On Literature and Teaching

  What does a poem mean? The extraordinary Ern Malley hoax T.S. Eliot, surely one of the giants of English poetry and a founding father of the modernist language for it, was once asked what he meant with the line (in his Ash-Wednesday (1930) ): ‘ Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree ’. Eliot’s answer? ‘ I mean ’, he replied, ‘ Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree ’. Conclusion? Don’t ask the author what they meant. Other conclusion? The meaning you’re looking for is not for me to tell you about, it’s up to you to determine. Whether it’s the same as mine or someone else’s is immaterial: you are reading the text, make of it what you want! Those two conclusions are still baffling for some people, and when they are not, they remain difficult to internalize; witness how many times we speak in terms of ‘ The author means that… ’, or ‘ The author suggests that ’. Witness how many times we talk of a book ‘ being about this or that ’, about ‘ the book’...

  Oscar Wilde: ‘It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors’ I was having a discussion with a student not long ago, about a novel and its main character, and how that character – a boy –   changes throughout the narrative. At some point, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, I see, this character has grown – he has developed!’. No, I said, it doesn’t pay to think that way. Instead, you should think: ‘That person has changed, that person has developed’- he’s not a character, he’s not made of cardboard or balsa wood, he’s not a Platonic shadow: he’s real, he lives and breathes like you and me. He’s alive . This idea that a made-up character, in a made-up situation, with made-up parents and friends and occupations, could be real, seems at first illogical. ‘No’ you say, he’s not real: he’s an invention, he’s got no blood in his made-up veins, no feelings in his made-up body and mind – he’s a character in a book of fiction, and as such he cannot exist for himself. His wo...