A Lesson From Langston

In Langston Hughes’ beautiful, profound poem “Theme for English B,” a young man, the only Black student in a college English course, sits down in his rented room at the Harlem YMCA to write an assignment given him by his white professor. He’s struggling with the teacher’s instructions, which tell him to write a single-page essay, and to “let that page come out of you. Then, it will be true.” 

As he puts pen to paper, the young man in the poem realizes that the pronoun “you” may mean something more complicated than the instructor assumes. In the poem, he writes as an individual, telling the instructor of his likes and preferences: “I like a pipe for a Christmas present / or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.” But he also realizes that his page will also be the product of his identity and experience as a member of a particular group—in this case, Black Americans.  
 
Given that none of us lives outside of history or outside of the structures of our society, this will be the case whether he intends it or not. He’s just not sure that the instructor will understand what he’s getting when he reads the theme. Here are the lines that seem to me crucial: 

So will my page be colored that I write?    
Being me, it will not be white. 

One gets the sense that the young man is a little uncertain of his footing; he seems to suspect that what he writes will not be what the instructor is looking for or expecting, for reasons having vaguely to do with their difference in race. Still, he forges ahead:

But it will be 
a part of you, instructor. 
You are white— 
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you. 

There are two profound ideas in these lines. They are in tension with one another, but that tension doesn’t mean that they contradict each other or that one makes the other less true.  
 
I think most readers find the idea in the second of these two quotes more attractive and understandable—that is, the idea that the young man’s “page” of writing can bridge the various barriers of race, age, class, and educational experience that exist between him and another person–in this case, his instructor. This is basically the claim I and many other English teachers make for the power of poetry and of imaginative literature in general.  

But, despite the fact that I believe this, it’s too simple and easy to ignore the more difficult lines that precede it. For right now I want to focus on those lines, which have to do with whether the speaker’s identity as a member of a particular group (not just as an individual) will or should come through on the page. That’s a more complex and challenging proposition to some of us, I think. Some of us might ask ourselves, “So why bring race into it?”  
 
And Hughes’s young man might answer, “Because I can’t keep it out and still be honest about who I am. If I leave it out I’m not being true to what I and others like me have experienced or have loved or have dreamed of.” And what’s the point of writing—whether it’s a theme for English B or a poem or a graphic novel or whatever—if you’re not going to be true to the experiences, the history, the values, and the aspirations you share with others like yourself?  

Hughes’s point, here and in some of his other writings (his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”), may be more intuitive to us if we try to understand it as a more general rule, and not as unique or particular to the vexed legacy of racism and racial conflict that is so much a part of our ongoing history in the United States.

The point is really simple: as writers we express ourselves both as individuals and, consciously or not, as bearers of whatever forms of culture and community have imprinted themselves on our identity–family, church, school, state, neighborhood, ethnicity, gender, and, yes, race. Hughes was not the first, and would not be the last, to assert that part of being true to oneself as a person and an artist means also being true to where one comes from, specifically the values and culture of the community in which one was raised. The extent to which we speak or write as individuals or as “bearers” of a group identity varies from situation to situation, and, in the case of poets, from poem to poem. But I’d like to play this out in a little more detail so we can see some of the considerations that go into this proposition.

There are three basic dimensions to any poem. It’s usual—and correct, I think—first to view the poet as trying to create something unique: to give the reader an experience he or she could not get elsewhere, from any other poem or poet. We might be tempted to call this the personal dimension of the poem; but the poem’s uniqueness does not or should not depend on the details of the writer’s unique autobiography. It doesn’t really matter if the poem comes out of the writer’s imagination or out of his or her experience. (Poe probably never met up with a raven who kept crowing “Nevermore,” but that poem is still an experience we can’t get anywhere else.) The point is for the poem to create that movie or picture in our minds that is unique to the poem.

At the other end of the scale from this personal aspect is what we might call the universal, those patterns of meaning that encompass human lives across the board. (Frye’s anatomy of the seasons is one attempt to describe what this aspect looks like.) This is the framework that allows us to connect with and identify with unique experiences other than our own, even though we might be distant in time, place, and culture from the poem’s scenario. This is the inner voice that allows us to say, when reading a poem like Tony Hoagland’s “History of Desire,” yes, that’s what it feels like to be 17 and in love; or, reading one of Li-Young Lee’s beautiful but sorrowful reminiscences of his dead father, yes, that’s what it’s like to mourn a loved one. We don’t have to be from a small town in Indiana to “get” what’s happening in Hoagland’s poem; nor do we have to understand the particular Asian-American family dynamics that hover in the background of Lee’s evocative images to identify with his feelings of loss and love.  

But in between these two dimensions of the poem there’s a middle one that’s worth considering. Sometimes the poem’s meaning or significance is influenced by the poet’s writing from within a particular community. This is the “voice” we hear in our heads when something in the poem tells us the speaker is not just speaking as an individual, but is speaking as a member of that particular group: speaking for instance as “a Black person,” as “a woman,” as “a member of Generation Z,” or even (in light of recent events of February 2022) “as a Ukrainian-American.”

The boundaries and territory of that community can be defined in a variety of ways. But most commonly and powerfully it has to do with the way in which a specific group’s history and culture have distinctly shaped that group’s identity, its outlook on life, and its way of expressing itself. This distinctiveness might have its origins in common ethnic, cultural, or racial experiences and identifications; in religious traditions; in experiences or ways of thinking that are gender- or class-specific; in generational divisions; or perhaps others I’m not able to think of right now. 

Stephen Henderson, in an important little book called Understanding the New Black Poetry, coined the term “saturation” to describe the source of that sense that we have, when reading a poem or short story, that the voice we are hearing is speaking in the way I’ve alluded to above–not just as an individual or as a generic human being, but as a member of a particular group whose orientation to the world or experience in the world is distinct from that of other groups in some significant way. I like the term “saturation” because it suggests that what Henderson is talking about is not like an off-or-on switch; it’s something that occurs on a scale. Some poems are more “saturated,” if you will, by the particular group identifications of the speaker or the author; some may seem to lack this “group” dimension altogether.

Henderson noted that this “saturation” can be felt in at least three ways: in ways of speaking (vocabulary, grammar, idioms) that are distinctive to the group; in the choice of images (either literal or figurative) that draw on the distinctive history, culture, or experience of the group; and, finally, in the implicit orientation to the world (belief and / or value system) that is characteristic of the group. The more instances of any of these we encounter in a given text, the greater the “saturation.”

That’s not to say that anyone who personally identifies as Black, female, Catholic, trans, Ukrainian-American, or whatever is going to write in an obviously particular way; the “saturation” factor in a particular poem my be greater or lesser, depending on the story or the portrait the writer is presenting. Even Langston Hughes’ young man in “Theme for English B” stops short of saying his text will be “Black” because he’s a Black man; he only knows it will “not be white,” and that “it will be me.” But in other poems Hughes increases the “saturation” quotient in precisely the ways Henderson describes: using language that is more firmly in the style of African American everyday speech of the day; referencing Black musical forms like jazz and blues; and voicing the specific political, social, and cultural aspirations of his community. (See his poem “Dream Boogie” for an example of what I’m talking about here.)

I’d like to talk about one more of Henderson’s ideas, that of the “mascon image.” Although it’s only one subtopic in Henderson’s overall discussion of this “saturation” idea, I’ve found that it helps us think more clearly about the ways in which poems can give voice to the experience of a community or a people as well as that of the individual poet. 

Henderson noted that communities of human beings can be distinguished by the particular meanings that a given group attaches to certain objects or images. Because of their associations with the shared history or current life of the group, these images or objects have over time acquired powerful and complex emotional charges. Henderson labeled these “mascon terms” or “mascon images” (“mascon” being a term he adapted from communication theory, a shortening of the phrase “massive concentration”). He pointed out a number of such terms that he thought important to an understanding of the Black experience and poetic tradition—trains, trees, ships, rivers, for instance.  

I won’t take time here to discuss the particular mascon terms Henderson linked to the African American experience, though I think that would be a worthy pursuit. For the moment I want to use his discussion as a jumping-off point for a broader understanding of his meaning. Based on other discussions we’ve had, I think we can see that Henderson’s “mascon term” is closely related to the concept of a “conventional symbol.”–but a very special and powerful instance of that category, not limited to Henderson’s specific focus on Black poetry.  
 
Let’s take for an example the image that is probably the primary “mascon object” in Christianity—the cross. In the beginning this object was just another tool of capital punishment in the Roman-occupied Palestine, meant to send a vivid message as to what happened to you if you crossed (pardon the pun) the Empire. Most folks of that time and place just thought of it the way we today might think of the electric chair.  

But the early Christians adopted the figure of the Cross, and the story of Christ’s crucifixion as a sign of their identity and belief system, and thus made it into something deeper and more complex–a “mascon term,” in Henderson’s terminology. For them it has become a kind of visual shorthand for an entire theology. It at once symbolizes suffering and victory, death and resurrection; it serves as a sign both of believers’ guilt as sinners and their glory as redeemed children of God. It’s all this and more, and all a Christian has to do is see the shape in a particular context to call forth all of these meanings and the feelings associated with them.  
 
As a result, it seems reasonable and natural that a poet working in Western literary tradition, deeply informed as it is by Christianity, would find this particular image useful, maybe even natural, to a faithful rendering of his or her experiences and feelings. The community of Christians is defined by their mutual and shared recognition of the Cross and other trademark “mascon terms” (water, bread, wine, and other sacramental substances for instance). Such shared cultural resources both distinguishes them as a group from others and knits them together as a community.

Obviously readers outside of, or unfamiliar with, the culture of Christianity, may sense that an image like the Cross is somehow significant when they encounter it in a poem. But they may have to unpack it more slowly and consciously, using research or other contextual clues, to make sense of it. They might read as “outsiders,” so to speak, but that doesn’t make the facts or the feelings of the poem impossible to understand. Using a combination of a little research and their own powers of sympathy, empathy, and imagination, they can “translate,” and successfully create the “movie in the mind” that the poem wants to convey to us.

