Photo by 🇸🇮 Janko Ferlič on Unsplash
Do you happen to know any languages other than your primary?
I could assume that all of you reading this have a primary language of English, but I could be wrong. Maybe English is your second language, which would answer my first question. Maybe this website is being translated, which would be totally awesome. Either way.
I’m terrible with languages. It would seem that God saw fit to gift me with a skill for one language and one language only. I might be good at English, but I am just about the worst when it comes to trying to learn other languages. My worst grades in college came from my Latin 2001 class when they actually expected us to read literature in Latin. It was so bad.
The only reason I passed Latin 2002 is because I had a professor who was older than the world itself, an adorable little old man who had been at UGA for almost 50 years, who played the clavichord on Fridays and would give you at least a B if he saw that you were putting the effort into his class. Nice man. I literally owe him my English degree, because…yeah.
Let’s ignore the fact that I could have had him for Latin 2001 and gotten a B if I hadn’t dropped his class a couple years earlier in order to fit bowling into my schedule. That one is on me.
I would say that I’m digressing, but that would be an understatement. My initial point with the whole language discussion was to talk about the process of reading a document or sign or some form of literature in that other language.
If you’ve never tried to read something in a foreign language, then you may not understand where I’m coming from, but it can be a difficult task. If you happen to know the language, then great. You can probably just translate what it says and be on your way. Otherwise, you’re trying to read the words or the symbols as best as you can, looking for any type of familiarity.
We are fortunate that English pulls so heavily from both Romantic and Germanic language families. A lot of the world’s most common languages all branch off of and into English pretty seamlessly, meaning we can usually interpret some of what we’re seeing. Perhaps we wouldn’t be so lucky with anything Cyrillic or any of the Asian languages that rely entirely on different symbols, but you take the good with the bad.
“Okay. Either the pavement is really hot up ahead, or we should probably just not go there.” (Photo by Ivo Marinkov on Unsplash)
Now when you’re trying to interpret something, can you just make it up as you go along?
Well…yeah. You can. You can pretend that this foreign language says whatever you want it to. You may not be correct, but you can certainly pretend.
But either way you look at it, these languages are really pretty limited in how they can be interpreted. Those words might have a few different meanings, but even then you can generally figure it out based on context.
So why is it that we act like we can just make up whatever interpretation we want when it comes to literature in our own language?
Seriously. It makes no sense.
I don’t really know when the discourse changed, but it seems that we don’t really care about the meaning behind a work so much as what we want it to mean.
And lest anyone get too haughty here, this isn’t something we can just pawn off on the “uneducated,” is it? No, this little problem can be directly attributed to an extremely irresponsible and self-important academic establishment (Oh, dear. Did I really just use that phrase?) that believes their own words matter more than the words on the page.
As far as I’m concerned, there are only two ways to interpret a piece of literature: You can either interpret what the author wants to say, or you can interpret the work in the context of how it displays a certain truth or idea.
Let me give you an example of what I’m saying. The esteemed H.G. Wells wrote one of my favorite books, The Time Machine. I love that book so much. It also happens to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction, and it deals with the social inequities between the working class and the leisure class in the late 1800s. That is a valid interpretation of Wells’ masterpiece, though not the only one.
The primary “romantic” relationship in the book is between our unnamed protagonist and a pink-skinned little Eloi woman named Weena. You could use their relationship as an example of the relational difficulties between people from different cultures. Now, is this idea what the book is about? Not at all. This concept isn’t even all that widely explored in the book. But you could argue that it exists.
While these two ideas sound identical, they aren’t. The second is more a question of comparison or explanation. It’s what I do all the time in my writing, where I pull an example of some movie or book character and use them as an example of what I’m trying to prove.
Now there’s no real consequence from discussing the relationship dynamics in The Time Machine. Who cares? I don’t think it’s exactly accurate to say that the book is about that topic, but it doesn’t change anything.
Such is not always the case, though. I recently watched the 1984 classic They Live!, a movie about aliens secretly living among us and controlling everything. In this movie, wrestler Roddy Piper plays a regular joe who finds a pair of special glasses that enable him to see the aliens. According to director John Carpenter, the movie is about how the wealthy and the powerful take advantage of the rest of us in order to maintain their positions of privilege.
