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I was always afraid to read any classical work because no matter what you think you read, someone will tell you "Actually..." Then one day I read this beautifu

• leejoramo 7y ago
  I remember reading that that same quote while reading the book!
• smt88 7y ago
  On the other hand, it makes all works of art more personal and interesting when you read into them. Even if it's not what the author intended, it may be what makes the work enjoyable to you. But I agree that forcing your interpretation on everyone else is pointless and often irritating.
  • gatherhunterer 7y ago
    Literary analysis is overly criticized due to poor teaching of humanities. I disagree with some of the interpretations that I have heard of major literary works but no one has ever forced those ideas on me, I have never been censured for proposing an interpretation that differs from another. Bad teaching is a shame but dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandizement. As an adult one should be aware of the general public perception of one’s education. I grew up on standardized tests like the one in the article and even as a teenager I knew they were abysmal.
    • colechristensen 7y ago
      The people producing art and the people talking about what it means are so very often are mutually exclusive that it is very hard to take the people talking about it seriously. My experience with literary analysis is being forced to analyze pieces which I often believed didn't have any abstract meaning to speak of and then inventing some nonsense I thought would appeal to the teacher. The criticism is apt because my experience is generally the only experience many people have with the study of languages and literature. If it didn't exist these classes might add value to the lives of the people taking them.
      • Veen 7y ago
        My experience of programming is making a turtle move around on a screen, so programming is dumb. My experience of math is working out how fast trains traveling towards each other are going, so math is dumb. My experience of chemistry is making a bit of paper change color when dipped in vinegar, so chemistry is dumb. And so on ad nauseam.
        • kortilla 7y ago
          Those all proved useful though using real empirical based systems. If your programming class was, “what do you think the author meant by this line of code?” with no evidence to support any kind of guess, then yes it would be dumb.
          • Veen 7y ago
            As I said in another comment, at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop rudimentary skills of textual interpretation. You learn what symbolism is and are asked to produce some examples. It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction and variable speeds and the changing mass of trains as they burn fuel when you work out how fast they're going in school math tests. When you get to more advanced textual analysis, you have to justify readings based on the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on.
            • skytreader 7y ago
              > at this level "literary criticism" is intended to develop...skills of textual interpretation But it is also at this level that multiple-choice tests about which bits of a text mean what (as the original article illustrates) proliferate. It is at this level that the textbook is the One Truth about what a text means. As one other comment points out, at this level there is no recourse but "authority" which is, ironically, detached from the author. > It doesn't matter what the poem "actually" means any more than it matters that you're ignoring friction This is a false equivalence. When we ignore 'what the poem "actually" means' it opens up interpretation to a colossal array of extremely subjective possibilities. "The curtains are blue" could symbolize anything from the author's depression to his thoughts about the Yuan dynasty. In contrast, the effects of ignoring friction can be objectively proven (if not empirically demonstrated) and would give us a definite answer, no mental gymnastics required. In real-life engineering, we also tolerate a certain amount of slack and simplification in our models so long as the discrepancy between computation and observation is not so drastic. In this sense, ignoring those variables is tantamount to practice in iterative refinement (you are launching a projectile in an indoors gymnasium; you wouldn't really care if your computation is off by a foot or so because you ignored air resistance and the curvature of the Earth). The simplification can still provide value (not to mention practicality). But eking out an explanation just for the sake of giving an explanation, relegating "the work as a whole, the writer's oeuvre, historical context, linguistic concerns, philosophical frameworks, and so on" to more advanced levels, is just sloppy scholarship and build poor habits.
    • vidarh 7y ago
      I have been censured for proposing the 'wrong' interpretation. And it totally destroyed my respect for that teacher. My interpretation was supported strictly by the actual text. The 'correct' interpretation not just according to our teacher, but our textbooks, required a tortured reading and assuming a comma was misplaced when this author always otherwise had perfect grammar. The only defense was an appeal to authority: surely I did not expect to understand it better than some idiot who'd failed at basic reading comprehension a century ago.
    • benj111 7y ago
      In this situation it isn't the teaching, it's the test. The test demands an answer, whereas good teaching would be a discussion. I'd prefer my kids to finish school knowing how to read and enjoy poetry, than knowing how to complete multiple choice tests.
    • TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Let's call spade a spade: if a literary critic is creating an interpretation that goes beyond what the author intended to convey, they're pulling meaning out of their ass. It's completely arbitrary and has no validity; at best it boils down to psychoanalyzing the author (and the critic is not qualified for that), trying to guess what the author "truly wanted" to say without realizing they want it to say. A simple experiment: imagine a blind test in which the critic doesn't know whether the work was produced by a human or a GAN. If they can give similar statements about "what the author meant", then they're talking garbage. Trying to put the work in context of other works from the same genre or historical period? Sure, that's useful. Telling you what the author "truly meant", even though the author never said that? That's just entertainment. Let's label it as such explicitly, instead of trying to tell people it's a form of "deeper truth".
      • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        Not quite. The humanities are fundamentally about persuasion, not about objectivity. There is no objectivity in the arts, creators are not the last word on their work [1], and any good observation is considered a success if it's persuasive to at least some people some of the time. A lot of academic-level criticism is really an advanced game of "Hunt the hidden metaphor." People can take it or leave it, but as a pastime it's unlikely to go away. No one competent [2] seriously expects any one interpretation to be definitive. It's all just opinion, and sometimes it's interesting and insightful opinion - and sometimes it isn't. [1] A lot of people find this strange, but why should it be? Creators are no more aware of their own internal motivations than anyone else is. [2] This may not include high school teachers attempting the same thing, because they're likely to be teaching by rote from standard interpretations and marking them right/wrong rather than trying to elicit interesting personal insights.
        • TeMPOraL 7y ago
          Fair. Then I guess my argument boils down to, "I wish high-school teachers and a bunch of other people stopped doing that". I can appreciate the argument of a work of art being like a mirror, where looking at it reveals as much about it as it does about the person looking. I can appreciate "hunt the hidden metaphor" exercises and even "bend the interpretation so hard to make the book be about something it obviously isn't" games. I've done both, and I enjoyed it - it's a nice workout for imagination and arguing skills. But I wish it was presented as such, clearly labeled as intellectual entertainment. As it is, the way I - and perhaps many other people in this thread - was exposed to literary criticism always made the critics look like historians - dispensing factual, if not always obvious, knowledge about works of literature.
    • Stratoscope 7y ago
      > ...dismissing an entire academic field because you had a poor experience as a child is self-aggrandizement. Can we please try to be more polite than this? Accusing someone of self-aggrandizement doesn't usually lead to a friendly and interesting conversation.
      • gatherhunterer 7y ago
        I was using "you" in the general sense. The site guidelines encourage readers to assume good faith on the part of others and if you have an issue with a comment it can be flagged so that a moderator can deal with it.
• pishpash 7y ago
  That isn't what art is about though. If you feel there's symbolism to you, then that's that. It isn't anything objective, but the author consciously or unconsciously elicited something.
  • nitrogen 7y ago
    Sure, but then why take one person's subjective experience and turn it into an entire discipline with questions on standardized tests?
    • pishpash 7y ago
      Standardized tests test study skills. It doesn't matter what the topic is.
    • whatshisface 7y ago
      It's wrong to say that critical theorists don't study anything, they study the preferences of critical theorists.
• anbop 7y ago
  One mark of a good classical education is that the literal reading is more meaningful than the allegorical.
  • C1sc0cat 7y ago
    Not sure I would agree with you some of the classical Greek plays have to be read with an understanding of what was happening at the time.
• mykowebhn 7y ago
  On the one hand I feel Hemingway was being sincere when he said/wrote this quote. On the other hand, part of me feels he was saying this just to be provocative. Also, I'm not sure anyone has ever told me "Actually..." when I've explained what I thought I read. If this was a teacher/professor of yours he/she did you a huge disservice. I can think of two reasons (I'm sure there are more) for why artists say what they want to say indirectly. 1) Things tend to stick in our brains the more we have to work to gain that knowledge. If someone imparts knowledge to you and you take it in passively this knowledge tends not to stick around in our brains as well as if you had to struggle to acquire this knowledge. 2) Many times in our history what an artist said or wrote could get that artist killed. As a result, they tended to mask the true meaning of their message using allegory and/or metaphor.
  • philwelch 7y ago
    I don't think artists intentionally encode secret messages or deep meanings into their work, but it doesn't necessarily have to be intentional. Or you could just stop caring about intentionality and just acknowledge that you're basically cloudwatching.
    • C1sc0cat 7y ago
      Some do the structure of Gravity's rainbow for example.
  • komali2 7y ago
    From what I know of Hemingway, it's sincere. The image he gives of himself (or imagines of himself) is a barrel chested beer swigging straight shooting Man's Man. He bullied "pencil necked" little Fitzgerald into alcoholism, and possibly abandoning his wife. He used a writing style that was the quintessential "no fluff" style of the period. I don't know him but from what I know of him he would not be a fan of having untanned literary professors claiming his works were about more than literally just an old man pissing in the sea or a bull fighter fighting bulls.
    • Angostura 7y ago
• skookumchuck 7y ago
  There are people who create art, and those who study/analyze art. I've often suspected the latter were just seeing pictures in clouds.
