Literature

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I really hope that these entries are not supposed to be specifically about the stories we read in class.

See, I like to read, and I like to write. I find it annoying to interpret every work. In my opinion, around eleventh grade, the teacher should pass a story to the class, and after the class tries to interpret it, the teacher corrects them all by saying, "OK, no, this story isn't about anything at all. It's just complete junk."

Of course, that can't happen. When a story is written, authors put a great deal of time in, the reader can pick up psychological interpretation that the author didn't even see to an endless extant. There are, supposedly no stupid mistakes, "they are all subconscious attempts to explain ourselves."

There is a class in the Florida colleges that teaches Finnegan's Wake, but since the book is so hard to interpret, the teaching progresses at about fifteen pages, or a chapter, every semester. At the beginning of each semester, the professor just picks off where he left off.

Thank God, not all writers are Joyce, but the thing is, that nearly every book I'm acquainted with can be interpreted to an Nth degree. It is because the author of the book was not God, or Shakespeare, that the books are not so minutely analyzed, but they very well could be.

Take any silly children's book. If there are three of anything, it "should be interpreted" either the id, ego, and superego, or the trinity. If there are any cardinal directions, then they also have immediate meaning. North means discomfort, east is discovery, south is comfort, west is death. (12th grade English, after Frankenstein) Any names of the characters should have their names examined for origin, meaning, or existence in previous literature, etc.

It's like going to an art museum. I don't mind art, but I hate going to art museums. A good picture generally has enough detail to offer new discoveries after twenty minutes of examination. A small museum has at least two hundred such pieces. Over kill.

A book can easily be analyzed and reanalyzed in depth, without approaching a level generally dedicated to Shakespeare or the Bible, for a span of two months. If this is the case, a library really has no need for more than four hundred books.

Commercial break:

OK, we now return...

I think most teachers would like it that way, dwelving into the same book deeper and deeper, until the impossible infinite end. The students, even if they didn't read it, eventually catch on to the story, and the teacher also doesn't need to do so much studying in the process. I still remember studying, in ninth grade, A Separate Peace (Finnegan again…), and being in the group assigned to the symbols. Well, the tree was a baptizing, a starting over point, yadda yadda yadda, and the book was supposed to be an interpretation of WWII. So, I remember giving the theory, somewhat jokingly, that the first word of the book is "I," the last word is "enemy." That means that he was the enemy, i.e. Germany, who betrayed his friend, i.e. Russia, etc. The teacher bought it.

The problem is though, that when teachers are not like this than they cope the highly annoying, "no, that is not what it says" attitude. The story goes that a few years ago, a student wrote a paper on a Frost poem, the teacher told him it was an awful essay, and he had clearly misinterpreted the poem. This guy, clearly feeling that he had miles to go before he slept, wrote to the then-living Frost, sent him the paper, and asked what he thought.

Robert Frost wrote back something in the line of, "Perfect. I couldn't have put it better myself." The student showed it to the teacher, who then said that Frost was wrong. I think they did a bit like that in Back to School, where Dangerfield paid Vonnegon to write a paper for him about one of Vonnegon's books, and the teacher replied that "whoever wrote it, clearly does not understand Vonnegon."

I think we've all had teachers like that, and we all collectively hated them. There is almost no middle ground, and THAT is why I hate interpreting Literature.
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Michael Kadish

"People do not quit playing because they grow old ... They grow old because they quit playing." -Oliver Wendell Holmes