Well, in 2017, Carpenter had to publicly debunk a popular theory about the movie that was running rampant in certain circles. A lot of people were saying that the movie was about how Jewish people were secretly in charge of the world and how we were all at their mercy.
“I have come here to chew bubble game and to destroy Jewish space lasers…and I’m all out of bubble gum!” (Image property of Universal Pictures/Alive Films)
This is where my problem with interpretation comes into play. If you want to use the movie as an example of people being controlled and you want to say that we are all being brainwashed by the Jewish elite, “Just like the aliens in They Live!” then you know what? You can do that. I don’t exactly respect you as a human being, but you can do that. However, I also think that the director of the movie is well within his rights to defend his work from being connected to such false interpretations.
It’s okay for an artist to tell the audience that they are mistaken.
Academics will use concepts like “the intentional fallacy” to give themselves carte blanche when it comes to interpreting media and literature, and there is a healthy amount of doubt that can be had when an artist tells you exactly how to interpret their work, but all of these opposing forces have to be taken in conjunction with each other.
If you can effectively explain your interpretation of a work, based primarily on the work itself and the appropriate historical context and biographical knowledge of the author, then fine. That’s great. I’m all for that.
Goodness, this is why things like dictionaries of symbols in literature matter, to help us put symbols in the proper historical context. If you don’t believe me, consider this: An author in 1873 might have conjured a very different image by mentioning the flower known as the columbine, but an author writing after 1999 had better realize what most people are going to think when they hear that word.
I read a book recently called What Time Devours by A.J. Hartley, about a missing Shakespeare play that a detective has been hired to find. In it, the English professor who wrote the book lampoons this bizarre academic obsession by including a Shakespeare society that meets to discuss Shakespeare, but never talks about the plays. They talk about social issues and fashion and everything tangentially related to the plays, but never the plays themselves. That was a wonderful little side story.
In college, I took a class about analyzing literature through different critical lenses. We were supposed to read Kate Chopin’s masterful The Awakening and, over the course of the semester, write eight different two-page papers wherein we discussed what the book meant based on a different perspective each time.
There is certainly immense value in being able to look at the world through different perspectives, and it is important to recognize that people will embrace and analyze art differently based on their own lived experiences, but when we get too wrapped up in our own perspective, we fail to see what the art teaches us and instead only see ourselves in the art. While it can be incredibly powerful to see how art changes in our eyes, we need to make sure that we also allow the work to change us. We need to make sure that we leave plenty of room to let the work be itself rather than what we want it to be.
Let me tell you this. As a writer, I certainly have an intent when I’m writing. I know what I’m trying to say. That doesn’t mean I always get the words out correctly. That doesn’t mean that subconscious creations can’t trickle out. That doesn’t mean that there can’t be any little cultural connections that are at work in the background. And I’ll admit that my work might mean different things to different people.
It frustrates me to see professors and teachers and the generally pretentious pretend that art can mean whatever they want it to mean. This just isn’t true. If you are going to insist on the intentional fallacy as your gospel, then I am going to join with the creators and argue the interpretational fallacy.
No doubt, I would be deeply honored to hear someone talk about how my words have touched them. I would love to hear what they believe my words mean. And, should the need arise, I can hope that I would correct them gracefully. Or, heck, I might just smile and nod if what they think it means is so much better than what I intended all along, anyway.
“It’s okay for an artist to tell the audience that they are mistaken. ”
Authors, artists, and creators of all kinds spend hours considering how their words and their work will affect an audience. Shouldn’t the audience take just as much care considering their interpretations?
NOTE: While we’re on the topic of interpretation and authorial intent, I want to be clear that my intent here was not to discuss religion. I never once broached the subject of Biblical interpretation, but it’s still true. Everything I’ve said here applies to Biblical interpretation just as well as it does to interpreting art and media. Now you can argue that we don’t have the benefit of knowing authorial intent when it comes to the Bible, but I would disagree. Just as we should take the entire body of a text or work of art into question when trying to develop an interpretation, we can’t just interpret chunks and pieces of the Bible however we want to, ignoring the rest of it.