I’d like to loop back to my beginning point. I believe that the job of any poet (any artist, really) us to give us an experience that shows us we’re not alone despite the solitary uniqueness of our individual lives. But I also believe that the work of the poet (or of any artist) is not just an individual product, but is also a product of the culture, tradition, and community in which that artist’s talent was formed and developed.

I know for instance that, when I write poetry, I write differently—in imagery, in word choice, in worldview, etc.–than I would had I not been raised where I was: in a tight-knit German Catholic community in a small town in Indiana. Yes, my poems are my words, they come from “what I feel and see and hear,” just like Hughes’s narrator in the “English B” poem. But he sees and feels and hears Harlem, and the North Carolina of his youth–a different set of inputs than my home town and home culture. And like him, I can’t help that my page is “colored” by where I come from. And neither of us would have it any other way.

And that’s basically what Hughes’s young man in “Theme for English B” means when he says of his own page, “Being me, it will not be white.” He can only be himself, and his race and his community and his people’s history and culture are part of who he is. And yet his distinctive experience and culture as a Black person doesn’t necessarily prevent him from being heard or understood by his white professor. His page still “will be / a part of you, instructor”–because “You are white– / Yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.” 

That instructor might have to listen a little bit harder; he might have to process what he’s hearing more thoughtfully than he might with someone of his own race and class cohort. But if he does, he will feel more connected, and more human—even if, as in Christians’ contemplation of the Cross, that connection may bring pain and guilt as well as joy and redemption. 

How Not to Do It (If You Don’t Want to Blow Up the World): Some Thoughts from I. A. Richards

I. A. Richards in the Alps, 1930’s

It’s been a little over a century since “literature” took its present form as an academic subject. The person who is probably most responsible for the format and philosophy of a typical American college-level literature course is a fellow named I. A. Richards, who was a professor at Cambridge throughout the 1920’s.  In a way, he was doing in England what Shklovsky was doing in Russia at about the same time: making a case for reading poetry as a way of “de-automatizing” our perception and attaining a more attentive and nuanced view of the world around us.

Richards typically gave his students copies of poems from different periods and authors in the English-language poetic tradition—though he didn’t reveal the authors, the dates of publication, or other information about the poems themselves. He then simply asked his students to comment freely on the poems. The students could write anything they wanted—whether they liked the poem, how they interpreted or otherwise made sense of it, whether they noticed any formal features (rhyme, metaphor, etc.) that seemed worthy of comment.

Using these responses as a kind of database, Richards noted a few patterns in them that seemed to him to be a drag on the writers’ enjoyment and understanding of the poems. And some of these issues had to do with what we’ve already talked about elsewhere on this blog—including the habit of trying to rush our reading, which leads to missing details that are important to our understanding and appreciation of the poem as is. I’ll summarize the most pertinent ones here very quickly.

• First, Richards noted “the difficulty of making out the plain sense” of the poem. By this he means, the basic question of what happens or what is pictured in the poem. If it were a news story, a short film, or a photograph, literally what would we see? What happens? To answer such questions, we need to make sure we’ve recognized everything that the poet has literally placed in the frame of the poem: people, objects, events. We should have a very specific and vivid “movie” or picture in our minds.
  
• Next he noted the importance of images—something we’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog. It’s too easy for us to skim over words, knowing their meaning, without visualizing the sense experience they convey. (This is what happens with automatized or habitual reading, as Shklovsky noted.) Richards emphasized the idea that “the capacity to visualize” is maybe the most important quality that a reader brings to the act of reading. (Shklovsky expands this to cover not just poetry but life in general; he proposes that the ability to visualize is the basis of a number of essential human virtues, including appreciation and empathy. We can’t “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” unless we can specifically imagine their journey.)

Up to this point, the issues noted by Richards are really issues of literal meaning—of what we might call the data of the poem. Either we’re supposed to see chickens or we’re not; the wheelbarrow is either red or it’s not. Or, looking at a poem like Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina,” the “data” of the poem would include a month of the year and a time of day when the poem takes place (September, late afternoon), the presence of two people (the grandmother and the girl), a few crucial objects (the toy stove the girl is playing with, the real stove on which the teakettle is heating, the almanac hanging on a string from the wall above the kitchen table).

But how we respond to this data—what feelings or associations the data evoke in us, and what meaning or significance we assign to it—is a different story. Richards was concerned about emotional reactions or interpretations that come to us too hastily, before we’ve fully attended to the literal aspect of the poem. He identified two such kinds of responses, and they’re worth considering in some detail.

One such response is what Richards called mnemonic irrelevances. He defines this category in the following way:

These are misleading effects of the reader’s being reminded of some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations, the interference of emotional reverberations from a past which may have nothing to do with the poem.

I’ll give an example. When I was nine, I came home from school and was given the news that my grandfather, maybe my favorite person in the world, had died that afternoon. My grandmother gave me the news, but in the next room my mother was running the vacuum cleaner. Those two bits of information got wired together in my nine-year-old brain, and they’ve never come unstuck. Even today, many decades later, when I hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner or encounter the vivid image of one in a poem, short story, or film, I catch my breath a little with the memory of that shock and sorrow. Sometimes I can even feel the beginning of my eyes tearing up.

So, the image of the vacuum cleaner has a powerful set of associations for me. But these associations are personal; if a poet puts the image of a vacuum cleaner in a poem, she or he is most likely not trying to evoke the feeling of sorrow and loss in the reader. Focusing on my own unique personal memory as I’m reading the poem would keep me from fully realizing the experience that the poem actually conveys. It’s OK for me to feel those feelings, to have those associations (my memories and feelings are what they are), but I need to focus on the experience that is in the poem, not the experience that’s in my memory.

Another difficulty that Richards is concerned with is sort of the opposite. Stock responses are emotional reactions or inferences that are so strongly associated with particular images that the meanings and feelings associated with those images have become automatized. In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory,” we see how the ordinary folks of the town have developed the habit of thinking of a wealthy, well-dressed, handsome man like Richard as being of a different order from them. This is probably what they’ve been taught, and maybe the rich folks of the town have encouraged them to think in this way. In any case, this “stock response” keeps them from recognizing Richard’s subtle but desperate overtures toward friendship and human connection, and they (and perhaps we as readers) are surprised when he commits suicide in the last line, perhaps out of loneliness.

Another kind of “stock response” is the temptation to see the poem as primarily conveying a familiar message or lesson or moral. Thinking of “Richard Cory,” we might think of sayings like “It’s lonely at the top,” or “Money isn’t everything,” or “Don’t trust appearances.” Such “stock responses” reduce the poem to a single socially shared cliché rather than pointing us back to the concrete experience that the poem makes uniquely available to us. As the term “stock response” implies, this way of reading a poem is a kind of “ready-made,” already-baked notion, like one of those one-size-fits-all hats.

The Oxford Reference Online Dictionary defines “stock response” in the following way:

A stock response perceives in a work only those meanings that are already familiar from a reader’s or audience’s previous experience, failing to recognize fresh or unfamiliar meanings.

If for example we encounter a poem in which there are German Nazis, we might reflexively say, with Indiana Jones, “Nazis—I hate those guys!” because we know we’re supposed to disapprove of such characters. That’s a very different response than we might experience if we read attentively a poem that describes a specific incident from the Nazi era, like Catherine Tufariello’s “February 18, 1943.”

Here’s how Richards himself describes the “stock response”:

These [stock responses] have their opportunity whenever a poem seems to or does, involve views and emotions already fully prepared in the reader’s mind, so that what happens appears to be more of the reader’s doing than the poet’s.

In other words, if we feel tempted to think of a poem as something that simply confirms an idea we already believe, or to represent an idea we instinctively approve of, we should suspect the possibility of a stock response on our part. A poem should be an experience first, and we don’t agree or disagree with an experience—though of course we are welcome to our judgment about whether or not we find the experience pleasant, engaging, or illuminating.

All this may make Richards sound like just another English-teacher killjoy, but it’s worth considering why these particular ideas seemed important to him as a teacher and a literary scholar in the 1920’s. Richards taught and wrote in the period immediately following World War I, which was distinguished by (among other things) the fact that it was the first war taught with modern propaganda methods to demonize the opposition. These methods were both visual and verbal, and circulated through mass media (newspapers, posters, radio, film) using the recently invented techniques of advertising.

Not surprisingly, the hatreds and prejudices stoked during the War persisted into peacetime, and were expressed through “stock responses.” The Allies had been conditioned to think of the Germans as bloodthirsty animals, while from the German side the Allies were seen as vengeful, money-hungry races who held a gun to the head of Germany and made them sign the punitive Treaty of Versailles. It was similar to the sort of knee-jerk reflexes we see on social media these days, as well as in international relations, in which opposing sides see one another in such negative, stereotyped terms that any insult or even violent act seems justified.

Richards saw a widening gap between people’s thought reflexes (stock responses) and the actual, complicated reality of the world they shared with others. And he believed that reflex-like thinking stunted attentiveness and empathy in the same way that it impaired the enjoyment and understanding of poetry. So he saw his battle (as did Shklovsky) as being against those habits of “automatized” perception that advertising and propaganda aim to create in us. Poetry, as a genre that cultivated “slow reading” and close, non-judgmental attention, was important to them not just because they valued it as an art form, but because they firmly believed that the “slow reading” it encouraged had social as well as psychological benefits, and could help prevent another War like the horrible one they had just lived through.

Here’s a key quote from Richards’ book Principles of Literary Criticism (1925). (By “reference” in the following passage, he means seeing things literally rather than colored by our desires, expectations, needs, or prejudices.)

The extent to which reference is interfered with by needs and desires is underestimated even by those who, not having yet forgotten the events of 1914-1918 [that is, World War I], are most skeptical as to the independence of opinions and desires. Even the most ordinary and familiar objects are perceived as it pleases us to perceive them rather than as they are.

Past, Present, and Future

In the beginning, poetry was part of ritual. It was part of the process by which human beings organized their experience and created meaning around that experience. It was part of the process by which humans in groups bonded as community.

