The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.
When I was in college a novelist I admired made an appearance at my school and I was asked to introduce him. I walked to the podium in front of a large student crowd and gave a brief summary of the author’s recurring themes. Then I sat down and the author came out and told everyone I was an idiot. Not in those words, exactly, but he claimed, with more than a little disdain, that all the things I had said were in his books were products of my limited imagination, and he got a few good laughs at my expense. Of course I was mortified, not only because there were any number of totally crushable English majors in the audience who now had reason to doubt my critical acumen, but also because I was right. Everything I said about his work was absolutely true. I couldn’t figure out why he would deny it.9
Fifteen years later I was on tour promoting my own novel and sat for an interview with Janet Taylor, an extremely intelligent and thoughtful host for Oregon Public Radio. For the first ten minutes she asked interesting questions and I gave more or less coherent answers. And then Janet said something like this:
“In your novel, the character of Justin Finn, the child Davis Moore clones from his daughter’s unknown killer so that Moore may one day see what the fiend looks like, is an obvious Christ figure. And as such I find it interesting that you chose to give Justin’s mother the name Martha. Of course it would have been very obvious and over-the-top if you named her Mary. But in the Bible—as you are obviously aware, Kevin, but I’ll explain for our listeners—Martha of Bethany was a frequent host to Jesus and the disciples. And while Martha rushed around cleaning the house and preparing food and washing feet and so forth, her sister Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him teach. Finally Jesus had to call out, ‘Martha, stop what you are doing and come sit next to your sister. These other things you are doing are not important. The only important thing is what I have to say.’ And in Cast of Shadows, Martha Finn, like Martha of Bethany, is so worried about being a good mother to Justin, about caring for him and watching out for him, that she never sees who he really is or understands what he is trying to tell her.”
It was brilliant. It was sophisticated. It was meaningful. And I wish I had known what she was talking about.10
But here’s the important thing: Janet was right! Her analysis was terrific. And if we had never met she would always believe that the name Martha Finn was a deliberate and clever allusion to the biblical Martha of Bethany and not the result of that character having been named on the day Martha Stewart was indicted for securities fraud. I’m not a radical relativist when it comes to critical theory but that observation made the book better for Janet, and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads his novel reads a different book. Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader understands the book a bit differently. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader gets different answers, which explains why you are crazy for Confederacy of Dunces and your otherwise extremely intelligent attorney wife thinks you’re an idiot for laughing at it.
Earlier this week Jason Kottke made this important point about Infinite Jest: You’re never going to get half of what Wallace intended the first time you read it, so don’t sweat it. I’ll add a corollary to that: A lot of what you do get, isn’t anything that even occurred to Wallace in the first place. Don’t sweat that either.
We have a tendency to think of novels, especially novels we admire, as being like timepieces with every moving part dropped in its place with expert precision. I suppose writers would like people to think that sometimes, but even the most brilliant novels are far messier than that. Writing a novel is less like watchmaking and more like baking a cake without a recipe. Or an oven. Or a pan.
I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come because even after only 100 pages Infinite Jest is almost the perfect novel for this discussion, but think of the reader and author as partners. Wallace has constructed this novel with a lot of care and left pieces of the puzzle in ingenious (and unexpected) places and there is great conspiratorial pleasure in finding those clues where others might miss them. But the reader brings his own ingenuity to the project as well and in the many places where Wallace has left gaps, the reader will fill them in herself. Often brilliantly.
In fact (and I say this in a whisper because it’s the dirty secret of writing fiction) the author is counting on you for it.
I think this is a really great way of looking at how reading works. Authors certainly intend certain things, but they don’t always achieve what they intend. And they certainly achieve other things they never intended, and that’s not a bad thing either.
Writerly and critical hats are different hats; they’re modes of thought. Both, in my view, perfectly valid.
I remember an interview with Julian Barnes where he, though sometimes dismissive of criticism, embraced the view you’re putting forth here. The interviewer had trotted out a perfectly reasonable line of interpretation about themes that cut across many of his novels. Barnes said that the observation was probably true but that he didn’t think of it like that–that it would probably be detrimental to his ability to write them if he had.
