Literary Analysis and You

I was going to write about something else, but I got distracted by a call for help yesterday.  You can thank Leslee for today's topic.  Welcome, Leslee -- glad to have you aboard.

Literary analysis involves (among other things) the interpretation of a work of literature.  It's the sort of thing that's assigned in college (and advanced high school) English classes.  It can be daunting to the uninitiated; I know it was to me, back in the day.

There is an excellent little book about the sort of writing you'll do in these classes, and it has direct application to fiction writing.  For today's purposes, we can think of Sin Boldly! by David Williams as a handbook for how to excite your English teacher (your reader).

For your English paper as well as your fiction, you want to excite and entertain your reader.  You can do that by giving them something different.  What -- you don't think your teacher will appreciate being entertained by your writing?  Imagine being the teacher giving an assignment to interpret Moby Dick in 5 pages to 3 sections of 90 freshman students each.  You know you're almost guaranteed to receive 270 nearly identical totally boring papers.  And you have to read them anyway.  No fun at all.

Being entertained sounds better than the alternative.  It will affect your grade positively -- they're sure to notice your work among all that leaden sameness.

But entertaining your teacher/reader by presenting the unexpected is not enough.  In English papers like these, the key is to justify your argument.  You can say that Emily Dickinson was a devil worshiper, but you have to back it up.  Find elements of the work in question that (perhaps with a bit of imagination) support your interpretation.  The birds she writes about are singing to the devil -- that's why they do it in the dark, before the sun rises, and why they scatter before God's glorious light of dawn.

The same is true in fiction.  Your story can and should take twists and turns.  It shouldn't be predictable, and it shouldn't be the same old same-old as some other story.  But you need justification for everything your characters do.  The justification here comes in a different form than in the English paper; you won't be writing out arguments to support a character's actions.  Instead you must have laid the groundwork prior to the action, so that what the character does makes sense.  To take the quiet and reserved Emily Dickinson as a fictional character, she would not slit her neighbor's throat and feast on the heart, with a gleam in her eye.  It would be out of character.

Unless we'd earlier been clued-in that she was a devil worshiper.

Ha!


Someday, maybe one of my novels will be analyzed by high school students.  What will they think it "means?"  Hopefully they won't all say the same thing.  I want someone to jump on the fact that the heroine always goes barefoot, and say it means that she's the only one with her feet on the ground.  And someone can say that all the rocky paths the characters walk over symbolizes the difficulties and obstacles they're encountering in their inner journeys.  That's all good.

Some of those students, though, will want "the one true answer":  what does it mean?  If they were to ask me, I'd tell them that it depends.  On them.  Every person brings their own baggage to the interpretation, their psychological makeup, their past, their upbringing, their fears and hopes.  They can't have mine.  I don't even know what my own baggage is.  So, I firmly believe that everyone's interpretation is as valid as the author's.  It may not match the author's interpretation, assuming the author has one, but it is valid all the same.  That's one of the wonderful things about a novel or a poem:  it's open to various interpretations, it's multidimensional.