While the language of literature communicates in ways far more complex and nuanced than syllogistic reasoning, it also moves well beyond the bounds of simple analogy. The form of a work of literature itself works to instigate meaning. To put this into a formula, one could say Form=Content; the way something is written communicates what it is “about.” Consider meter and rhyme or slant/near rhyme in poetry, for example, and how these harbor and nurture a work’s meaning. A poet like Emily Dickinson frequently used “slant rhyme” in subtle and powerful ways. In the last stanza of “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” we find:
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down -
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing - then -
According to the rhyme scheme of the poem, that final word “then” should rhyme with “down.” It nearly does, but not quite. And what about those infamous dashes, how they bookend that word, disrupting things further? The last line gives us the same three beats each of the other last lines of the quatrains in the poem do, but this last beat feels so unnecessary, and also so incomplete, like a piece of music not ending on the dominant note/chord. There is no resolution, not even in the rhyme—and all this set against the strange description of dying as hitting “a world at every plunge.” How is dying a series of “plunges”? In what sense is one falling through different “worlds”? Is dying itself being cast as a metaphor for how she lives, “dying” through layers of understanding as she gets progressively closer to a wiser, more authentic self—that final “then” suggesting still more layers to come? While I could write about the poem for many pages, my point here is that works of literature communicate with us through innumerable, often nearly invisible devices—their final “intent” only to provoke thought.
But literature classrooms all too often ignore these intersections of form and meaning, encouraging us instead to go hunting for symbols. Consider perhaps the greatest of all AmLit. symbols, Gatsby’s green light. Google “green light Great Gatsby,” and you will receive untold numbers of hits, pages and pages of references from sites promising students better grades, to essays you can outright purchase, to graduate thesis and published, well-known works of “literary analysis.” You will find the green light stands for Gatsby’s love of money and his envy, that it speaks to Fitzgerald’s own lifelong desire for wealth and fame…and on and on. Many of the arguments are quite convincing, elaborate, impressive. But what most of them miss, especially those aimed directly at students writing papers on the novel, is that the green light is Jay Gatsby’s symbol, not necessarily Fitzgerald’s. Fitzgerald has imagined and set in motion a character who sees the green light as a mysterious way of pinpointing where Daisy’s house is across the bay, and it clearly has a profound meaning for him.
But it gets still more complicated: Nick Carraway is ostensibly writing the novel. These are his words. At one point he even writes, “Reading back what I have written so far, I fear I may have given you the wrong impression…” Fitzgerald has written a work he envisions being written by (not just narrated by) another character, who in turn envisions his character, Gatsby, as being obsessed with the green light. So the symbol is now Nick’s and Gatsby’s (and Fitzgerald’s)—the “symbolic meaning” of the green light many layers deep. And, of course, Nick has his own, grandiose symbol, one that is googled at least as much as the green light, the eyes of T.J. Eckleburg….
So, the better approach might be to address why Fitzgerald might have enshrouded this all within so many different perspectives. What might he be inviting us to think about in terms of the human capacity to create symbols, echoed in that famous last page where Nick considers human beings’ incredible “capacity for wonder?” Far too many “analysis” of the novel fail even to acknowledge these are all Nick Carraway’s words, Gatsby his creation, perhaps even a projection of what he wants to be (they are the same age, and just happen to live right next door to each other)….
To read literature well most of us must dispense with things we were “taught” to do in our high school and college English classes; I know I had to. The insistence to “understand” literature in simple, reductive terms that so many profs and English teachers demand from us can do lasting harm, setting up an unnecessary antagonism with books considered “literary.” When I show students a poem like the Edson poem from my last post, they get upset that they “don’t get it,” almost as if it’s the fault of the author, as if artists take secret delight in embedding indecipherable meaning inside their work. I might then go all in and show them a quote from Gertrude Stein’s truly impenetrable book (or rather, untranslatable back into ordinary language), Tender Buttons, where we find lines like these:
“A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing.”
One’s brain freeze when faced with this odd conglomeration of words comes primarily from having learned that words on the page need to have discernible, resolvable meaning. But why don’t we put those same demands on music or painting? I look at abstract painting in large part to admire the juxtaposition of colors and shapes that don’t overtly represent anything in the lived world just as I listen to music’s harmonies or dissonances with nothing in my brain screaming at me to “make sense of it,” to reduce it to a univocal, argumentative statement. I enjoy reading Stein because she forces me just to listen to words colliding with each other in ways I had not expected. She also invites me to consider why I can’t help but long to “make sense” of it, to think about how language communicates in so many ways, often non-rationally. She has somehow managed to utterly strip away logic and coherence leaving something pleasing that finds its way into my mind—if I let it work on its own terms.
The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed that all communication through language (artistic and ordinary) relied as much on what was not said as what was said, arguing that even what we might consider our least “artful,” syllogistically grounded expressions contain all manner of “silent” expressive gestures, claiming—artfully—that “language is silence,” that it is “like a footprint in the sand,” that it works much more like “the mute arts” (painting) than we might ever have imagined all the time….
In the words of Gertrude Stein, “A fact is that when the direction is just like that, no more, longer, sudden and at the same time not any sofa, the main action is that without a blaming there is no custody.”
Upgrading to a paid subscription will help me greatly in the creation of this newsletter (and in paying my bills). You can make a one-time contribution HERE.
You can listen to my podcast on the works of Ernest Hemingway HERE
You can watch my introduction to my YouTube series on Film Noir HERE
i really enjoyed this. wonderful stuff.
Elegantly expressed and supported, Arnie, and spot-on. Read e.e. cummings "since feeling is first" for a beautiful perspective from the writer about intention. I have spent the past few years undoing what my education taught me and I am becoming a more honest (and I believe better) writer for it.