Barnes is actually a pretty skilled critic of other people’s work, but I can understand why leveling that same critical gaze at his own could be counterproductive.
I wish English teachers understood this. I had many arguments in school about this. I came to the conclusion that I had to decide how the teacher interpretted a story in order to pass his or her class. Took the fun out of reading.
Please don’t generalize. You’ve had a handful of English teachers, hardly enough to make this absurd statement. Thanks.
This was lovely. Between this post and Jason’s “Forward”, IJ seems much more approachable.
We each bring different experiences each time we read it, as well. I have read Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm at least 8 times, and it has been terrifically different each time. I suspect IJ weave and bend if I read it again later as well.
I’m on page 33, for the second time. I think this time I have much more of a chance of making it past the first 100 pages. 🙂
Not to nerd out here, but this is also reminiscent of another public radio intereview I had once heard with Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Dr. Horrible fame) who echoed this very same sentiment. One of the things he had “learned” from the fame of Buffy is that people bring these somewhat “crazy” interpretations of his work to light. Now, I’m not familiar enough with Buffy to remember the character’s name, but a fan had written on a website that two of the characters had an “obvious lesbian relationship” because of x,y,z,aa,bb,cc… Joss said he remembered being furious and writing on the message boards that this was clearly, clearly not the case at all. What was great is that, if I recall, he had a very elucidating conversation with many people on that fan-board that agreed with the original poster (OP) and walked him through their analysis. Stunned, he confessed that he, too, now saw that it was probably the case.
I just like to think that Whedon’s subconscious wrote the theme into the series and then released into the collective unconscious… or something.
I must refer you to Whedon’s This American Life performance (probably available on the site from April-ish) where he performs a somewhat angsty composition about providing DVD commentary for everything ever created…which I think fits very well here. And not to jump ahead, but I have to wonder if James Incandenza would have put commentary on any of his films?
Reading any novel to get at the author’s intentions is a suspect and futile practice anyway. You could even argue that the whole point of postmodern fiction is to encourage suspicion of metanarratives and authorial intentions. Instead, the author takes us on a journey where the whole point is to enjoy the ride, not to get to an end. If you are constantly preoccupied by “what does this mean?” or even worse, “what does the author mean?” you will miss most of the ride and find yourself at the destination, confused and dissatisfied.
It’s all well and good to be concerned with meaning and even with authorial intention so long as “you can’t, in the end, know for certain” is part of the standard disclaimer attached to whatever you might say of either.
I’ve always though of what authors say about their work as interesting to know, but not necessarily any more illuminating than what others might have to say about it. Some authors are simply not very good critics of their own work (e.g. Roy Lichtenstein comes to mind). And some, like Barnes, just refuse to take on that role.
Ooh, we’re getting a little bit Barthes here! I’ve never really got on completely with old Roly’s absolutist “the author is dead” angle, but I think there’s a lot of truth in what he said. Like Rich C says, the point is to enjoy the ride, and if we come to any conclusions about what the book “means”, they’re just as likely to be insights into our *own* psyches as into the author’s.
Well, I don’t buy into all interpretations are equal reader-response theory either. I grappled a lot with that one when I taught literature and students felt entitled to their reading, no matter how off the mark and unsubstantiated by the text. Umberto Eco did a good job at defining some limits of interpretation, falling back on some new criticism (when it was quite old) as a pragmatic voice in the pool of theory.
Agreed there, too. I was of the “all interpretations are valid” school until I taught for a while. It becomes apparent–pretty quickly–that there are plenty of interpretations for which there is no textual support.
Reminds me of a Joseph Campbell quote (substitute “author” for “shaman”):
“Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become a carrier of something… Since inspiration comes from the unconscious, and since the unconscious minds of the people of any single small society have much in common, what the shaman or seer brings forth is something that is waiting to be brought forth in everyone.”
We bring our own agenda to a novel when we read it, and those themes will stand out the most. It’s like when you’re thinking of buying a certain type of car, and all of a sudden, you see it everywhere. They were always there before of course, but now that make and model is taking up a lot of your consciousness and you notice it first. So someone reading IJ for the first time will pick out different themes from their own experience–addiction, mental health, competitive sports, wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists, etc.
