To Analyze, or Not to Analyze?

Office Hours

Q.

Dear Mister Saunders;

There you are, on a what-is-so-rare-as-a-day-in-June day, reclined on a halcyon hillside watching an endless parade of cumulonimbus float by. There, whispers the muse on your right shoulder, a duck, an elephant, castles, a tall ship under full sail. Hold your horses, cowpoke, says the muse on your left, those are just puffs of aerosols consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets suspended in the atmosphere. 

Ah, the eternal conundrum, the tug of war between imagination and reality. While the right brain strives for abstraction, metaphor, symbolism, the left brain struggles for certainty, objectivity, the material. Where's the ideal interface? How much critical analysis is necessary to enjoy a story? Is it sufficient to read for the pleasure of the experience? Are all impressions, conclusions, interpretations equally valid? Is a story whatever the reader thinks it is? Or, to paraphrase Orwell, "All interpretations are equal, but some interpretations are more equal than others"?

CS Lewis: "Trying to see through everything is the same as not seeing anything at all."

Donald Bartheleme: "By turning a mystery to tatters...you have tatters, not mystery."

Cormac McCarthy: "I think [rhetorical analysis] is a good way to ruin the reading experience."

Michael Chabon: "I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain...it [boils] down to entertainment and its suave henchman,

pleasure."

Raymond Carver: "I'm not following any kind of formula or program for myself...I'm just writing stories." 

James Joyce: "Every story should start with 'Once upon a time'."

John Barth: "I just like to horse around with words."

Sigmund Freud: "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Padgett Powell: "Fiction is just made-up people doing made-up things - MUPDMUT: pronounced 'MUP-DEE-MUTT'."

Well, that's all fine and dandy, but consider the counterpoint:

Albert Camus: "Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth."

Kurt Vonnegut: "The reason writers write is that they want to change the world."

Leonard Bernstein: "A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them, and its essential meaning is the tension between the 

answers."

Karl Kraus: "A writer [is one] who can make a riddle out of an answer."

Ok, then. Perhaps inside that that toothsome chocolate coating of reality is hidden a soft creamy dollop of symbolism...or metaphor. But what if the literary gourmand is positive that salted caramel is strawberry nougat? 

One day, John Barth entered a classroom to conduct a course. The previous session had been led by a TA who attempted by diagram to explain of one of Barth's works. The chalkboard was covered with lines, arrows, stick figures and other assorted hieroglyphics. Barth regarded the mess for a long minute, turned to the class, raised a finger and said, "So that's what it's about!"

David Byrne: "People have interpreted [the Big Suit stage costume] as meaning like this is the archetypal businessman imprisoned in his suit...but it wasn't my intent to...kind of make fun of businessmen."

Raymond Carver: "You get the strangest letters in the mail; people write and tell you what your stories mean. I named a character Bud in one of my stories and someone told me that it must be short for Budweiser and the good times."

Carrol's "Alice" stories were remodeled by fabulists as a roman a clef, a satire on mathematics, and a riff on existentialism. Although Baum introduced "Wizard of Oz" as a 'modernized fairy tale' meddlers argued for elaborate themes of political satire, a treatise on monetary policy, allegories of class, race, or gender relations, and manifestoes on both populism and capitalism. And "Ferdinand" the sweet children's story of a gentle bull that preferred smelling flowers to skewering matadors was twisted into metaphors for pacifism, communism, socialism, manic-depressive tendencies and both pro- and anti-Franco-style fascism. Douglas Hofstadter, in his preface to the twentieth anniversary edition of 'Godel, Escher, Bach' lamented the lengths to which readers would go to misinterpret his thesis: "I sometimes feel", he groused, "as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message into an empty chasm and nobody heard me." Does it seem as if oftentimes a writer can't scrawl a paragraph or two without over-active imaginations turning quotidian processions of clouds into fantastical menageries? 

Kurt Vonnegut: "Paul Engle, the founder of the writers' workshop at Iowa [told me] that if the workshop ever got a building of its own these words should be inscribed above the door: 'Don't Take It All So Seriously'." 

Should readers probe for 'meaning' knowing that chances are at least 50/50 that they'll likely get it backasswards? Should writers care if readers get it wrong? Is literature really inscrutable knots of riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas, or just a lot of MUP-DEE-MUTT?

A.

Well, all right then!  Thank you for this collection of quotes and this thoughtful, essential question, to which, I’m afraid, I have a pretty simple answer. 

You ask, “Is it sufficient to read for the pleasure of the experience?” to which I would answer with a resounding YES.  It is totally sufficient.  It’s all there is. 

It’s also necessary, if we have any desire to understand the thing better, to first read it for pleasure.  Without that first read, we’ve got nothing to work with.  I always read for pleasure (reaction) first.  For sure.

And, for my money, it’s perfectly fine if a person wants to stop there.

However, if a person doesn’t want to stop there – if they feel that there’s (even more) pleasure to be had, by way of asking what makes the thing tick (why it gave them pleasure, or didn’t), then I’m good with that too – and I belong firmly in this camp.  Approaching stories technically has definitely helped my work – although, as with all things, I find I have to do it “just right” – not too much and not too little.

So, I think the level of critical analysis “necessary to enjoy a story” is zero. (We enjoyed plenty of stories when we were little, non-analytical, kids.)

I remember reading an art critic who said that that first split-second after our eye falls on a painting is all that matters, and I agree with this: the way we feel after a first read of a story is the whole game, and most stories in the world only get read once anyway.

When I’m writing, I want you to get blown away on your first reading, while having no thoughts about how I did it – I want you living that story with all of your senses, caring deeply, all caught up in it.