  • fenomas 7y ago
    "When art critics get together they discuss form and meaning; when artists get together they talk about where you can get cheap turpentine", as the expression goes. (Usually attributed to Picasso but seems to be apocryphal)
  • Zarath 7y ago
    I disagree, I think it's easy to look at this quote and say "yeah it doesn't really mean anything". But just because the author didn't intend for something, that doesn't mean it can't be interpreted that way. Yes the ocean is the ocean, and the sea is the sea, and the fish is the fish, but if you were just to literally take the story at face value, it would be boring. Things come to be symbolic through their participation in the story. The fish doesn't represent anything literally. But the fish, and the man's battle with the fish, can be abstracted to any medium... that's the whole point of the fictional story. You're telling the story, but what is the point of the story, what is the subtext? The story is really about determination, and respect for another living being, the fish and the sea are simply the medium through which the real story is told.
• massivecali 7y ago
  I had an art show once. I walked up to a couple debating what a hand in my painting was holding. It wasn't holding anything in my creation. But art, like writing, is subjective.
  • gumby 7y ago
    But you see it was your own blindness that caused you not to realize what the hand was holding, though your subconscious expressed it. Of course you can't see this! Yes I am being sarcastic but I actually heard this kind of comment about my then wife's work.
    • roenxi 7y ago
      It isn't all that silly an idea that there is information encoded into the work that the creator didn't intend to be there. Some of the best literature works with characters rather than plot. I can easily see how an author trying to work accurately with characters based on generic memories of how someone should behave would actually leave a lot of evidence for interpretations they didn't expect. Author's intent is important, but sometimes even the author will stand up and say their not quite sure what their characters would do in a given situation.
    • jodrellblank 7y ago
      "I made the blue/gold dress, and I intended it to be blue, so everyone who sees it as gold is ___" what? What are you saying about the people who make such comments about your then wife's work? Something demeaning, I infer.
    • mola 7y ago
      As engineers we usually have a direct conscious intention for the details of our creation. Art doesn't work that way. The art piece is a piece of the artist and her surroundings. Including her conscious intentions, the naturalized social norms, her deep subconscious urges and desires, And with today's commoditized art, it includes the preferences of the collective unconscious. Literary analysis have plenty to work with. Diminishing art to the artist intentions does injustice to culture.
• legohead 7y ago
  I read Crime and Punishment for the first time recently. found it quite boring and with limited meaning. but I am a 40 year old man and understood the concepts the book was introducing a long time ago. I feel like with the advent of the internet, shocking concepts/ideas are hard to come by. I'm sure ideas in the book were provocative "back then," but nowadays, not so much. I even watched some lectures on youtube discussing the book, which brought to light a thing or two, but still nothing of significance for me.
  • m0zg 7y ago
    That's probably because you've read it in English. For the life of me I don't get why non-Russian people read Russian classical literature. Just don't. It is true that there aren't really any Western authors of the same stature as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but really, you aren't really reading what they wrote. Their work requires quite a bit of thought, and that thought requires quite a bit built-in stuff that a native wouldn't even notice. 30% of the meaning is not there because you don't have the same cultural background. Another 15-20% is lost in translation. What remains is still formidable, but nowhere near as good as the original work. I happen to also have recently re-read Crime and Punishment, but in my native Russian, after a gap of some 25 years. I've found it very vivid, engaging, and full of nuance I just wasn't even able see when I was a teenager. Likewise I have fairly recently re-read War and Peace, and it is now my favorite book of all time. When I was much younger it seemed "too long" and extremely boring, because it requires quite a bit of lived experience to fully appreciate, and not just any experience, but experience that only someone who has lived in Russia for an extended period of time (not necessarily originally Russian) would have. Really fundamental, basic things, which Americans just can't even begin to understand. I.e. how the government is perceived there (hint: Tsar-like figure is still perceived as a desirable thing), what it means to have a land war on your soil (Russia had many, some extremely devastating), Russian ideas about patriotism, yet at the same not liking how they do things over there, Russian fatalism, how women are perceived by men and the other way around, etc, etc. Having spent 20+ years in the US and having traveled quite a bit, I've recently read The Grapes of Wrath. I liked the book, and the use of language in it (it almost reads like poetry at times), but I very strongly suspect I didn't quite "get" it to the extent that an American would, for the same reasons I alluded to above. And I have vastly more "American" lived experience than most Americans have "Russian".
• dehrmann 7y ago
  > It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28
• oh_sigh 7y ago
  "My favorite book is Moby Dick. No frou-frou symbolism. Just a story of a man who hates an animal. And that's enough." -Ron Swanson
  • nimih 7y ago
    Only tangentially related, but one of the most incredible accomplishments of Parks & Rec seems to be that Ron Swanson's lines are equally loved by folks who get the joke and folks who don't even realize that there is one.
• Bukhmanizer 7y ago
  Why do people here seem to think that the only form literary analysis is direct symbolism? Is it the only thing covered in the American high school curriculum?