“Writing a novel is less like watchmaking and more like baking a cake without a recipe. Or an oven. Or a pan.”
Lovely. I should be working on my novel right now, and this perfectly sums up why it feels so very difficult. Because it is.
I wouldn’t choose the word agenda but we certainly bring our own experiences. I don’t know anything about addiction. But right now my roommate is a raging coke addict (I thought he was recovering when I let him move in) and I am more interested in that theme of this book than I was when I first attempted to read it.
In fact, I have little in common with any of the main characters, so far as I can tell. But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying books like Bridget Jones (don’t hate). Fiction gives me insight into other people’s lives if not my own.
[…] me Leave a Comment Over at Infinite Summer, Kevin Guilfoile inaugurates his Wednesdays (here) by noting that “fiction’s little secret” is that the author is counting on the […]
Interesting meta-post. The reason I (half-jokingly) called it a “dirty little secret” is that I think (half-jokingly) that a lot of writers are in denial about it.
Meta-post on Kevin’s and DFW’s view on Barthes’s death of the author at http://snipurl.com/ksxe5.
Absolutely. That’s one of the best things about art. I like approaching books that way as a reader. I also make theatre, and ate answering the audience’s questions about “what does it mean”. I’d much rather hear their answers.
If you’re interested in debunking authorial intention, you should start with “The Intentional Fallacy” by Wimsatt and Beardsley, a classic piece of 20th C. lit-crit; you can say that “The New Critics” are old now, but it’s still foundational.
Brilliant. I loved this entry. I wish I could have articulated it as such in school as an excuse to get an A on every book report and essay I’d ever written! “But, Mrs. Cunningham, this is how I interpreted the story!”
Before we go running off to our English professors, waving this essay and appealing our grades, let me point out that it’s a false choice between “all reader interpretations are valid” and “only the author’s intent matters.” I’d say readers make poor interpretations with about the same frequency that authors write poor novels.
Amen to that.
OH you guys rigged up the footnotes where you can click on the number to read it and then click it again to jump back to your place in the text. I wanted so badly to do that on my own blog, but couldn’t figure out the code. Sad face. But also, clapping.
I have listened several interviews with DFW. I think it’s one of the KCRW-Bookworm interview where the interviewer asks him what he thinks of the literary criticism about his work. DFW says something along the lines of “I think it’s brilliant, but I don’t understand it.” I’ll re-listen to these interviews and try to find them as soon as I get time away from re-reading the book.
Not too long ago I saw Charlie Kaufman on Colbert Report talking about his last film. Colbert made a joke about what the movie was about, the audience laughed and Kaufman just replied that its about what you think its about. I got sick of this type of PoMo response when I got out of undergrad but I think I have finally circled back to it now that I have spent enough time in the painfully literal, what-did-the-authors-think legal world. Also I love Charlie Kaufman’s stuff. My friend Jim told me about this cite and I figure its time for me to read this book.
Hi, My name’s April, I’m 26, live in Portland, OR, I’m a pseudo-attorney and I just got to page 10 🙂
I once saw Charlie Kaufman speak about Eternal Sunshine, and someone asked a question about the end of the movie that he kind of answered and validated. His half-answer put me into a panic, because I had an entirely different view than this person, and if she was correct in her interpretation, I thought I might not like the movie so much.
So I approached Kaufman after, sorry to bother him but uneasy about his comment. Right away, he told me that he wasn’t affirming this woman’s interpretation as THE interpretation, but he found it valid just because it exists. And then he said to me, “It’s your movie. Take it. It’s yours, for you.” I think of everything I see/read/listen to that way now.
Wonderful post, Kevin.
Once, after reading my work in class, my poetry professor turned to me and said, “That was a brilliant poem about Hiroshima.” When what I thought I’d written was a poem about Star Trek.
Just purchased an ebook copy of Infinite Jest on my Kindle 2 and I’ve decided to join the group. Looking forward to the chat!
Excellent. I’ll add that I don’t think there’s anything “post-modern” about this from a reader’s perspective. I think this has been self-evident to readers going back to cave drawings. There was a point at which writers became more aware of the reader’s engagement and tried to leverage or subvert it on the page or whatever, but the reader’s job is the same as it ever was, it seems to me.
