Literature itself

I'm kicking off with a post that goes a little against the grain of most of my literary analysis, and talks more about literature itself. Please do tell me what you think - personally, I'm not sure if I disagree with what I'm saying more than I agree!

This blog is indebted to my best friend Jess, whose art analysis blog I have shamelessly copied (check it out here). In one her most recent posts she more or less argued that what is most important about a piece of art work is what it means to the artist (or, in our case, writer) and their intentions.

I tend to disagree. It is probably the case that to its writer a text will be at its greatest in connection to their original thoughts, but this doesn’t necessarily hold true for the reader. There are a myriad of ways you can read a text – and while some may be more ‘correct’ than others, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are the best way for that particular reader, at that particular time.

Let’s take the last few lines of TS Eliot’s Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock as an example:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown

There are so many ways you can read it. On a fairly shallow level, I could read it when I’m feeling depressed about guys, and see it speaking to be about how tantalizing, yet ultimately unattainable, having a boyfriend is. But I could also read it and see the power of art; or the ultimate futility of art. I could see the alienation of any particular individual of subsection of society I chose to associate with. I could see it as expressing the struggle to live a meaningful existence in the modern world – and that could be in the sense of the underpinning modernist cry for help at the time Eliot was writing (early 20^th century), which would probably be deemed the most 'correct' interpretation; or it could be in relation to today, or society even in 300 years time. If I read those lines in conjunction to the whole poem then again I may come to a different interpretation.

I could recognize an allusion to Plato’s cave and theory of the Forms because of what I’ve just been studying in Philosophy; also, I have a vague recollection that one of the lines alludes to a poem by Laforgue, a French symbolist poet, and that could lead me to a different interpretation. I could see the mermaids as representing Prufrock’s fear of sexual impotence and rejection. I could take a more Freudian approach and suggest that what makes a mermaid such a powerful yet alien image is the phallic aspect of their tails. I could link the “white hair” to the lines immediately preceding the section I’ve pulled out, and see Prufrock’s fears over ageing. I could even not feel any negative emotion at all: I could see it as a triumph over the illusionary; or the beauty of the image could uplift me.

Some days Prufrock might be me; some days he might be a certain a group of people; some days he might be everyone; and some days he might just be Prufrock.

To quote AS Byatt, “think of this - that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other”. Every time we read a text we bring to it a part of ourselves and our past experiences, our prejudices and preconceptions. We should gain from it a similar insight into the writer; and from these two halves a meaning and a feeling is created which is, if almost imperceptibly, unique to that particular reading.

Between all these different interpretations one thing stays constant: the poem itself.

Eliot said himself that “real poetry can communicate before it is understood” and one of the reasons I chose to use those lines is that the first few times I read the poem I didn’t think about what they meant at all. When I first realised that I felt bad: I’m an English Lit student, I’m supposed to do that sort of thing naturally. But I think it was really a mark of their power: the emotion they triggered was too raw.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the poem itself isn't in the interpretations. It is in the rhyme scheme; it is in the repetition in the penultimate stanza; it is in the cadence of single words like “lingered” or “combing”; it is in the pervasive sounds of the sea.

That isn’t to say that the words themselves are more important than the emotion or meaning they convey. In fact, I’d argue for the opposite. What makes something remarkable, in my view, is the effect it has: on the reader, the writer, or a particular time period. I just think there are times when you need to remind yourself of the text itself. This is sounding heretical for a self-professed English Lit geek, but it isn’t really. I love English because I love asking questions about a text and digging deeper behind it. I love how literature can draw from every aspect of knowledge and how, in learning more about a text, we are really learning more about ourselves.

Ultimately however, I don’t read a text to analyse it, but to simply to read it. Let’s return to Eliot for a moment and to the end, not of Prufrock, but of The Waste Land: “shantih, shantih, shantih”. Literally translated, my name means “the peace with passes understanding”. Perhaps it’s just egotism, but I can’t help but feel this fits well with English Literature: its very core really does "pass understanding".

At it's heart Literature is more than a representation of life, or a means to understand it: it has a life itself.

Related Literature: Terry Eagleton, An Introduction to Literary Theory; TS Eliot, Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land; AS Byatt, Possession