When you come right down to it, poetry, like the rituals in which it was originally embedded, is basically addressing three fundamental human questions:

How did we get here? (Tradition, history, memory)

What’s happening here? (Taking in and analyzing / reflecting on the present moment)

Where do we go from here? (Projecting values, aspirations, expectations for the future, generated from or informed by the data of the past and present)

In other words the work of poetry, like the work of ritual, is to help us understand our location in the world in a given moment–to give it meaning by orienting us in time and in relation to others.

If this all sounds vaguely religious, that’s as it should be, given the ritual origins of poetry. If I consider the ritual I’m most familiar with, the Catholic Mass, the elements I’ve mentioned above are obvious: After some preliminaries, there are readings from Scripture (sacred texts, but also historical ones, handed down from past times and relating the “stories” that remind us of the origins of the faith). This is the “tradition” part–how we got here.

There is a homily, typically applying the lessons of scripture to the present day; this is followed by a liturgy of Communion, in which the community shares a meal that re-enacts and reconstitutes the Last Supper of two thousand years earlier. This would be the “What’s happening here?” phase.

Then there is a closing ceremony in which the congregation is exhorted to go forward into the world and act on the values and commitments that have been illuminated by scripture, by the homily, and by the in-the-moment fellowship of the Communion meal. This would be the “Where do we go from here?” part of the ritual.

I’m going to suggest that any poem that really “reaches” us does so in this three-part way; some may emphasize one of the three aspects more than the others, but I think we’ve all had the feeling that when a poem “moves us,” we feel more connected, more located, more conscious of our place in the world and in time.

And even if a poem doesn’t grab us at first, I think we can still be uplifted by it, we can still “get it,” if we look at it a little more closely with these three questions in mind. Sometimes we’ll have to infer or even hypothesize answers to one or more of those questions to flesh things out in our experience of the poem. Sometimes we’ll remain unsure, unsettled, a little lost in our experience of the poem; but I guarantee that returning to these three basic questions, and using whatever resources we have to find answers to them, will increase our understanding and enjoyment of the poem.

I say this because that’s what it is designed to do, in the same way that a religious ritual is designed to help us feel more located in the moment, and more empowered and confident in going forward to face what an unknown future might throw at us. I don’t think that’s an overclaim.

Let’s test this idea out on a “real” poem. For an example I’ve selected a short poem called “Eating Together,” by Li-Young Lee. It goes like this:

In the steamer is the trout
seasoned with slivers of ginger,
two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil.
We shall eat it with rice for lunch,
brothers, sister, my mother who will
taste the sweetest meat of the head,
holding it between her fingers
deftly, the way my father did
weeks ago. Then he lay down
to sleep like a snow-covered road
winding through pines older than him,
without any travelers, and lonely for no one.

The first thing to note is how powerfully this poem focuses on the second of our three questions–What’s happening here? The sensory information–the tastes and smells of an Asian family meal being prepared–is strong and vivid, and it puts us as readers right there in the kitchen. We also know the time of day–it’s late morning probably, since the meal they’re preparing will be eaten as a lunch.

But the first question is powerfully addressed as well. Even without knowing the poet’s name, there is a strong sense that this activity of preparing the meal is part of a legacy; it is part of where they come from as a family, or, more broadly, as people of a specific cultural heritage.

And we also find that the father of the family has recently passed, perhaps suddenly and unexpectedly; “only weeks ago” it was he, and not the mother, who would “taste the sweetest meat of the head” of the fish. Now, only the speaker and his or her brothers, sister and mother will share the meal.

The death of the father is a fact of the recent past–part of “how we got here”–and his absence is part of the present. But what about the future, the question of “where do we go from here?” that this family, with the recently deceased father, faces?

There are a couple of clues. First, the “present” is the preparation of the meal. The actual eating of the meal is in the future: “We shall eat it with rice for lunch” (my italics); moreover, it’s the mother who will “taste the sweetest meat of the head, / holding it between her fingers / deftly, the way my father did.” The family will go on–they will cook and eat together, and what the father’s fingers once did, the mother or others in the family will now do in his place. And in this way the traditions, the cooking, the meals, the family will go on, as one set of hands picks up from another.

The poem ends on a sad, elegaic note–the remembrance of the father who is no longer in the kitchen or at the table. This is a natural emphasis, given that the loss is fresh for the rest of the family, only a few weeks old. But when read closely, we can see how the poem suggests where things go from here. And while there may still be sadness, there will always be another meal to prepare and eat, another gathering of the family, as some hands take the place of others in the handoff from person to person and generation to generation.

How did we get here? (Tradition, history, identityWhat’s happening? (Taking in and processing the present moment)Where do we go from here? (Generalizing lessons learned, values or aspirations going forward)

This Is Just To Say: On Poetry in a Time of Pandemic

Note: As I’m writing this it’s June 16, 2020. I have been thinking of what I could say to the students I will be meeting in a couple months, especially first-year college students who have had a senior year like no other, and who will be arriving on campuses for a Fall term first-year experience that’s very different from what they could have imagined a year ago. The focus of the class will be the literary genres of poetry and the short story–topics that may at first glance seem very distant and peripheral in light of the upheavals of the past few months. This is what I came up with.

We’ve been through some horrible and amazing times in the last few months. Pandemic. Economic free fall. George Floyd. The violent unrest and the calls for healing social transformation that his (and many others’) deaths inspired.

How will we mark these times for ourselves and for others? Some of us will do it by writing poems and telling stories about what they saw and how they felt as they lived through these times. And when they do they will be saying something simple but also something human and universal.

They’ll be saying: I was here. I saw this. I felt this. And it mattered. And I want it to matter to you, whoever you are.

And it does matter, regardless of who you are, where you were, or what you saw. It matters regardless of whether you were there and saw with your own eyes the officer’s boot on George Floyd’s neck, or if instead you saw it on TV. Or if you didn’t see it at all, but walked home from work through riot-torn streets, wondering what was going on. Or if you just saw THAT on TV, too.

My point is, it doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t see. You were here, you saw something, you felt something. And that’s enough for the moment to matter, as far as poems and stories are concerned.

Poems and short stories try to capture human moments and human experiences in a way that reminds us that we are here, in a particular place and time, and that what we see and feel and hear matters, regardless. Not every poem or story we read in this class will be about big moments or “important” lives. A lot of it will seem like small stuff in the grand scheme of things. But we shouldn’t forget that small stuff is big stuff.

How many times have you bought something at a convenience store, handed a $20 bill to the clerk, and stood there while the clerk counted your change into your palm? Hard to imagine a more unremarkable moment than that, but in the case of George Floyd at Cup Foods, that was the beginning of an old world blowing up and a new one struggling to be born. There will be poems and stories about that moment, and why it matters, many of them. There probably are already.

But there should also be poems about all the moments just like that one that DIDN’T end by turning an already crazy world upside down. Moments that don’t end in a tragic death, but simply end with an exchanged glance between customer and clerk–a glance of kindness, or coldness, or even suspicion and distrust, whose consequence goes no further than the impact of the moment. And those moments matter too, or at least a good poem or story can make them matter.

It’s hard to imagine a “smaller” moment than the one William Carlos Williams presents in his poem “This Is Just To Say,” published in 1934:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Not a lot of mystery here, and at first glance not a lot of significance. It’s just about one person who, rising early, can’t resist eating the delicious plums that someone else in the house was saving for breakfast. And he (assuming the speaker is male, like the poet) is both sorry and not sorry for what he’s done. The poem does a good job, I think, of putting us in the moment, of saying, I was here, I saw this, I did this, I felt this. And somehow it seems to matter.

But matter, how? Well, let’s widen the focus a little bit. Besides being a poet, Williams was an M.D. who lived and worked in the area around Paterson, New Jersey. He was a family doctor, and he started his practice there around 1912. In 1918-19, shortly after the end of World War I, there was a global flu pandemic that killed 100 million people worldwide. Over 30,000 died just in New York City alone, right across the river from Paterson.

At the time, Williams was a young doctor with a family–his wife and two sons, aged 2 and 5 years old. His practice took him into the homes of his patients on a daily basis. Many of his house calls during that pandemic involved close contacts with a highly infectious, deadly disease that was at that point poorly understood and for which there was no known cure or treatment. (Sound familiar?)

It wasn’t until I was in grad school and studying Williams’ poetry that I found out, through a chance conversation with my grandmother, that Williams had been her family’s doctor through the 1918-19 pandemic, and had been present in the house when, a few months apart from one another, two of her brothers contracted the influenza. She told me the story of how “Doc Williams” held one of those brothers close as the dying boy struggled for breath.

(“Doc Williams wrote poetry?” she laughed, incredulously, when I told her I was studying him in school. “Well I never!”) Certainly, Williams’ experience as a family physician during a terrifying and deadly pandemic was full of moments that mattered. But it’s interesting that for the most part in his poems he chooses to present very different kinds of moments–like the moment of combined regret and pleasure experienced by the plum-eater in “This Is Just to Say.”

This reminds me of another Williams poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” (1923), which begins with the line “so much depends” and then goes on to describe a simple, common backyard scene featuring a few chickens and a “rain-glazed” wheelbarrow. “So much depends” is just another way of saying, I was here. I saw this. And it matters. It mattered even though–or possibly even because–for “Doc Williams” all the death and suffering he saw during that horrible pandemic was probably still fresh in his memory. Maybe when you have spent a big part of your life on intimate terms with the dying, even at the risk of your own and your family’s safety, you come to realize that every person, every moment, every juicy plum, is a miracle worthy of your total attention.

Poems and stories can (and some of them should) remind us of the big moments and events–wars, pandemics, profound political changes, the public deeds of heroes and villains. But they are also here to remind us that things don’t have to be big to matter. Anything can matter, even if only because we are here to see it, and to say so. And because we–you and me, each and all of us–matter, too.

This semester, let’s read and discuss with that in mind. Let’s treat these poems, and one another, as if all of us matter. Because we do. Because we were here. And we saw this. And we felt this.

