The Meaning of Literature

Now that I have that pretentious, high-faluting title for this blog post out of the way, I can continue in my usual random, completely informal style, with my usual philosophizing. I know you non-existent readers are most anxious for the next installment of my words of wisdom.

Yes, I'm being sarcastic. The bad thing about literature versus spoken communication is that it is much harder to communication emotion or intent through the printed/typed medium. Italics and bold only help so much. Underline and strikethrough I use less often.

Anyway. Mild tangent. See? It's happening already!

So in class yesterday Dr. Brewton expounded for a while on the meaning of literature, and how a lot of times its meaning is not always exactly what the author says it is. In other words, it can have meanings the author did not intend. However, as an author myself, I think in most of these cases the meaning is not necessarily there, latent and under the surface for a cunning reader to delve out, but rather is read into the work by the reader. I think that is the case for a lot of people who analyze things Freudian style.

I think you know by now my position on those things. Let us never speak of this again.

Moving along.

Despite my misgivings in those cases, I do think that the meaning of a work of literature can very much be more than the sum of its parts. After all, if you reduce, say, Hamlet by Shakespeare to its constituent vowels and consonants, as the Auditors of Reality in a Discworld novel would do (they reduce famous paintings to carefully divided and organized blobs of paint in an effort to understand art), you have not learned what it is. Instead, all you know is what it was made out of.

That is why Gandalf says to Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring: "He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."



Always listen to Gandalf. He knows best. Better than you, at any rate.

This is why I do not hold with literary analysis of many works of fiction. I saw a book in Books-a-Million one day, filled with analyses of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I like that series, so I flipped through the book. Other than the interesting point being made that monsters in that series usually pose as salesmen (salespeople, if we want to be PC), which is hilariously true, once you think about it, it wasn't that interesting. Reading about a series is nowhere near as interesting as actually reading the series.

Peter Kreeft (yay, I just got a new book by him today - my trinity of favorite authors goes like this: JRRT, PK, and GKC, or Tolkien, Kreeft, and Chesterton) actually made the same point in his introduction to The Philosophy of Tolkien. While reading about the characters, places, and themes in an analysis can be no fun at all (who wants to read the rehash when you could read the original?), reading about the themes or the mindset behind the work can be vastly interesting, and so it was with Kreeft's book. Granted, I love all his books, but The Philosophy of Tolkien has got to be my favorite by him. It combines several of my great loves: Tolkien, logic, right morality, and philosophy.

Win.

However, while picking apart a work of fiction to its bare bits may not tell you too much about what it is or what it means, and while readers may read many questionable things into a work that do not really mesh with the author's worldview or purpose, I do believe that there can be meanings actually latent in the work that the author did not intend.

To illustrate, in one of J. R. R. Tolkien's letters, he talks about meeting an old man who had several pictures he thought displayed scenes in LOTR perfectly. Tolkien admitted he had never seen the pictures before. The man was silent for a while and then said: "You don't suppose, do you, that you wrote that book all by yourself?" Tolkien commented that that was an alarming conclusion for a middle-aged philologist to draw concerning his own private amusement.

However, I think the man was right. There is something about LOTR, and about other great works of literature (not necessarily the ones the critics have arbitrarily deemed 'the classics'), that resonates with people. We read them again and again. Why?

I think there are many reasons, but one of the deepest has got to be the fact that these stories touch on eternal, objective truths. They enshrine themes written deep into the DNA of our souls, and we quiver like a guitar string when a hand touches it or like the string in the piano when the little felt-covered hammer hits it. Somewhere deep down inside us, we recognize these themes, out of the wrack and ruin original sin has inflicted upon us, and we cannot help but respond to them. They become great books, or books which are read by humanity, and they stay with us forever.

(Granted, I'd like to disagree on the Eragon one, and I can't really say much about The Hunger Games since I haven't read them, but you get the picture...)

Being an author myself (even if not a published author, of course), I think I have an interesting viewpoint on literature, either my own or others'. I am too close, in a sense, to my own works to analyze them honestly; they have come from my heart, and while I can nitpick them and generally act all perfectionist, like a fussy parent, I can say what I think is true about them, but I may not know for sure.

Granted, it's like that with me and any work of literature, probably. I say what I think is true, but it may not be only actually true: I may only perceive it to be true, with my limited vision.

But, yes, I have had that feeling of, "I haven't written this all by myself." I remember deciding that green would be the color of hope in the world I have made for my stories, and then reading that the Church has traditionally considered green to be the color of hope. I speculated about what men would have been like if they had not fallen in the Garden of Eden, and then I read elsewhere the speculations of others that confirmed my own.

It can be eerie, frightening, and/or ultimately uplifting, the feeling that something great and wonderful and vast beyond reckoning, something that has been born of the more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophies, which is being born through you at the design of someone else.

Someone.

There cannot but be a Mind behind it all. Or life would not be worth living.

"You all right? I was worried about you back on the bed there. Your eyes rolled up into your head and everything."

"I supose I was dying again, so I asked the Lord of Permanent Affection for the strength to live the day. Clearly, the answer came in the affirmative."

"I didn't know there was such a Fellow," Buttercup said.

"Neither did I, in truth, but if He didn't exist, I didn't much want to either."

-- The Princess Bride, by William Goldman. Yes, there was a book before there was the movie. It is Good Fiction, and you should definitely read it. I have recently discovered it myself (a million thanks again, Marcela, for recommending it!!). Now, it is a wacky, zany tale, but this part at the end really struck me.

It reminds me of the scene in The Silver Chair, by C. S. Lewis (part of the Narnia series, of course, you people whose childhood did not include it), where Puddleglum stomps on the Green Witch's fire and makes a very good speech about how their belief in Aslan and in Narnia may be something they have made up, that they are all dreaming, but that he would rather stand by it, because it'd be a much better world than meaningless existence in the Underland, ruled by her.

C. S. Lewis was the successor of G. K. Chesterton in many ways. It's a pity his theology can sometimes be a bit wonky. (And never, ever read That Hideous Strength. Just don't. Read Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and love them, but never read the third book. You'll go nuts sooner than figure it out.)

Continuing with my random elaborations upon Dr. Brewton's words (and also continuing with my abrupt thought shifts), I must mention that he said the only way to ensure that every meaning in your work of literature was a meaning you intended would be to invent your own language. Been there, done that, it doesn't work. Tolkien invented several languages. (So have I. They are inferior to Tolkien's. Because everything that I can do halfway well, he did better.) And look what still happened to him!

There are phrases, metaphors (a favorite word of Terry Pratchett), and figures of speech. Language is a living thing, shaped by countless thoughts and minds and environments, as the Duat is shaped by the dreaming minds of so many in Egyptian mythology. (At least, as interpreted by Rick Riordan.) And there is always, always the glorious risk that you may be inspired, and that something larger than you and more wonderful than your thought may be written through you.

Words are the houses of being, after all. In principio erat Verbum.

It should be no surprise that the works of letters, literature, holds such power over our minds and hearts. It is composed of words, and is therefore inherently potentially a great good or a great evil. Literature can be sacred or it can be the opposite of sacred.

Yes, I see everything from an eschatological standpoint. Welcome to my world.

Literature is like music in that respect, I think. It should not be misused. Terrible consequences may ensue. Terrible things. Because fear leads to anger, and anger leads to hate, and hate... leads to suffering.

All right. I can no longer be serious. Have this funny gif:

To quote Celtic Woman, good night and joy be to you all!

In Pace Christi,

Elyse