fishingboatproceeds:
justmargaret:
mentalflossr:
It was 1963, and 16-year-old Bruce McAllister was sick of symbol-hunting in English class. Rather than quarrel with his teacher, he went straight to the source: McAllister mailed a crude, four-question survey to 150 novelists, asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work. Seventy-five authors responded. Here’s what they had to say.
IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE AUTHOR PUT IT THERE INTENTIONALLY OR NOT. That is not the point. Reading is not a game of Clue; books are not a mystery that you have to solve by putting all the pieces together. That’s not the point. Find the meaning you want to find in it. That’s what we do with books because that’s what we do in life.
What Margaret said. If the point of reading is merely to understand precisely what the author intended, then reading is just this miserable one-sided conversation in which an author is droning on to you page after page after page and the reader just sits there receiving a monologue.
That’s not reading. That’s listening.
Reading is the active co-creation of a story, complete with all its symbols and abstractions.
To read well, you have to understand that sometimes an oligarchic pig is not just an oligarchic pig. Maybe Orwell intended Animal Farm to be about how dangerous pigs can be. Maybe he had a personal vendetta against pigs. It doesn’t matter. Animal Farm happens to say a lot about how humans organize themselves, and how power and social status shape our understanding of justice. It happens to capture the limits of human empathy, and how those limitations can lead to structural inequality.
I don’t see how it matters at all whether Orwell intended his book to be as good as it turned out to be. So when the story above says that a 16-year-old went “straight to the source,” the article is dead wrong, because every story has two sources: writer and reader.
English teachers forcing me to find symbolism and meaning in books make assigned reading in high school absolutely miserable. It was bad enough that I couldn’t just enjoy the story and spend time with the characters, but they also made me go on some kind of treasure hunt where I had to find something the teacher/school/board of education/someone-who-was-not-me decided was the “correct” thing to find.
As a result, I hated many classic works of literature, and actually resented them and the people who wrote them.
Years later, when I was in my mid-twenties, I spent the summer rereading the books I’d hated in high school, because I figured they were classics for a reason. I read:
Great Expectations - still hated it.
A Separate Peace - liked it, didn’t love it, but that’s a big improvement over how much I despised it when I was in school.
1984 - Loved it. Loved it, loved it, loved it.
Brave New World - Read it just after 1984. Loved it.
Romeo and Juliet - Hated this when I was 14 (who, at 14, is mature enough to appreciate it? What a huge FAIL it is to teach this to 9th graders), and was moved to tears by it as an adult. Went on a bit of a Shakespeare tear as a result, and did Julius Caesar, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Still didn’t understand all of it, but loved every second of it.
All Quiet on the Western Front - When your authoritarian Cold Warrior English teacher isn’t somehow making this book all about how fucking great Reagan is, it’s just amazing.
There were others, but you get the idea, right? I was already an avid reader, so these (hopefully) well-intentioned teachers couldn’t turn me off from reading in general and forever, but both of my siblings wouldn’t pick up a book if you gave them a hundred dollars to do it. I understand that educators want to encourage students to dig into stories and see what they can find in them, and that’s a great exercise, but forcing them to find what some board of education has decided is the One Right Thing To Find does those kids (and did this kid) a huge disservice.
This. This this this. My God, this. So hard. There is nothing that makes reading less appealing than a typical high school English class, and there is nothing that should make it more appealing.
I wrote this recently as an indirect response to a new author who I thought was too focused on plot and not enough on story:
I think there are a few reasons why beginning writers get trapped in Plotland, but the most major hurdle - for people of my generation and nationality, at the very least - has to do with high school English classes. When you tell a bunch of sneering teenagers that the boar’s head in Lord Of The Flies means this and you will be tested on it and don’t you talk back to me, those teenagers are going to grow up hating symbolism and metaphor, deeming it “pretentious” and “artsy-fartsy”. It’s anything but, of course, but I remember when I thought it was, and why. It’s because telling people what they’re supposed to take from a work completely kills any engagement people have with it. When they take something different from it than what’s on the test, they assume they don’t understand it - and, because teenagers are arrogant, they assume it’s the book’s fault, as if it’s a metaphor machine that’s blown a fuse. ”This book is broken!” You know? Couple that with the bloody-minded literalism seemingly peculiar to American discourse (though I’m sure it’s not) and the nasty anti-intellectual streak that permeates that same discourse, and it’s easy to see why so many people sneer at anything “artsy”.
(Not that the Andres Serrano types that sculpt ten-foot dongs out of horse excrement and call the piece “Operation Iraqi Freedom” are doing us a whole lot of favors either, but at least, you know, they’re trying.)
It’s a real shame, because when I talk about, for example, what I wanted to “say” with a story of mine, it’s easier than ever for others to dismiss that as pretentious drivel, even if those same people later talk about loving a part of the story that’s an example of the exact theme they dismissed earlier. There’s a poisonous feeling that stories can’t - and, in more extreme cases, shouldn’t - “say” things, that they should just be entertaining. And, as someone who likes to entertain while secretly infecting you with my ideas, that’s really disturbing.
Super-glad to see that opinion expressed elsewhere.