Not Waving, But Drowning

I’m sure we’ve all had at least one of these people in our lives: the guy / gal who’s always clowning, making the rest of us laugh. Sometimes we catch a hint of the darkness that fuels the person’s antics, but we’re so busy enjoying the show that we push away our awareness of that dark side and just keep laughing.

That’s the all-too familiar situation that the poet Stevie Smith sets forth in “Not Waving But Drowning,” the title poem of her 1957 collection. It’s a poem that is often misread, both in terms of its scenario and its themes, but once you “get” the scenario it’s almost impossible to read it any way but that which Smith intended. So I thought I would spend a little time taking it apart and putting it back together, to help us see where both the difficulty and the emotional impact of the poem come from.

Nobody heard him, the dead man,   
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought   
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,   
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always   
(Still the dead one lay moaning)   
I was much too far out all my life   
And not waving but drowning.

So, a seemingly simple three-stanza poem, with four relatively short lines per stanza. But its complexity and its challenges come to the front if we ask the first question we ought to ask of any poem, song lyric, or work of fiction: Who is speaking?

The answer to this question turns out to be more complicated than we might expect.  The first two lines give us a third-person narrator who may or may not be a bystander to the scenario depicted in the poem:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:

That colon at the end of the second line prepares us for a shift: the lines that follow are spoken (in fact “moaned”) by the dead man:

I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

But there are other voices in the poem we haven’t heard yet, though the voice of the drowned man points us toward them. The pronoun “you” in the line “I was much further out than you thought” is very interesting. Who is this “you”? Is it the reader? Someone else present in the poem but not yet introduced? Or maybe some conflation of those two?

We get a suggestion of who that “you” might be when we hit the middle stanza, where a third voice begins to speak. Now we hear the conversation of those on the shore, who after the fact are trying to explain or rationalize to themselves how the tragic drowning of the man occurred:

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead.
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way
They said.

Significantly, the fourth line of the stanza (the simple “They said”) returns us to the third-person narrator we met in the first two lines of the poem. The final stanza of the poem returns to the voice of the drowned man, with an interjection from that same third-person narrator to remind us whose voice we’re hearing (“Still the dead man lay moaning”).

So the poem introduces three different voices in twelve lines–the disembodied voice of the drowned man, the voice of the living to whom he is still calling out, and that of a third-person narrator who serves as a kind of moderator. Setting aside the commentary of that third-person narrator, Smith’s poem of three stanzas has roughly the following structure:

• Drowned man speaks from beyond the grave, addresses unidentified others as “you”
• People on the shore don’t hear him / have misunderstood his gestures while alive, don’t comprehend their own part in his fate, speak of him in the third person (“he”)
• Drowned man continues to speak from beyond the grave, contradicting the explanations given of his death, while those who survive him still don’t hear / understand.

So what’s the storyline and what’s the point?

The people on the shore have thought of, and continue to think of, the now-dead man as a joker, a “larker.” But what they have interpreted as his “antics” is actually something very different–a cry for help from a drowning man. He eventually dies of misunderstanding (one might even say misinterpretation) by those on the shore. Those people assume that they know what they’re looking at or hearing, and thus don’t look deeply or listen carefully to what’s playing out in front of them.

And the way they explain his death to themselves–the water was “too cold” and “his heart gave way”–is all at once too easy and too clichéd, but also symbolically apt. For as the “dead man” tells us in the final stanza, the waters in which he found himself had “always” been too cold, he had “been too far out” all his life, “not waving but drowning.”

This suggests that the cluelessness of those on the shore is not just something that happened in the moment. All his life they have thought of him as the joker, the “larker,” the class clown. They seem to have never considered that his “antics” were a bid for human connection. So that the final fact of his drowning, as his heart gives out in the cold, lonely water, is simply the desperate end to a process that has been going on for a long, long time.

I have always been fascinated by this poem, partly because I think we have all known people like that drowned man, and we are all guilty of some error of perception like those on the shore who speak in the poem’s middle stanza. Since the comedian / actor Robin Williams’ death by suicide in 2014, it’s impossible for me to read this poem without thinking of him as the dead man, whose “larking” turns out to have been a mask for sadness, depression, loneliness, perhaps even clinical illness.

But I’m also fascinated by the twisty way in which Stevie Smith weaves those three voices in and out of those twelve short lines, making what might otherwise be a simple and obvious scenario into a narrative that we have to pay very close attention to, line by line, lest we lose its thread and misinterpret what’s happening or who is speaking in a given line or stanza.

That’s what makes the poem an exercise in paying attention–a task at which the poem’s reader, just like the people on the shore, can either succeed or fail. And this illustrates, once again, what I have said in other entries on this blog about the value of reading poetry: doing so can cultivate in us habits of attention and empathy, as well as powers of useful inference and interpretation, that under the right circumstances can literally be life-savers.

Reading, Writing, and Racism: A Manifesto in Support of the Study of Literature

As I am writing this, it is early November, 2018. It has been a rough couple of weeks in my little academic universe, and in the broader world that surrounds it.

First, the faculty members at our University decided that a dedicated literature course was no longer a necessary element of our core undergraduate requirements.

After that, in quick succession, the following occurred:

• Here in St. Paul, Minnesota, our campus was rocked by racist and racially intimidating messages posted on the dormitory door of an African American student at our school.
• In Louisville, Kentucky, a man with an assault weapon first cased a Black church, then proceeded to a grocery store and shot two African American customers. When confronted after the shooting by another citizen, the shooter said: “Don’t shoot me, I won’t shoot you. Whites don’t shoot whites.”
• In Florida, a man was arrested after sending multiple mail bombs to people and organizations he regarded as political “enemies” because of their party affiliations or their criticisms of President Trump.
• Finally, in Pittsburgh, a gunman spouting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories shot up a Jewish synagogue worship service, killing 11 and wounding many more.

What does any of these events, aside from the decision to remove the literature requirement from my university’s core curriculum, have to do with the subject of this blog? Well, in my view there is a connection between what kinds of reading are taught, practiced, and valued in our society and the actual policies and actions that predominate in our society as a whole.

And I am left to wonder, particularly with reference to the bullet points above:

What have these folks been reading? Are there collections of poetry, short stories, novels, literature of any kind on their bookshelves? Where did they get their information or ideas about the people or the groups or the organizations they attacked? What kinds of language did those information sources use to describe the objects of their violence?

For instance, if we went into the home of the Louisville shooter would we have seen any books of poems by Langston Hughes, Rita Dove, Gwendolyn Brooks, or Claude McKay? Or any short stories by Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison? Or any of the plays of August Wilson? Or if we looked at his computer’s search history would we have found any visits to websites featuring or discussing the work of any of these great writers? I might be wrong, but I suspect that the answer to these“for-instance” queries would be “no.”

Why do I think it matters what these folks might or might not have on their bookshelves? I’ll try to explain it in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a literature snob.

Evils like racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia exist at least in part because human beings’ perception is often short-circuited by our impulses to simplify complex matters, to have our own assumptions confirmed, and to see things in terms of our own self-interest. I touched on this idea in an earlier post on this blog, when I discussed Viktor Shklovsky’s concerns about the “automatization” of our perception–the way in which our everyday habits of seeing and thinking reduce the world around us to simplistic, ready-made formulae that are convenient and gratifying, but ultimately false.

We must often make a special effort to make sure that our perceptions and our responses to others around us are deeply rooted in an understanding of the realities that define the lives of those others, and the shared humanity that compels our sympathy and respect for them. Reading literature encourages us to make this special effort, and gives us practice in doing so, precisely through the qualities by which Shklovsky defines the “literary”: that special kind of difficulty (and that special kind of pleasure) that encourages us to SLOW DOWN THE PROCESS OF PERCEPTION so that our assumptions don’t run ahead of our actual experience and understanding.

As Shklovsky noted, it’s easy for our perception to become “automatized”—that is to say, for assumptions, prejudices, half-truths, generalizations, and outright untruths to substitute for deeper truth-seeking and truth-seeking about the world around us, including other people. And the temptation of this automatization is all the more powerful when it produces the junkie’s high of confirming our own beliefs and priorities. The special purpose of literature and of “literary” reading is to break that automatism and compel our close attention to, and contemplation of, an experience or worldview other than our own.

In reading literature we are challenged to experience what is truly being said, not what we expect, wish, or casually assume is being said. We expand our understanding and sympathy by imaginatively experiencing the world through the words and perceptions of another rather than forcing our reading experience into the already-set patterns of our own expectations and assumptions.

I believe that the discipline of “close-reading” literature is not just an academic practice. It is a social, philosophical, and even a spiritual practice that is crucial to the effective functioning of a diverse society such as our own. This kind of reading helps us to inhabit and identify with the perspective of the speaker in Langston Hughes’s “Theme For English B,” regardless of what race we are; to feel at a visceral level the mutilated selfhood of the female protagonist in Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll,” regardless of our sex or gender; and to be torn by the moral dilemma of the motorist in William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark,” regardless of whether we have had the power of life and death over another living creature.

My point is that is matters what we read, but it also matters how we read it. So, WHAT WE SAY and HOW WE SAY IT matters.  But even more important, HOW WE LISTEN, HOW WE READ, and HOW WE PAY ATTENTION matters even more.

But as anyone involved in close encounters with literature knows, inhabiting a poem in this way is hard work. It takes attention to every detail of language, it takes imaginative projection into the thoughts and feelings of another, and sometimes it even takes a little research to check and correct our initial impressions. But it’s what we do to be more responsible and more skilled readers.

This is why I teach literature, and why the challenges of it are as fresh and meaningful for me now as they were when I began teaching over 40 years ago. It’s because the close study of literature has the ability to make us more human, and better humans.  It has the ability to make us more careful and sensitive stewards of the language that we use in our daily interactions with others. A work of literature, like any work of human hands, may have its flaws and its blind spots. But every good work of literature challenges us as readers to be the most attentive and sympathetic readers we can be–the very opposite effect of language that engages in stereotypes, prejudicial beliefs, and open slurs against others among us.