[…] Fiction’s Dirty Little Secret […]
Is no one bothered by the fact that DFW was very clear in interviews (for example, with Charlie Rose) and essays (for example, E Unibus Plurum) about his authorial intentions? What made DFW inspirational, what made him a genius was not that he was a more clever postmodernist than anyone else, but that he found a way out of postmodernity’s lostness. He had a message-an intention-that he wanted to communicate to other human beings, an intention that could be misunderstood (not simply and innocently interpreted differently). In the Charlie Rose interview, DFW said that one of the main causes of his depression was that most responses to his work misunderstood the message he was trying to communicate.
Thanks a lot. You all killed David Foster Wallace.
In response, I would encourage you to read (or reread) DFW’s essay on Dostoyevsky in “Consider the Lobster,” and what he has to say about the Intentional Fallacy.
Stephen. Take a breath, dude.
As has been repeated several times, I don’t think anybody here is suggesting that all interpretations of any work are always valid. But the act of reading is the act of interpretation. This isn’t controversial. Every novelist knows (or should know) that once his work is in the hands of a reader his unspecified intentions are irrelevant to that reader. And to write a novel that needs to be subsequently explained by the author on Charlie Rose in order for it to be understood “correctly” (as you seem to be suggesting is the case here) would be absurd. We have a medium for people with a specific point to make who want to be very sure they aren’t misunderstood, and that’s the op-ed page of the newspaper. I haven’t seen the interviews you’re talking about. When I’m done reading I’ll seek them out. But if DFW really couldn’t tolerate people trying to figure out what Infinite Jest is about (and occasionally getting it wrong) then he shouldn’t have written it. I really don’t believe he was that naive.
And finally, nobody on this particular thread has even offered an interpretation of the book, good or deadly.
Kevin.
I never accused anyone of suggesting that all interpretations of any work are always valid; rather, the following statement perfectly illustrates what I find problematic about your position: Every novelist knows (or should know) that once his work is in the hands of a reader his unspecified intentions are irrelevant to that reader. How would you like a novelist to specify her intentions? Hoping that readers would try to understand his sincere intentions may have made DFW a bit naive (E Unibus Plurum: The new literary “rebels” will risk being accused of naivete), but refusing to acknowledge a responsibility to try to understand the intentions of an author/interlocutor just makes the reader a son of a bitch. No one believes any longer that we can perfectly reconstruct authorial intent, but we have a responsibility–especially when a book is written out of an urgent need, as IJ may have been–to at least attempt to understand what an author was trying to say. Maybe this is reading as subjective enjoyment vs reading/writing as sincere communication.
Take is easy, Kevin. I don’t believe that anyone killed DFW but DFW. I thought the last line of my comment was clearly more humorous than the rest. Note the change in tone–the short sentences, the lack of commas, the silly colloquialism; these are some of the subtle resources we have to signal authorial intent.
Stephen, I think the disagreement we’re having here is possibly semantic. The whole point of reading a novel is to try to discern authorial intent. I assumed that was obvious. But in pursuit of that goal the reader often makes discoveries in the text–often legitimate ones–that were not part of the author’s blueprint. The reader can’t know in these instances what the author intended and he doesn’t need to wait for the author’s permission to validate them. That’s all that was ever asserted here.
And I didn’t think you were actually accusing anybody of killing DFW, BTW. (Smiley face here.)
Sounds good to me, Kevin. I think you’re right about our semantic differences. Or maybe we’re just emphasizing different phases of the reading process. I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that readers’ personal experiences and thoughts should be (or could be) kept out of interpretation. Thanks for responding to these comments, and let’s all enjoy reading and discussing Infinite Jest!
[…] when this novel was published) would just assume it was original. We’re back now to the discussion of what the reader brings to the novel. The reader who is familiar with that story will probably react to its appearance differently than […]
[…] Fiction’s Dirty Little Secret at Infinite Summer (via kapowee): …and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads his novel reads a different book. Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader understands the book a bit differently. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader gets different answers, which explains why you are crazy for Confederacy of Dunces and your otherwise extremely intelligent attorney wife thinks you’re an idiot for laughing at it. (tagged: via:kapowee literature reading writing essay todo ) […]