Reading poems should be like peeling an onion. The act should have layers of experience, if not of meaning, as you read and reread, as you and the poem become more intimate. This is not the same thing as interpreting the poet's meaning or uncovering the poet's intent. It is much more like getting to know (or remember) yourself through a work of art: whatever you bring to the reading, no matter whether you do it consciously or unconsciously, engages, and if you are paying attention, that is, reading conscientiously, you will come to know it.
Poems do this for us better than other kinds of writing and probably better than the other arts, so long as we stay open to the possibilities of one or more readings. And, like everything else about art, the more we know about poetry's history, movements, styles, techniques, and examples, the more open we can be when experiencing any given poem.
A case in point: polysemous interpretation. Thomas Aquinas wrote the first definitive text on the layers of meaning that can be uncovered in a poem. He had sacred texts in mind and was concerned about how to read and interpret the stories in the bible. He said all biblical texts are capable of being interpreted on two levels: the literal (a.k.a., historical) and the spiritual. The spiritual level itself can be applied in three ways: the text has an allegorical dimension, a moral message, and an anagogical meaning. In Aquinas's view, the literal interpretation of a biblical text appeals to those who are less equipped to understand a text's deeper meaning. The spiritual interpretation requires training, practice and intellect. Thus,
- Historical or literal meaning (or reading): there was a bush that burned but was not consumed by fire because God (Yahweh) was in the bush, making Himself known to Moses
- Spiritual meaning: the burning bush is an allegory of revelation, it is a message to Man about the mystery and glory of God, and it is, without saying so directly, an instance of salvation (seeing the light)
How this spiritual dimension works out as allegory, morality and anagogy (meaning a mystical interpretation) is not important here and beyond me to explain. But the point is that, at least since Thomas Aquinas, we've tended to think of certain texts as "hiding" something from our direct apprehension or understanding, that present to us a surface which either masks a depth of understanding or leads the diligent reader more powerfully to those depths. (An idea that has all kinds of implications for mysticism, oracles, the Elect, and classes or hierarchies of knowledge, and therefore temporal power.)
Dante, much later, applied this same idea of polysemous-ness to non-sacred texts, namely to his Divine Comedy, but also to all heightened poetry written in the Italian vernacular. His poem, or any serious poem, can be (must be) understood to mean more than what it says on the surface, the "surface" being the vernacular of the text and its referents in the world of people, that is, history. Words you encounter first, but not alone. They "point" to or orient you to something else, and that "something else" can only be paraphrased and interpreted.
By this point in my discussion, you should be recalling your high school and college English teachers. They, after all, were our oracles and priests who had access to these deeper meanings, and we, the acolytes, were supposed to follow them toward enlightenment. (In my experience, we were supposed to guess what the teacher was thinking but not telling us.)
Thus, a figurative use of language in a poem, like a simile or a metaphor, or a tone of voice like irony, is never just ornamental, but code for some deeper meaning. And the more you know about these figures and how they work, the deeper into the poem you can go, the more "meaning" you will get from it.
Of course, we want to rescue poetry (and our own poems) from such a tyranny of interpretation! Which is where I'm headed at the beginning of this post when I compare interpretation to peeling back an onion and how you bring your own experience--literary and lifetime--to a poem, even if you don't necessarily think you're doing so. You cannot interact with a text and not put your own experience into the mix of meaning.
That last term is important. For peeling an onion isn't the best analogy for reading a text. The text doesn't merely turn into an ever-shrinking version of itself as you go into it until you come to nothing. Reading and interpreting are much more organic and complicated than that. They are generative, in fact. Each person who reads a text anew adds to the mix of it, because that person brings personhood into the exchange. Each person who rereads the same text does the same again. To the extent that you're familiar with other peoples' readings of a poem, and some of these can be famous in themselves, you can bring increasingly complex associations to the experience. But these are filtered through your personal experience and capabilities.
What keeps the polysemous interpretation from tipping over into mere relativism or interpretive chaos, or worse, arbitrarily imposed meanings? For Aquinas, it was following certain strict rules of interpretation, laid out by the Church and by the Scholiasts. For those of us who studied in the 60s and 70s, it was one or another movement, like New Criticism, Psychoanalytic criticism, Feminist criticism, Structuralist theory, Deconstruction, etc. Each a new form of literary interpretive tyranny! If you've mastered all of these approaches, there's not a poem in the history of poetry that can get by you. Ha-ha.
But all schools or systems of interpretation are fundamentally arbitrary, at least all the prescriptive ones are. They are not organic or "natural," but mechanical; we might say technological. They are devices for coming at or into an aesthetic experience and somebody had to invent them. But all systems agree on one thing about a poem: it can mean many things to many readers. Some of those meanings we can agree on. Some are radical, some superfluous. The impetus underlying a system or theory is to exclude the radical and the superfluous.
And some are just plain wrong, the products of misreading or misjudgment. But I'd buy at the drop of a hat the book on the history of misreadings of poems,* if there is such a book. Because even a misreading adds ultimately to the mix of a poem's polysemous-ness. Of course, the potential for misreading a text doesn't make it right to try to wring blood from the proverbial turnip, only interesting in the best of cases, perverse in all others. Conscientiousness and honesty about what we're doing when we read a poem will steer us clear of the perverse.
----------
*In some ways, literary history itself is a history of misreadings in which one academic or critic or literary historian or school of them takes issue with another's interpretation of a text.
No comments:
Post a Comment