My take-away from my own experience of reading, teaching, and writing about literature boils down to what I feel are three basic “deep truths” that are unique to the literary experience. Not coincidentally, these “deep truths” stand in opposition to the kind of thinking (and the habits of reading) that appear to stand behind the violent actions alluded to at the beginning of this post. In contrast to much of what we find on the internet and on social media, literature helps us cultivate the following habits of truth:

• Things are almost always more complex, rather than more simple, than we would like to think.
• Deeper truths tend to surprise us and challenge our assumptions rather than confirm them.
• The deeper we go into the story of any person or group, the more reason we have for sympathy, love, and identification rather than fear and hate.

Poetry is Breath!

When I hear others read poetry aloud I am often fascinated by the choices that they make about where to take a pause for breath. This is true whether I am listening to a poet read his or her own work, or it is someone in a poetry course reading a poem that he or she is seeing on the page for the first time. There is no real rule about where to pause in reading a poem out loud, but I think it is instructive to consider the possible factors that drive this choice. For instance:

• A reader might pause at the line breaks in a poem.
• A reader might pause at natural grammatical divisions in a poem (sentences marked by end punctuation or major clauses marked by commas, colons, or semicolons).
• A reader might pause at the natural comfortable limit of his or her breath.

It’s that last possibility I’d like to think about for a moment, since it reminds us that poetry, more than fiction or prose, is at its core an oral and aural genre, with its roots deep in song and ritual recitation. The physical sounds of poetry, and the physical acts of making those sounds (and apprehending them through our sense of hearing) are a key part of the experience of poetry, just as the physical acts of facial expression and body language are a key part of how we communicate in social situations.

Language is such a taken-for-granted part of our lives that it’s easy to forget that it must be physically created, exhaling a breath as we shape our oral cavity into the sounds that make up our words. This means that, in oral language at least, there is a natural length at which any phrase can be spoken with relative comfort—the cycle of a natural breath.

Now, the duration of a “natural’ breath is going to vary slightly from person to person, depending on what kind of physical condition he or she is in. I’ve done a few tests on myself, and assuming I am somewhere in the “average” range, it appears that in casual everyday speech (normal speed and volume) I typically produce somewhere between twelve and fifteen syllables in a single breath (that is, before pausing to take in additional air and start the breathing cycle over again).

In some cases I might produce fewer syllables per exhalation (when I am yelling or cursing, for instance); or from time to time I might produce more, to try and complete a long sentence or a complex idea before I lose my train of thought. But my point is that there is a natural range limit in terms of how many syllables a single human breath can comfortably produce. And it seems to fall somewhere just beyond one of English’s most familiar poetic meters, the five-beat, ten-syllable line of iambic pentameter.

Now, even in casual speech most of our sentences are longer than ten, twelve, or even fifteen syllables; but we typically pause our speech for breath at natural grammatical divisions—not just the stops at the end of sentences, but clauses, phrases, even sometimes single words in a series, where we might stop for emphasis and cadence–and, not coincidentally, sometimes for a breath). (I’m thinking here of the way in which the casual punctuation in social media evokes the SOUND of dramatic pauses for breath by putting periods after every word of a phrase—e. g., “Every. Single. Time.” or “Not. On. MY. Watch.”, to name a couple I have seen recently.)

So there is a natural relationship (although not a one-to-one correspondence) between what we might call the grammatical or syntactic extension of the sentence (the number, order, and organization of the words necessary to express a thought) and the physical duration and force of the breath necessary to articulate that sentence orally.

As I’ve said elsewhere, poetry is all about getting us to sit up and pay attention to those things we ordinarily take for granted or pass without reflection. And few things are more taken for granted than the way in which spoken language is dependent on the physical cycle of breath–unless it is the mysterious ease with which we produce grammatical structures–phrases, clauses, sentences–whose operations perplex and mystify us when we are asked to diagram or otherwise analyze them. We become conscious of this relationship mainly when we find ourselves–usually by accident–running out of breath before we are able to express our thought completely and grammatically.

So one of the functions of the poetic line is to make us more conscious of this complex, interdependent relationship between breath, meaning / syntax, and the printed word on the page. Sometimes the poetic line corresponds to the length of the breath, sometimes to the natural phrase or other unit of meaning; but sometimes the poetic line dramatically FAILS to correspond to these “natural” but interlinked intervals (one biological, one syntactic). Let’s look at a couple of texts that many of us have spoken aloud, both individually and in groups, multiple times over the course of our lives. I have set them up as if they were poems, but have followed opposite strategies in terms of their division into poetic lines on the page.

Example # 1

I pledge allegiance
To the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the Republic
For which it stands
One nation
Under God
Indivisible
With liberty and justice for all

Example # 2

Our father who art
In heaven, hallowed be
Thy name. Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done, on earth
As it is in heaven. Give us
This day our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those who trespass
Against us. And lead us not
Into temptation but
Deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
The power, and the glory
Forever and ever. Amen.

The line breaks in Example # 1 pretty much conform to my memory of how we recited this text together every morning in my grade school some 50+ years ago. The line breaks correspond to the points at which we collectively paused. And while the lines themselves are shorter than the duration of a natural breath, they do reflect natural grammatical divisions in the text: the subject + verb sentence stem of the first line, followed by two complete prepositional phrases in lines 2 and three; a continuation of parallel prepositional phrases, followed by a series of very short lines that consist of parallel noun phrases, then ending with a final prepositional phrase.

The nuns always frowned when some of us tried to rush the recitation by eliminating some of the pauses–which we could, because those short two-beat and three-beat lines were easily combined into a single breath. But it is also the case that we were encouraged to recite these short lines with an intensity and force that took up whatever reserve of breath might otherwise have been left over after a mere four (or six) syllables. My main point here is that the relationship between grammatical unit, line division, and breath in Example # 1 is on balance more or less close and well-aligned, so much so that the recitation flows naturally, without calling much attention to itself as the odd and artificial performance that such a recitation–especially of a text such as The Pledge–actually is.

For the second example–The Lord’s Prayer–I have divided the text into three-beat lines (“Our Father who art / In heaven, hallowed be / Thy name. Thy kingdom come,” etc.), letting the beats rather than the logic of breath or phrase determine the line-endings.  Of course, in traditional metrical poetry the length of the line is everything, the backbone of the poem’s rhythm that is more or less consistent regardless of the length of the phrase required to complete the sentence or clause.

When reading it aloud from the page, the visual cue of the line endings tempts us to pause; yet we resist pausing because we feel the lack of completion of the grammatical unit at that point in the sentence. The visual division of the line endings pulls against our grammatical sense of where the grammatical divisions are, making us consciously choose our pauses in a way that Example # 1 does not. And somewhere in the background of all this is the question of breath, trying to pace itself and anticipate how many syllables the next exhalation will have to support.

The technical term for this effect—the spillover of a natural grammatical phrase from one line to the next—is called enjambment.  Its counterpart, caesura, refers to the placement of a major grammatical division, like the division between sentences or independent clauses, in the middle of the line. But these two terms are often taught simply as definitions, without much attention to their underlying effect. As I’ve tried to describe it here, enjambment and caesura serve to make us more conscious of the interlocking forces of breath, phrase, and the poetic line by exploiting the possible tensions among them. It’s a little like the way we become aware of rhythm in music when it becomes markedly syncopated—when certain parts of the ensemble start emphasizing different beats or patterns of stress within the measure.

It’s yet another way in which poetry slows down our process of attention by calling our attention to the stuff it is made out of—sound, breath, image, etc.—as well as to the meaning it makes as we read it. Ezra Pound, in one of his many literary manifestos, called for poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome” (252). But of course even in music we are aware of both the implied rhythm (the tempo and pattern of stresses) that underlies and often pulls against the contours of the melody—just as we are aware of the natural breath limits that determine the length and intensity of the phrase. The point Is that these relationships are more or less taken for granted as a rule, and we only recognize their workings in a conscious way when they are somehow disrupted.

I’ll close with just a few illustrative examples. In the English-language tradition, there is probably no more familiar and “naturalized” form than that of the sonnet, with its fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and its typical structure of opening quatrains (either two or three, depending on the form) followed by a concluding volta, or turn, which occurs either in a two-line concluding couplet or a concluding sestet (again, depending on the form). In the opening quatrains at least of many sonnets (sometimes called the proposition part of the poem), the three elements I have discussed (breath, phrase, line ending) are predominantly in alignment. Take for example Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s ease hath all too short a date; . . .

In this opening quatrain, we have four consecutive phrases, each corresponding roughly to the duration of a comfortable breath (ten syllables, five stresses), and each terminating not just in a punctuation mark (question mark, semicolon, comma, semicolon) but ALSO a line break. The effect is musical, comforting, reassuring, as is appropriate for a poem in which the lover is proclaiming admiration and affection for the beloved.

Now let’s look at the opening quatrains from another sonnet, this one from the modern American poet Countee Cullen:

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did he stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair. . . .

First-time readers are often disoriented and confused by this 20^th-Century poem in a way that they are not when they read the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare’s Sonnet # 16—and not just because of Cullen’s Classical references to Sisyphus and Tantalus. The first two quatrains are a single long sentence that spreads over eight lines, with the last six of those lines made up of a dependent clause that hangs on the subordinating conjunction why at the end of line two. In the second quatrain we see one mild enjambment in which the subject of the clause is separated from the verb (“Tantalus / Is baited) and a couple of consecutive stronger ones in which the verb phrase is divided by a line ending (“declare / If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus / To struggle up a never-ending stair”).

In other words, the line endings offer little in corresponding resolution of meaning or grammatical structure. Unlike the opening quatrain of the Shakespeare sonnet, the line breaks fail to offer reliable guidance in terms of when we might pause for breath if reading or reciting the poem aloud. The effect is unsettling, puzzling, disorienting, even at the basic level of what the poem is supposed to sound like in our ears—let alone the meaning conveyed. This is appropriate for a poem whose subject, once sussed out, is alienation and confusion, asking clarifying questions of God in a world that seems to make no moral or philosophical sense.