  • munchbunny 7y ago
    No, but it's seen by many engineers/scientists as too hand wavy to be worth spending mental cycles teaching/practicing it. Personally, I believed that until I began to think about literary analysis like math. Some people make careers out of it because there are situations where it has real impact (law, for example). For the rest of us, it's a form of intellectual play as a proxy for other mental skills. You might come up with some wonky and possibly wrong theorem or some useless formula, but I wouldn't jump to say "you're wasting your time" because the process is the valuable part of the exercise.
  • daveFNbuck 7y ago
    It's the thing I remember most from my high school curriculum because it was the most annoying part of English classes. The majority of what I was taught was boring and forgettable.
• twic 7y ago
  For the alternative point of view: A playwright is not the best person to talk about his own work for the simple reason that he is often unaware of what he has written. -- Alan Bennett
  • kortilla 7y ago
    The playwright is still within his/her realm to call bullshit when people claim that the playwright “meant X”.
    • princeb 7y ago
      the writer's mind is a palette and on it are his experiences, his instincts, his biases. to be fully aware of the meaning "X" is to be fully aware of not only his own meta-cognition, but the context of the world that he lives in that coloured his person, that resulted in him deciding to write something in order to bring forth the message "X".
• shaki-dora 7y ago
  It’s possible to leave traces of whatever inner conflict tortures you in your writing without even knowing. For example, the disdain of the humanities in this thread (and generally on HN and the tech community) is just begging for an explanation, because the stated reasons (entirely useless, plain wrong) are neither true, nor would they seem sufficient to warrant the level of emotion. So there’s something else in the subtext, such as status anxiety, even though the authors would vehemently deny it.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > It’s possible to leave traces of whatever inner conflict tortures you in your writing without even knowing. Identifying those borders on psychoanalysis. Even trained medical professionals have problems with that. > the disdain of the humanities in this thread (and generally on HN and the tech community) is just begging for an explanation It's simple - humanities as most of us here were exposed to, have high propensity to bullshit. Bullshit in the On Bullshit (2005) sense - that is, not caring in the slightest whether what one says is true or false. As for heightened emotions - well, for many of us, humanities at school were not just the first major exposure to bullshit, but also a situation in which you were graded on your ability to eat it and produce more of your own. The dislike may be particularly higher amount STEM crowd because STEM interests are much less tolerant to bullshit - there are right and wrong answers in hard sciences and engineering, and telling them apart is paramount.
    • shaki-dora 7y ago
      That’s sort of like a parody I would write to prove my point. You’re clearly emotional about the topic, to a degree that cannot be explained purely by doing a few interpretations in school. I don’t see, for example, this sort of venom directed at sports, even though I have heard more anecdotes about the dread of PE classes. I could also make the same sort of claim about science and math: namely that school did little to inspire any sense of wonder and appreciation for the subject; that it tended to dwell on the rote application of some learnt rules to slightly varying problems without capturing the essence of the subject. I have an inkling that people here might agree that some amount of rote learning was necessary for sciences to later be able to appreciate them, and that some of us may not have been ready to appreciate those subjects fully as early teens anyway. To not extend this sort of benefit of the doubt to the humanities them seems baffling. It may be explained people never going further in those fields and therefore not evolving the understanding that lets them reinterpret their early experiences. Or it’s an almost active socialization, a choice to fully identify with one group of academia and to deny the other’s validity in an in-group/out-group dynamic. It’s also somewhat indefensible to claim “pure bullshit”—one just needs a single counterexample to show this, and others in this thread have brought up law as a rather impressive example of the power of interpretation. Personally, I’d point to Hannah Arendt, but I’m sure there are other philosophers for everyone. Heck, even Ayn Rand is squarely in the humanities. Or Carl Schmid if you like Trump, or Hobbes if you hate everyone. Oh, and I just noticed this, Frankfurt’s On Bullshit is itself very much in the humanities’ wheelhouse. Were the interpretations you were taught mere bullshit? I bet if you were to go back in time, or pick up a textbook, you’d find that no, they tended to be, if anything, a bit too much on-the-nose. Of course it’s not just about a white whale, but about something in the human experience that we can see far more often than any hunt for large marine mammals. But as teenagers, that sort of introspection was liable to instill a certain amount of existential dread, and quite possible ruin the easy enjoyment of what is otherwise an engaging but rather superficial adventure story on the high sees.
• usrusr 7y ago
  On the other hand you have art talking about sensitive subjects that either cannot be talked about openly at all, or where the artist feels uncomfortable doing so. You can listen to whole albums of the B52s telling yourself that no LGBT topics are touched and it's already great fun, but the experience gets so much more interesting when you start reading between the lines. And then there is the whole topic of non-deliberate creative decisions. I guess Tolkien was truly as convinced of not writing about his war experience as he liked to tell people, but "the enemy in the east" and so on, it all fits too well.