to considering possible symbolism of a fig tree, then screw the damned tree already.

Last night, I started reading The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time (yea, yea, the first time, I know). This edition has a foreword by Tolkien in which he addresses this issue of the reader's interpretation of his words. He actually gets quite defensive that these books are not allegory to the World War II era (when he wrote them), as many people have extrapolated. Then he makes a point that I wish I'd known how to articulate in high school.

Tolkein states that "an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience" and "the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex." Then he refers to his own experiences during World War I, which affected the entirety of his adult life. Basically, he's rejecting the assumption that a book is allegory for the day in which is written as limiting. It doesn't mean that it cannot be, at times, but it is certainly not a rule of reading (take that Dr. Fussell!).

The part of the foreword that sat me straight up in bed is his comment that readers often confuse "applicability" with "allegory." Aha! There it is!

This is why Shakespeare can be so wonderfully and shockingly relevant, even in the twenty-first century. Human nature hasn't really changed all that much for the last several centuries, has it? The way we treat each other and the things we do to one another are just as beautiful and just as shitty as they ever were. The stories written about them, however are almost always applicable to one reader of one era or another. The only things that really change are the circumstances, the scenery, the outfits.

Tolkein has forever endeared himself to me with his stubborn stand that the trilogy isn't allegory, goddammit. A little bit on the defensive, stubborn side, but also willing to allow the reader to have their own experience with a text...so long as they know the author might or might not have wanted it that way. He and I would have been great friends.