Just for fun, here is a really extreme example of what we’ve been talking about, from the 20^th-Century American poet e. e. cummings. Once again, the form we’re looking at is a sonnet (fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, with a more or less standard sonnet rhyme scheme). But the enjambments in the poem are extreme, in some cases even splitting words up at the end of the line; and we search in vain for a mark of punctuation or syntactic clue that would tell us when to pause for an intake of oxygen. In fact the last line of the poem reveals to us that we are to speak the first eleven lines in a single rush of breath that violates both grammatical sense and the normal physical breathing cycle upon which oral language depends :

next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

WORK CITED

Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect.” 1917. In Pound, Early Writings: Poems and Prose.  Ed. Ira B. Nadel.  Penguin, 2005.

 

 

From Tom Jones to The Great Gatsby: A Tale of Two Narrators

Chapter IV of Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749) begins with a description of the home of a Mr. Allworthy, as seen from the crest of a hill above the house. It’s a beautiful May morning, with the sun gorgeously illuminating the scene. In our mind’s eye, with the help of the narrator of course, we see not just the Allworthy house but the valley below, the surrounding woods, and a distant ridge of mountains whose peaks here and there poke into puffy clouds. It’s like a scene from a painting at which we can safely gaze—until, suddenly, Fielding’s narrator catches himself with an expression of alarm:

Reader, take care, I have unadvisedly led thee to the Top of as high a Hill as Mr. Allworthy’s, and how to get thee down without breaking they Neck, I do not well know. However, let us e’en venture to slide down together, for Miss Bridget rings her Bell, and Mr. Allworthy is summoned to Breakfast, where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your Company. (43-44)

Of course the Reader is not in any real danger, no matter how imaginatively immersed she or he might be in the book. The narrator’s sudden sense of caution is a rhetorical flourish, a kind of playful, imaginative banter that adds a little spice and lubricant to the reader-writer relationship. But it also tells us a lot about the relationship that Fielding thinks of himself as having with his reader. The reader is clearly in his hands—under his protection, so to speak. He is the gentlemanly tour guide who points out the sights to us, explains what we are looking at, and accompanies us at every step so we don’t get into too much confusion or trouble.

It’s hard to imagine a narrator in a 21^st Century work of fiction (or even a 20^th Century one for that matter) adopting this tone and attitude toward the reader—at least if we rule out the possibility of parody or irony. It may be that we have become too suspicious of the motives behind others’ words, or maybe just too aware of the complex subjectivity of the human individual, to place ourselves so unreservedly in the care of another–even if that “other” is a fictionalized narrator. It would seem that in our own skeptical century the kind of trust one invests in the “authority” of a narrator is a relic of a pre-modern age, one woven from a very different social and philosophical fabric than our own.

Fielding’s work is often contrasted with that of his contemporary, Samuel Richardson, whose novels reflect a much more modern attitude toward storytelling. Richardson’s major works (Pamela and Clarissa) are epistolary novels–they are made up entirely of letters exchanged among the various characters in the story. There is no narrator to guide us, to tell us whom to trust, what to think of the actions and thoughts being described, or how to orient ourselves in the surrounding landscape. In other words, there is no one there to “help us down the hill,” as Fielding’s narrator stands ready to do. In fact, we are not on a hill at all, but down in the murky morass of tangled individual human perception, motives, and power struggles.

As Ian Watt notes in his book The Rise of the Novel, the contrast between Fielding’s work and Richardson’s reflects a paradigm shift that was vexing Western societies in the mid-Eighteenth Century. An older social and epistemological order–one in which aristocratic elites were regarded as the custodians of the interests of the wider society—was gradually, painfully giving way to an emerging capitalist-democratic order in which individuals were responsible for their own interests, including their own understanding of themselves and the world around them. (The American and French revolutions that occurred at that century’s end were maybe the clearest and most dramatic expressions of this paradigm shift.)

In other words, the reader’s relationship to events and characters in a novel began much more to resemble his or her relationship to events and people in real life. The reader is much more “on his or her own,” so to speak, in trying to assess the motives of characters, the significance of events, and—most relevant for my discussion here—the trustworthiness of the narrator, especially when that narrator is a first-person storyteller who is also a participant in the story.

To illustrate the profound change that has occurred since Fielding’s time in our expectations regarding the narration in fictional works, consider the assertion of Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. At the end of Chapter Three, Nick pauses the action to tell the reader: “Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people I have ever known” (59).

For most contemporary readers Nick’s assertion has the same effect as a politician’s denial that he is a crook; the very fact that he says it raises red flags of skepticism in us. (If you Google this quote, you will find dozens of discussion threads with titles like “Is Nick Carraway Honest?” or “Nick Carraway: An Honest Liar?”) This is because we are aware that Fitzgerald intends us to take Nick not as an authoritative commentator who is above the action (“on the hill,” so to speak) but as a complex, fallible human being just like ourselves. That is to say, we may assume that his perceptions (including self-perception) are not infallible or disinterested, but are colored by emotions, values, and experiences particular to him as an individual.

(I think we can see right away how this is different, both in terms of Fitzgerald’s narration and our expectations, from the reader-narrator relationship that is cultivated in that passage from Tom Jones.)

I bring this up because I think our skeptical 21^st-Century impulses tend to conflate the psychological and epistemological properties of a narrator like Nick, often at the expense of the larger significance of the story such a narrator might be telling.

If “objectivity” or authoritative commentary on events is what we want from a narrator, we’re not going to get it from Nick. Like us, his information is limited by his own perception, and much of it is compromised by the fact that it is hearsay from others in the story (Jordan Baker for instance) who themselves have a casual relationship with the truth. Furthermore, he announces his prejudice in favor of Gatsby at the very beginning of the story (even though he also tells us that Gatsby “represented everything for which I have unaffected scorn” (2).

Given the subjective and sometimes suspicious nature of Nick’s information, given his confused and divided feelings about the novel’s main character, Jay Gatsby, I think it is natural for us to question whether we can take him as the “honest man” he claims to be at the end of Chapter 3. Jordan Baker, who miscalculates Nick’s feelings for her, thinks not; near the end of the novel she says that she “guessed wrong” in thinking him an “honest, straightforward person” (177). My own feeling is that Nick is as honest as he knows how to be as a psychologically realized character whose knowledge and understanding—including of himself—are subject to normal human limitations and the extraordinary circumstances of his relationship with Gatsby himself.

But this is a different question from another one that I have frequently heard raised in discussions of the novel—that is, the question of whether Nick is a “reliable narrator.” When used in reference to character-narrators like Nick the concept of “reliability” is often confused and conflated with that of “honesty” or “objectivity.” At the risk of making a distinction that will seem too subtle to some, I will say that “reliability” is a quality that attaches to Nick as a narrator in a literary work (in other words, it is about his place in the novel as a whole), while qualities like “honesty” or “objectivity” attach to Nick in his role as a psychologically realized character in interaction with other characters.

In making this distinction I am relying on the critic Wayne Booth, who coined the term “reliability” (at least insofar as it applies to narrators in works of literature) and defined a “reliable narrator” as “one who speaks for an acts in accordance with the norms of the work” (158-59). What a “reliable narrator” provides is not accuracy or objectivity per se, but advocacy or faithful representation of the predominant values or concerns of the work as a whole. And by “work as a whole” we mean not just the words and thoughts of the narrator, but the meanings conveyed by all of the literary elements that make up a work of imaginative fiction–plot, character, symbolism, allusion to other cultural or historical references outside the work itself.

The example I’ve been discussing, The Great Gatsby, is a very subtle and complicated work, and one might put forward different hypotheses about what Booth would call its “norms.” But I’ll ask you to accept my own hypothesis about Fitzgerald’s novel, for purposes of illustration here.

One of the major conflicts in the novel is between what we might call the “old-money” worldview of the Buchanans and the “new-money” worldview of Gatsby. The Buchanans (especially Tom) are portrayed as spiritually empty, ruthlessly and unscrupulously clinging to their hereditary social and monetary privilege, closing ranks against possible usurpers like people of color and come-from-nowhere upstarts like Gatsby himself. For Tom money is all about power–especially about keeping it and using it to keep others down and under his thumb.

Gatsby by contrast sees money as an almost visionary medium, as something that can make “dreams come true,” even rekindling the long-lost dream of a love relationship with Daisy, Tom’s wife. Tom’s worldview makes him boorish, aggressive, paranoid, and ungracious; Gatsby’s worldview makes him (at least on the surface, and at least to Nick) civil, reticent, loyal, and generous. But, of course, Tom is a respectable citizen and Gatsby is a gangster whose friends make their cufflinks out of the molars of men they have had killed.

Nick is not just the narrator of the story; he is the “swing character” who observes the claims of both of these worldviews (and the characters who represent them) and who in the end must choose between them. In my own understanding of the novel there is no doubt which of these two contrasting characters–Buchanan or Gatsby–represents the predominant “norms” or values of the book as a whole. It’s Gatsby, despite his gangsterism and his visionary excesses. And Nick does choose to align himself with these values–in fact he declares his choice in the first few paragraphs of the novel.

Because he is the narrator, and because his own interpretation of the events he narrates points us toward rather than away from the dominant values or “norms” of the novel as a whole, he is (in my view at least) a “reliable narrator” in Booth’s definition. Nick may at times be a jerk or unfair to other characters (Jordan Baker for instance); he may at times finesse or even omit certain scenes that might cast himself in an uncomfortable light (for instance, the strange narrative gap at the end of Chapter 2, during which he may or may not have a sexual encounter with a man named McKee). But these things are simply evidence of Nick’s complex humanity, part of his function as a character in the novel, and raise issues that are separate from his performance as a narrator vis-à-vis the question of his reliability.

It’s not hard to imagine a version of the story of The Great Gatsby told by a third-person, omniscient narrator (one that looks more like Fielding’s narrator in Tom Jones, showing us the view from the hill, than Carraway’s often blinkered ground-level view). In fact, that’s pretty much what we get in the film versions (both Robert Redford and Leo DeCaprio), where the roving eye of the camera performs the function of the all-knowing, all-seeing narrator.

