Interpreting fiction: 5 basic principles to start generating ideas (1)

 

Interpreting fiction: Five basic principles to start generating ideas (1)

 (Today the first two principles, next time the following three)

So there you are: there’s a text in front of you, right there on the table or on your lap, it’s a poem perhaps, a short-story or a novel, and the question you have is: What on earth is this about?

And slowly but surely the famous cry will soon erupt from your lips: I don’t get it!

You read the words and you understand them, but you have that nagging feeling that you’re not seeing ‘what you’re supposed to see’. You stare and you re-read, but no, it’s not happening. You don’t ‘get it’, you don’t know ‘what the message/meaning is’.

There’s no magic formula to solve this problem, no smoking gun you can always find, no short-cut to the themes. Terminology is not going to help much, and reverting to jargon will only obscure what is already opaque. Looking it up online will only restrict your own input, and will fix in your mind interpretations thought up by someone else which you won’t be able to forget – their interpretation will become yours.

So what is the solution – is there even one?

I suggest we take it easy and step-by-step, and see how far we get. Today, it’s about the basic principles of fiction that we want to understand – not just ‘know about’ mind you, not just ‘be aware of’: we need to internalise these ideas and believe in them. We first need to free our minds of some clutter which stands between us and the texts. The following are not philosophical notions about the nature of texts, or deep thoughts on the conceptual essence of this or that: they are very pragmatic, practical, user-friendly ideas that help us bridge the gap between the text and our interpretations of it. The first two today, the following three next time. A concrete, worked-out example is available here, and another is here.

 A] A first principle, and a massively crucial one, is well put by Dan Sperber, famous anthropologist and sociologist – he’s not talking about literature but that doesn’t matter:

‘The true object of any interpretation is a conceptual representation. The error consists in focusing on the object of the representation interpreted rather than on that representation itself’.

This idea I recently discussed in class as ‘The story about an elephant is not about an elephant’. The ‘elephant’ (in that case, in a short short-story by James Robertson) is the narrative vehicle of the story, but that doesn’t mean it is the point of the story. As Sperber says above, a reader will go wrong if they focus their attention on the object (an elephant, say) instead of what the object stands for, represents or symbolises. In the case of this story, the elephant stands for wild-life, or perhaps for our moral standards, or perhaps for what we do to the environment, or for our sense of guilt, or for our indecision…The elephant can really represent all those things and more, and the mistake would be to think about the elephant as elephant, instead of the elephant as a conceptual (i.e. abstract, symbolic, meaningful) representation.

In other words, it’s an elephant but it could be another similar animal (similar in its habitat). The fact that it’s an elephant is, properly speaking, secondary to what the text is about.

 What does that mean for me?

To interpret, you must consider that the elements you are given can be seen on two levels.

Imagine you have a man named John who has kids and they live in a house:

               Level 1 – the surface level –  is what those elements are in the story: John is John, his house is his house, his kids are his kids, the story happens to him, it is about him.

              Level 2 – the referential level - is what they stand for at a more general – and therefore conceptual, and therefore interpretative – level: John is a man like millions, his job is shared by millions, his worries are shared by millions; his house is like so many other houses, where what happens happens in so many other houses; his kids are kids in general, not only his. The story happens to all of us (potentially), it is about all of us (potentially). John is a symbol for all men; his house means to him what ours means to us. To understand the character ‘John’, we must remember that he’s a man before he is a character.

     The surface level of the story is made up of the elements you need so as to understand what is going on.

    The referential level (or the interpretative level if you prefer, the name hardly matters) is what those elements refer to in the world, as general categories – beyond the surface of the text (see a worked-out example here).

 The take-away here is to remember that you must not focus on the wrong aspect of the story, and mistake a plot-device for an important, meaning-laden item. Remember that old meme about a (probably completely apocryphal) Chinese saying: ‘When the wise man points to the moon, the fool look at the finger’? There are many fingers in a story, but only a few moons: make sure to look at (and for) the moon, and don’t get distracted by all the fingers.

 

B] All fiction is metaphorical

A metaphor is a way to talk about A in terms of B; say, Love (A) is talked about in terms of Flower (B); Time (A) is talked about in terms of Money (B) – ‘We’re saving/gaining/wasting time’. In other words, a metaphor has two levels: the surface level, and what it refers to beyond itself. On the surface it says one thing (‘I will destroy her arguments’), and below the surface it refers to something else (‘Argumentation is War’).

And really, fiction is like that too when you think of it: on the surface something is happening, people are talking, moving around, doing things, but we know that all those events and people stand for something else – a theme, an idea, a ‘meaning’. Fiction is both completely true (it comes from people steeped in a culture/time/moment) and metaphorical. It tells us about itself (what happens in the story), and it tells us about other things as well: things are not only what they seem to be. The trick is to keep those two aspects in mind when reading, and create links between them: see each moment in the text as both itself and referring to something else – being a metaphor.

Gertrude Stein is the author of the famous line ‘A rose is a rose is a rose’; many made fun of her (and still do), and this is what she explained: 'You all have seen hundreds of poems about roses and you know in your bones that the rose is not there. Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a…is a…is a…’. Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years’. What she is saying here of course is that a Rose in a poem had become only a symbol, and she wanted to remind people that a rose is, well, a flower first. Fiction is metaphorical, and so are roses. And yet roses are real as well – that’s the next point we'll explore in the next blog, along with two more principles.

 

• The James Robertson short-story alluded to comes from his wonderful collection: 365 (Penguin, 2014) – he wrote one story each day for a year, each exactly 365-word long. Not all of them work of course, but many do. He also wrote the fantastic novel Joseph Knight.
• The example of the metaphor ‘Argument is war’ comes from the classic Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors we live by (Chicago, 1980).
• The Stein quote is from a lecture she delivered in England, and is in Renate Stendhal: Gertrude Stein in words and pictures (Algonquin, 1984). Say what you like of Stein, she was something else.