Against “deep reading”

From Thomas Beller’s conversation with an unidentified woman who knew J. D. Salinger, about a teacher’s assertion that Salinger was a “symbolist”:

“I mean, you know, it means that when the guy is throwing an orange in the air in ‘The Laughing Man,’ it’s a sign of fertility. Remember that one?”

I did.

“Well,” she continued, “a symbolist means the teacher says that when the guy tosses an orange up in the air it means the orange is a symbol of fertility. Or you know how when the Chief’s girlfriend starts showing up to the baseball games and she insists she play, and then she hits a triple? It means she’s pregnant and in her third trimester.”

We spend a minute being dismissive and contemptuous of this approach. The primary objection is that it sucks all the joy out of the work. This is the ingenious and maddeningly effective technique applied by the humorless: Their interpretation always sounds plausible until you remember how essential, if unquantifiable, humor is to the equation. Humor is beyond their reach.

Thomas Beller, J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist (New York: New Harvest / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

The habit of teacherly misreading that Beller describes has ruined literature for many young people. When I was in high school, we called it “deep reading,” after a television commercial for a liniment that promised “deep heating.” “Deep reading” meant that nothing could be what it appeared to be: every element of a story had to stand for something else, quotidian details coming together to form something like an allegorical pageant. In the more rarefied quarters of academic criticism, “deep reading” turns, say, the s that begins and ends James Joyce’s Ulysses into “a code symbol” for syphilis.¹ In truth, there’s nothing deep about “deep reading” (thus my continuing use of quotation marks): it’s a reductive way of engaging works of the imagination, operating on every one of them in the same damn way.

Beller is right that such interpretations are humorless, but I cannot agree that they always sound plausible. They never sound plausible to me, and not because they ignore humor: the horrors of “deep reading” may visit any work of literature, lighthearted or dour. “Deep reading” fails as a persuasive way to make meaning because it operates in only one direction, from details of a text to some arbitrarily divined meaning. Orange: fertility. Triple: third trimester. S: syphilis. But flip things, and we’re suddenly lost. What should a writer do to suggest fertility? Oh, of course: have a character toss an orange into the air.

I’ve talked about the illogic of “deep reading” on any number of occasions with students who have been subjected to it in high school. Many years ago a student worked out an ingenious reading of William Carlos Williams’s poem “This Is Just to Say”: the stolen plums symbolize the poet’s mistress; the poet’s wife has been waiting to confront him at breakfast about his transgressions; the mistress was on the wife’s mind (in the icebox, where you keep things) as she waited to talk to her husband. This student showed genuine insight into the element of transgression in the poem, and in positing a scene of adultery, he drew uncannily close to the sorrows of the Williams household. But if plums stand for mistress, what would Williams have to do to make a reader think plums? No, he wouldn’t toss an orange into the air. He would have to write plums.

Eudora Welty has a great comment on “deep reading” in her essay “Is Phoenix Jackson’s Grandson Really Dead?” (Critical Inquiry 1 (1974)). Its title is, alas, the question Welty most often heard from students, about her story “A Worn Path”:

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, for words to mean what they say. It's all right too for words and appearances to mean more than one thing — ambiguity is a fact of life. But it is not all right, not in good faith, for things not to mean what they say.

In Williams’s poem, plums are forbidden fruit, and an occasion of covert, solitary pleasure. But they’re plums. Plums is plums.

¹ Really.

Scott Pelley, man

Scott Pelley, on the CBS Evening News a few minutes ago: “. . . how man is attempting to restore bird populations threatened by climate change.” Man oh man. A better way to put it: “. . . the effort to restore bird populations,” and so on. Who but people — men and women — would undertake such work?

Pelley fell into the language of “man” last October too. How it grates.

Figures of speech

I’m not unwilling to discuss litotes. But I refuse to even mention paralipsis.

Sentence-starting conjunctions

“From at least the time of Chaucer, expert writers have tended to begin 10–20% of their sentences with conjunctions”: Yes, Virginia, you can begin a sentence with a conjunction. Bryan Garner explains: Conjunctions as sentence-starters.

Students often tell me that in past classrooms, the sentence-starting and and but have been off limits. Because too. Good thing no one told Emily Dickinson.

[Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly zone.]

Nancy in autumn

[Nancy, 1967. From Brian Walker’s The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s “Nancy” (1988).]

Mists, mellow fruitfulness — yes, it’s a nice season. Linus agrees, though for other reasons.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

[I must admit: I have distorted Nancy’s position through selective quoting. In the second panel of this strip Nancy adds, “But not for bubble gum.” Falling leaves stick to her bubbles. The autumnal equinox strikes tonight.]

Film recommendation: Another Year

Writing about Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater, 2014), Fresca recommended Another Year (dir. Mike Leigh, 2010). Elaine and I watched it last night and found it deeply thoughtful and moving. The less one knows about this film in advance, I think, the better: read a summary of its plot and you might never go near it. It’s a film for grown-ups, with some comedy and much pathos. It moves through the seasons, ending in winter. That is all ye need to know, and all ye are going to get. One more thing: the Hepples make me think of the Ramsays from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read To the Lighthouse.

Fresca has also recommended The Way We Get By (dir. Aron Gaudet, 2009), a documentary about three old Mainers on call to go to Bangor International Airport, any time, day or night, to thank American troops as they leave for and return from war. I too can now recommend this film.

[Fresca, what else should we put in our Netflix queue?]

Stellification, for the few

Elaine has written a terrific post about determining musical and artistic value. What she says reminds me of the last lines of John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa”:


[From Houseboat Days (New York: Penguin, 1977).]

Stellification is for the few, and for other people to decide, later. Or as T. S. Eliot said in East Coker (1943), “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Woody Guthrie in New York

“He rode the rails of the BMT. He played (unhappily, but still) for the swells at the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. He married a Martha Graham dancer named Marjorie. He had Yiddish-speaking in-laws, the Greenblatts”: The New York Times reports on Woody Guthrie in New York. My Name Is New York is the title of a book and a 3-CD compilation documenting Woody Guthrie’s life in the city.

[I can’t bring myself to refer to him as just “Guthrie.” It just doesn’t work.]

Janis Joplin in Sing Out!

A photograph of Janis Joplin by David Gahr appears (in tinted form) as a beautiful Forever stamp from the United States Postal Service. You can see the photograph and stamp at David Gahr Photographs.

When I first saw this stamp, I felt a shock of recognition: I knew the photograph right away. It appeared in the September / October 1970 issue of Sing Out! (“The Folk Song Magazine”), the twentieth-anniversary issue, as part of a two-page feature, titled “David Gahr photo essay” and ”for a painted heart.”

[Does anyone else know this?]

“Some stars”

At Lexikaliker, Gunther reaches for einige Sterne, “some stars.”

The logic of “some” seems to be everywhere. In Homer’s Iliad, action comes in threes: three times Patroclus storms the wall of Troy, three times Hector and Achilles run around the sacred city. Some storming, some running. The fourth time, things change.