But later, if you come back to it curious about how it works, I think you’ll find evidence that….well, it works for certain reasons. And that’s what I’ve been working on: making it work.

Did I know everything I was doing, along those lines?  No.  Did I think it all up beforehand?  God, no. 

Did I, in the end “approve that message,” after many adjustive readings, and therefore, was the story exactly what I “intended,” even though I may not be aware of all the things it is going to do to a reader?

Yes.

You also ask, “Are all impressions, conclusions, interpretations equally valid?”

No, not in my view: there are the “facts” of a story and those are not negotiable. (In “Enemies,” the story we’re discussing now behind the paywall, the doctor’s son definitely dies, and Abogin’s wife has definitely run off with another man.

There are, of course, meanings that are less “factual,” and those can debated – that’s the fun of it (for me, anyway).  Why did Alyosha the Pot look surprised at the end of the story named after him?  What are we to make of that substitute cat in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain?” 

Good readers can differ on the answers to these questions and good stories often push us exactly into this realm, where esthetic questions blend over into moral-ethical or political ones.

But in debating these things, there is some (story) logic involved, and part of what we’re trying to do here at Story Club is get more rigorous about that part – again, we’re learning how and where stories make their meaning.

There’s a way of approaching a story that tries to account for how the meaning got made, by looking at what happened and what that thing caused. That’s my main approach - looking at causation - and it relates closely to the mindset I’m in when I’m writing a story.

So, as for your question about whether a story is “whatever the reader thinks it is.”  Well, I think not.  (People often misread the ending of “Victory Lap,” for example, believing that Kyle actually kills the abductor.  But I can walk you through a careful close reading that demonstrates that this is not the case, per the story itself.)

Although, at the ultimate level, yes, by definition, I guess a story is “whatever a reader thinks it is.”  If a person, “misunderstands” or “misinterprets a story” – well, it is what it is.  They have experienced it that way.  Close reading and analysis will be able to correct that misreading – but only if they’re open to doing that work.

But sometimes they’re not.

Along those lines…I once got an email from a reader of The New Yorker about my story, “Winky.”  In that story, a brother decides to kick his somewhat troubled sister out of the house, after attending a self-help seminar that encouraged him to be assertive in seeking success.  The reader (I thought) would understand that this brother is in the wrong.  In the end, he makes the “right” decision (according to us) but regrets it.  To me, this was a surprising accomplishment of the story: the brother feels terrible and weak, even as “we” feel relieved that he’s done the right thing.

Well, after the story came out I got an email from a guy thanking me for the beautiful story, which had helped him, so much, in his personal life.  Fishing for a compliment, I asked him to explain.  Well, he wrote back, his 70-year-old mother was living with him and, though she was very healthy and mentally sharp and all of that, my story had convinced him to put her in a home (!).  I wrote back frantically, doing just a ton of analyzing, so that he’d see that he’d drawn exactly the wrong conclusion – but he wrote crisply back, saying thanks, but the thing was done, and thanking me again.

So much for literature having a positive effect on the world. :)

But I think you’re asking about something else: our tendency to confuse reducing/explaining a story with actually (totally) experiencing it.

I get the sense, from your question, that you aren’t a fan of overanalyzing stories and thus sucking the magic out of them.  I agree with you about this. It’s easy for person doing story-analysis to stray from the “Why did this move me?” stance and drifts over into mere conceptual analysis, i.e., that misguided practice that involves thinking that the way to “get” a story is to wring the theme out of it, and then you’re done.

To me, good analysis is the opposite of that.  Sure, a story has “themes” but that word is just a placeholder for the dynamic experience one has while reading it, and the way the mind moves around and grows and changes.

So, what I try to do is: 1) experience the story like a little kid sitting by a campfire, 2) analyze/explore, by noting where I was moved and then trying to understand why, and 3) forget (2) when I go back to work on my own stuff, except, maybe, I retain some visceral sense of having been informed by it.

Here at Story Club, I’ll confess, I have a slight procedural challenge.

Normally, when I’m teaching a story like, say, “Lady with Pet Dog,” at Syracuse, I have to do it all in one three-hour session.  If I were to write up my notes from that (which I have done), it’s about twenty pages – too long for a Substack post, for sure.  So that means I need to divide that session up into, say, five or six shorter ones and, in practice, it sometimes may feel like we’re making room to kick a dead horse, if you see what I mean – to overanalyze the story and blunder out into territory that 1) has nothing to do with the way the writer was thinking as she wrote it and 2) may serve to fuel the misconception that reduction of a story = understanding it.

I haven’t quite figured out a solution to this, to be honest.

Except to say that I encourage all of you to take what’s useful and jettison the rest.  If you ever start to feel that the extent of our engagement with a particular story here is not beneficial, I definitely encourage you to check out for awhile.

This is all supposed to be helpful (period).

For what it’s worth, I think a lot of writers feign a sort of “What, me worry?” attitude after a story is done.  That is, they want to appear to be savants, intuitive wizards: non-analytical, non-technical.  For them, you know - it just happens. And, for sure, in my case, there’s not much overt analytical thinking going on when I’m writing.  But there is something going on, and that’s what I like to teach the most – the idea that there is a particular way that the mind works on a story – how it makes decisions, how it revises, how iteration helps, how the mind manages, somehow, to be wiser than the writer himself.

That’s mostly what I think we’re talking about here - not symbols, themes, motifs, etc.

Can this be talked about?  Sure.  Is it easy?  No.  But my view is, since something happens as a work of art moved toward completion, we can talk about whatever that is AND its effect on the final product’s internal dynamics.

If we want to talk about that, that is.

And only if we want to.