But most who are familiar with the book come away from these film versions with the feeling that some essential qualities of the story have been lost, and that the expression of the story’s “norms” is somehow too obvious and lacking in impact when not experienced through the partly clouded window of Nick’s character. Fitzgerald wants us to apprehend the story’s norms slowly, with some effort of discernment, so that our understanding will feel more precious because it is hard-won. While Nick’s complex humanity may at times obscure or distract, I don’t think he ever really misdirects us with respect to the novel’s dominant norms or values. And that is what makes his narration reliable.

It’s also possible to re-imagine the novel as told from Tom Buchanan’s point of view, with pretty much the same facts in evidence. Tom might actually provide us with a more straightforward, factual, and complete account of Gatsby than Nick does; Tom certainly has more resources to ferret out “the truth” about the source of Gatsby’s wealth. But if the “norms” of the novel as described above were held constant, then Tom would function as an “unreliable narrator,” since absent a character transplant he would not be capable of “speaking and acting in accordance with the norms of the work.” And Fitzgerald would have to devise a way of signaling Tom’s unreliability–through plot developments, through the words of other characters, or perhaps simply through outright satirical exaggeration (and thus implicit critique) of Tom’s own personality and attitudes.

Unreliability of this sort is usually employed by authors for ironic effect, to highlight the norms of the work as a whole; an example of this would be Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, in which the narrator, Coverdale, is a virulent misogynist whose narration only serves to intensify that novel’s predominantly feminist norms. On the flip side, we can look at Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper,” in which a woman is slowly driven mad by her doctor-husband’s paternalistic (and psychologically toxic) treatment of her post-partum depression. Even as her narration becomes delusional and insane (and thus certainly not accurate in an objective sense), it also faithfully, even powerfully, expresses the story’s norms of female aspiration, self-determination, and solidarity–thus making her a “reliable narrator” despite her descent into madness.

(For an in-depth discussion of these matters–including definitions that depart from or complicate the one I am relying on here–see the Dan Shen’s entry “Unreliability” at http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php)

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961.

Fielding, Henry. The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. 1745. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1975.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. New York: Scribner’s, 2004.

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.

Flowers in the Snow: Season and Sense in Poetry (adapted from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism)

—In his book Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argued that poetry (and art in general) when taken as a whole express the totality of human experience, including our inner, subjective responses to our experience.

—To put this in Frye’s own words, literature is “a total form and literary experience as part of the continuum of life, in which one of the poet’s functions is to visualize the goals of human work” (Anatomy of Criticism, 115).

Frye saw this “continuum of life” in terms of interlocking cycles of experience that are broadly shared by human beings. These cycles take on two different shapes: recurrent patterns in nature (turning of the seasons, phases of the moon, day to night) and the linear progression from birth to death. According to Frye, literature as a whole is an “encyclopedia” of human experience, mapped in terms of these interlocking and overlapping patterns.

—These natural cycles provide a rich vocabulary of images, sounds, and other sensations that poets use as “natural symbols” to bridge the gap between their own particular insight and experience and the shared experience of human beings in general. We have come to associate sunrise with hope and expectation, for instance—much the same with images of spring, like budding leaves or new-grown grass.  Here is a rough (and very incomplete) index of images and settings that are often used in poetry to evoke particular phases of these natural cycles.

Before continuing, I should note that the index above, like much of Frye’s anatomy, is somewhat culture-bound. The conception of “seasons” in his anatomy probably applies most effectively the literature of a Euro-North American culture where the change of seasons (and the relationship of those seasons to agriculture) was a crucial element of their experience–not to mention more or less the norm. With that limitation in mind, we can think of a poem as an “entry” that catalogues a particular human experience on these overlapping or intersecting time lines.

—The “seasonal” profile of a poem is rarely simple, however. We find very few poems that are pure “spring” or pure “sunset” in their seasonal evocations or in the emotional values associated with them. And as the index above suggests, there are both cyclical (repeating) elements to the timeline (season, time of day) as well as linear ones–which themselves can represent the birth-to-death story of a community or a civilization as well as that of an individual person. (Think of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” as an illustration of some of these points.) Often these different cycles overlap in ways that produce complex tensions, especially in the emotional responses they evoke.

Let’s consider the “life-cycle” elements (including their emotional or experiential correlatives) of a hypothetical poem. In this poem a young woman, expecting her first child, stands at the grave of her mother. It’s winter, but the sun has been up a couple of hours and has melted away the snow to reveal the now-dried-out remains of flowers that had been placed on the grave, some months earlier—perhaps at the funeral of the woman’s mother. As the cold wind rustles the desiccated remains of the memorial flowers, it makes a sound that reminds the young woman of “the voices of adults as they try not to wake the children.”

Obviously, the “seasonal” aspects of this poem are complex, and distributed in interesting ways.

• —First, the main character (the pregnant young woman) embodies in her person both summer (her youth) and spring (the new life she is carrying).
• —The seasonal setting is winter, associated with death. This is reinforced by the dried-out flowers on the grave.
• —However, the time of day is morning, and the warmth of the sun has melted away the snow, in a kind of anticipation of a spring that is yet to come, but some time in the future.
• —Finally, we need to figure out what to do with the metaphor in which the dead flowers take on the life and voice of adults “whispering so as not to wake the children.”

—As we can see from our hypothetical example, all elements of a poem don’t necessary line up perfectly according to this matrix. In most poems (most interesting ones, at least) there is a dominant season, but there are also elements that provide tension or opposition to make the emotions of the poem more complex. A “winter” poem for instance may still have suggestions of hope (associated with spring), just as a “summer” poem may have dark anticipations of autumn or even winter.

In the case of our hypothetical poem, the young woman’s sadness at her mother’s passing is countered by her anticipation and hope for the new life she is carrying. And the seasonal imagery of the poem (not just winter, but morning, melting snow) provides a concrete trigger for this mixed set of emotions.

—Such complexities are not a defect in the poem; they help hold the reader’s attention and engage the reader’s experience and emotion across a wider spectrum than a less complicated set of images might.

Let’s look at one more example that may help illustrate the usefulness of paying attention to the seasonal aspects of a poem–Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Some may know the poem by heart, but here it is:

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

This is clearly a “winter” poem (and a “night” one), beginning with the title. Furthermore the setting–an isolated wood–clearly evokes the scene of the “winter waste,” and the speaker tells us s/he is alone except for the impatient and puzzled horse drawing the carriage. Using the index above we would, in other words, expect this to be a poem about death, or at least the contemplation of dying.

And certainly if we were reading the poem in terms of the linear time line of the individual human life cycle, we would be directed toward that idea. I am guessing that is why so many readers of the poem infer that the speaker is either an old man approaching death or someone contemplating suicide. (The “lovely, dark, and deep” line makes the idea of death–whether or not by suicide–actually seem seductive and comforting.)

But if we put these symbolic associations up against the cyclical implications of the poem’s details, a more complex and interesting picture emerges. That “darkest evening of the year,” of course, is the winter solstice, the date on the calendar with the fewest minutes of sunlight. But that is as much a moment of beginning as much as of an end; from there the days only get longer. Spring is still a long way off, but the speaker’s foreknowledge of this fact, of the ever-turning cycle of the seasons, focuses his attention on what is yet to come, to be done, to be experienced.

It’s also the case, examining the grid above, that the relative isolation of the speaker is something usually associated with early childhood and its pre-social consciousness, as well as with the stages at the end of the life cycle, as the individual faces his or her own mortality with an increasing sense of aloneness. In other words the speaker is poised in a moment that suggests either the oblivion of death or a retreat to infancy (an extreme ending or beginning, of which the winter solstice is both).

That the speaker ends the poem with a sense of social obligations (“But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep”) suggests that he or she is anticipating or identifying with the middle phases of the life cycle–most likely late summer or early fall, in which the full obligations and powers of adulthood are primary. Even in the isolation of the “winter waste” or poised at the birth of a new calendar cycle, the narrator retains a peripheral awareness of the obligations and rules of social life, including property relations (“Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though”).  He resolves to move on, into the new year and toward that network of relationships associated with middle adulthood and settled civilization.

I’m not claiming that my analysis here is either complete or superior to other takes on Frost’s poem. In some ways it may not add much to your own interpretation or understanding.  My point has been to show us how an awareness of Frye’s seasonal schema can help us arrive at an understanding of the poem’s inner dynamics, and to become more conscious about our own meaning-making processes as we read. It may feel obvious and intuitive (“Well, of course that ‘darkest night of the year’ can suggest death!”), but that’s part of Frye’s point–in a sense we are wired by our own experience to make these symbolic inferences. But a poem gathers its power and mystery not by being any one thing or completely of any one season, but rather by overlaying, juxtaposing, and sometimes ironically reversing the powerful “natural” symbolism of the cycle of the seasons.

Frost, Robert.  “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” 1923. In The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed.  Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969.

Frye, Northrop.  Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton UP, 1957.

“Who is this Gatsby, anyhow?” When Is Our Interpretation on Quicksand, and When Is It on Solid Ground?

Back in 1976 I was a first-time college classroom teacher trying to engage my students in a discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I was struggling to elicit their thoughts on the novel’s title character, whose identity is obscured beneath layers of concealment, misdirection, and outright untruths—only some of which are of his own making. Our discussion was floundering until one student in the class suddenly blurted out, “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think he’s dreamy!”

I was caught off guard by this unexpected take on the book, but I managed to respond in my best teacherly voice: “OK, but can you elaborate a bit on that? What in the text suggests that Gatsby is dreamy?”

The student seemed flustered, impatient at being asked to explain further. “Didn’t you see the movie?” she asked. “He’s Robert Redford!”

And of course he was, at least in the film version of the novel that had been released just a year or so earlier. At the time Redford was one of the surest box-office draws in the country, firmly established as a heart-throb leading man—a profile that no doubt influenced this student’s (and many others’) experience of the Gatsby character, both on screen and in the book.

(I’ll make a confession here: I know many people think Redford was woefully miscast in the role, and who regard his performance as wooden, awkward, and inauthentic. But in my humble opinion that is exactly how the character should come off. Gatsby is trying to act out an imaginary, alternative version of himself; and he is doing it just unsuccessfully enough for his public persona to come off as a rickety façade that conceals untold tragic or sinister realities.)

That student’s image of Fitzgerald’s character was obviously film-aided, but it represents the sort of mental leap we make any time we read a work of imaginative literature actively and with full engagement. It’s called “imaginative literature” not just because it’s a product of the author’s imagination, but because it engages our imaginations as readers in a profound way.

That is to say, when we are reading a novel or a poem the words before us are not just bits of information; they are cues we use to construct a complete virtual experience in our minds, almost as if we are watching a movie (in the case of a novel or short story) or looking at a photograph or a painting (in the case of an Imagist poem).

But no text, however detailed it might be, can specify everything we need in order to produce that virtual movie or painting in our minds; a literary text is necessarily suggestive and schematic, and much of our experience of the text we ourselves supply from our own stock of memories, expectations, fantasies, and previous reading encounters. In The Great Gatsby Fitzgerald gives us little physical description of the title character other than an occasional mention of how he is dressed. And yet in our imaginations he has a face, however fuzzy the image might be–so that face (and the body it’s attached to) might as well be Robert Redford’s.

The phenomenoligist Roman Ingarden called this process “concretization,” and he saw it operating wherever the actual language of the text left an “indeterminacy” of the sort I described above. Ingarden’s disciple Wolfgang Iser describes this process in the following way: “the structure of a text brings about expectations, which are interrupted by surprising unfulfillment, producing gaps, which require filling by the reader to create a coherent flow of the text” (298).

This explains in part why different readers sometimes have such different visualizations (and thus different interpretations) of characters and events in a short story or a novel. They are “filling in the gaps” in the text in different ways, depending on their own experiences and imaginative resources. And it is natural that they do so. When we are deeply engaged in the reading of a novel, our experience of that novel is an amalgam of the schematic cues given by the language of the text itself and our own implicit and (mainly unconscious) filling-in of the unspecified aspects of character, setting, and so forth that are necessary to complete the movie or the picture in our minds. It’s often the case, at least after a first reading, that we will have trouble separating the actual details given in the text from those we ourselves supplied to complete our imaginative experience of it.

But it’s also true that stories, novels, and poems add information as they go, so that what we might “fill in” is dynamic rather than static. We might learn later in our reading that a character we initially “concretized” as short and stout might actually be tall and thin, for instance; or a character we initially visualized as middle-aged might be younger than we thought. In such cases we have to adjust our concretization based on the new information and evolving context. This process of adjustment is as natural and necessary to our experience of the text as the initial concretization. But authors also sometimes delay giving us crucial “cues” to throw us off our “concretizing” game and make us more self-conscious about the assumptions and “default settings” we use to fill in some of these gaps. Let’s consider the following example, the opening sentences of another novel:

Helga Crane sat alone in her room, which at that hour, eight in the evening, was in soft gloom. Only a single reading lamp, dimmed by a great black and red shade, made a pool of light on the blue Chinese carpet, on the bright covers of the books which she had taken down from their long shelves, and the white pages of the opened one selected, on the shining brass bowl crowded with many-colored nasturtiums beside her on the low table, and on the oriental silk which covered the stool at her slim feet.

That’s a lot of information, and the level of detail allows us to see Helga Crane’s room with some specificity, even without “filling in” details to make the scene fully present in our imaginations. But what of Helga Crane herself? We are given no information except her name, the physical characteristic of her “slim feet,” and the implication that she is the sort of person who would occupy a room like the one described. And yet in our imaginations we “see” a woman–maybe with some features still indistinct in the shadows, but others already involuntarily filled in on our part, through the process of concretization. Do we imagine her at this hour (eight o’clock, with darkness coming on) still in her day clothes, or in a nightgown? Do we infer from her “slim feet” that the rest of her body is slender? Finally–a question that shortly will prove to be of central significance to our experience and understanding of the remainder of the novel–what race do we imagine Helga Crane to be?

If you recognize this character’s name and know the novel in which she is the main character, you know the answer to this question. But imagine you’ve pulled the book at random off the shelf and begun reading it. Imagine there is no dust jacket with a photo of the author or a blurb about the book’s place in American literary history. Or imagine you are reading the book for the first time outside of a class whose catalog description would encourage you to fill in this important blank one way rather than the other. Will you be surprised, two or three pages further into the text, to find additional information that cues you to imagine (or re-imagine) Helga Crane as Black?

I’ll admit this is something of an artificial test (as most experiments are), as we normally don’t begin reading a book without some external context to guide our process of concretization. Most of us will begin the book (Nella Larsen’s Quicksand) knowing that it is a key text in the African American literary tradition, and that it is considered one of the great works of the Harlem Renaissance. Or we might derive similar inferences from an author photo or blurb on a rear cover or dust jacket. So even without being told so specifically by the opening paragraphs of the text, we will probably “fill in” the unspecified detail of Helga Crane’s racial identity by visualizing her as Black.

But I have run this experiment on quite a few people not familiar with the novel, and in those cases readers almost invariably default to an initial concretization of Helga Crane as “white.” Or, as one reader typically responded after reading a little further, “Oh, I never imagined her as Black!” (Or as Asian, despite the mention of the “blue Chinese carpet” and the “oriental” upholstery of her footstool.) In a couple of cases, however, readers reported a difficulty in bringing the character into focus because they weren’t sure how to identify her, racially speaking.

There is an important political and cultural issue here that I will save for another time (it is most clearly exemplified in the outrage, even anger, with which some people greeted the casting of an African American actress as Rue in the film adaptation of The Hunger Games–despite the fact that the book describes her in such a way as to allow for, but not specify, such a casting decision). In the case of Quicksand, Larsen is very clever in allowing us–for a time at least–to concretize her heroine as something other than Black, since in fact that initial ambiguity is central to the novel’s main concerns about the puzzle of racial identity.

Helga is in fact half African American and half Danish, and throughout the novel she ping-pongs violently between a desire to identify fully with other Black people and her thirst to transcend racial categories altogether. In her novel Nella Larsen is interested specifically in the difficulty of “concretizing” race–a difficulty that extends to the novel’s heroine herself. For her part Helga is ambivalent and uncertain about what her own imputed “Blackness” means, and resentful of how that “Blackness” is read by others.

For my purposes here I am focusing on the racial ambiguities of Larsen’s Quicksand mainly to emphasize the power and the consequences of the process of concretization as discussed by Ingarden and others. As I have suggested, there are specifically political implications to this process when one is dealing with the way in which matters such as race and gender are constructed in our imaginations and in literary texts. That’s one reason it is important to read (and to re-read) texts closely–to become more aware of the distinction between what the the text specifies or strongly implies and what we use to fill its inderminacies or gaps. With that idea in mind, let me return for a moment to the text we began with, The Great Gatsby.

From time to time I’ve encountered readers and critics who float the idea that Gatsby is Black. The first time I heard this idea I was a bit incredulous–a Robert Redford Gatsby was easy enough to fit into my own concretizations of the text, but a Denzel Washington Gatsby? I really wasn’t so sure. But let’s consider the case and the possibilities. Nowhere does Fitzgerald specify that Gatsby is white, although we are encouraged to infer that from the fact that his parents back in Minnesota are of European descent; and despite the fact that he is treated as a suspect outsider by WASPish snobs like Tom Buchanan, race doesn’t seem to play an explicit role in the prejudices arrayed against him. In other words, little in the novel appears to encourage me to question my “racial default” concretization of Gatsby as Caucasian.

But, keeping in mind the portrayal of Helga Crane in Quicksand (who is first introduced to us in racially ambiguous terms and who might pass for white if she chose), I find myself now asking the question: what makes me so sure Gatsby is not (or could not be) a Black man? We know he has trouble accepting his parents back in Minnesota as his “real” parents; we know, historically speaking, that the bootlegging underworld of which he is a part was a racially polyglot subculture, populated by a variety of marginalized ethnic groups (some of whom have specific contacts with Gatsby in the story); and the novel is full of racially charged conversations and encounters, beginning with Tom Buchanan’s hysterical white-supremacist rantings about the rise of the “colored” races.

In other words I find some textual evidence supporting the notion, even if I can’t fully commit to the idea. I am forced to ask myself: to what extent do these details, either specified in the text or known with respect to its historical context, invite me to reconsider my own “racial default” concretization of Gatsby as white? What if Gatsby, like the heroine from Passing (another novel by Nella Larsen) is a Black person passing for or taken for a white one? Is it possible for me to accept or incorporate this possibility into my own experience of the text? Is this simply a matter of anything not specifically eliminated being allowed, or does it actually illuminate some genuine interpretive possibilities of Fitzgerald’s novel that might not otherwise be accessible?

I won’t answer this one way or the other, but I will say that any answer will lie in a close re-reading of the book–one that would examine the patterns of implication in the text as a whole to see if such a reading is encouraged. In other words, we would need to determine whether some readers’ experience of Gatsby’s Blackness is one of three things: (1) a reading error (that is, an interpretation specifically contradicted by information in the text); (2) a filling-in of a “gap” in the text that is incidental to our understanding of the story, or (3) an interpretive possibility that is actually cued by information or patterns of inference in Fitzgerald’s text.

Much of what we call “literary interpretation” involves this sort of close attention both to the text and to our own response to it. Our experience of a text is always a synthetic thing, structured by the words of the text itself but completed by our own expectations, anticipation, and imagination. Our interpretation or analysis of a text involves close attention to the often-blurry but important difference between the “facts” of the text and own imaginative contribution as readers to the “movie in our minds.”

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner’s, 1925.

Ingarden, Roman. The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art. Trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston, IL: Northwest UP, 1973.

Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: a Phenomenological Approach.” New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1972): 279-99.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1928.