When Interpretation of the Arts Wanders Off Track

 

I was recently enjoying a Bishop Barron interview with Ethan and Maya Hawke concerning their new movie, Wildcat.  Their film concerns the life and influence of Flannery O'Connor, one of my favorite authors.  While the first half hour was quite good, my ears perked when Maya began interpreting Flannery O'Connor's stories beyond a reasonable threshold.  It boils down to a debate concerning the intrinsic, objective value of art versus a more subjective rendering, and it's often discussed in university English Lit or art courses in one way or another.

For instance, one of my favorite artists is Caravaggio.  I have been fortunate to see several of his outstanding works in Italy, and I have always been captivated by how he paints light and conveys darkness.  While I love his paintings, Andrew Graham-Dixon's book, A Life Sacred and Profane, is right when it describes his life resembling his paintings as "a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of night."  He did not lead a life most would consider good, but instead brought hardship upon himself through his own crimes.  Still, we don't need to filter the paintings through the artist's life.  The art stands on its own.  It can be said that quality literary or visual art has its own life, separate and distinct from its creator.  The people who blacklist artists for failing to walk the line of political correctness, for instance, are oblivious to this subtlety or distinction.  Unfortunately, many in education circles seem intent on viewing art through a lens of psychology, symbolism, or sociology, which is their own creation alone.

This particularly struck me in the latter half of the interview I mentioned earlier. I am reading the letters of Tolkien and Flannery O'Connor, and this distaste for this manner of interpretation is prevalent throughout their letters, as well as those of C.S. Lewis. Here is how Flannery O'Connor puts it in a letter to a misguided teacher.

The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology.

There is a change of tension from the first part of the story to the second where the Misfit enters, but this is no lessening of reality. This story is, of course, not meant to be realistic in the sense that it portrays the everyday doings of people in Georgia. It is stylized and its conventions are comic even though its meaning is serious.

Bailey’s only importance is as the Grandmother’s boy and the driver of the car. It is the Grandmother who first recognized the Misfit and who is most concerned with him throughout. The story is a duel of sorts between the Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt involvement with Christ’s action which set the world off balance for him.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.

Flannery O’Connor

Likewise, a shared aversion to excessive interpretation is evident in Tolkien's letters.

I have no time to provide bibliographical material concerning criticisms, reviews, or translations. 

The following points, however, I should like to make briefly. 

(1) One of my strongest opinions is that investigation of an author’s biography (or such other glimpses of his ‘personality’ as can be gleaned by the curious) is an entirely vain and false approach to his works – and especially to a work of narrative art, of which the object aimed at by the author was to be enjoyed as such: to be read with literary pleasure. So that any reader whom the author has (to his great satisfaction) succeeded in ‘pleasing’ (exciting, engrossing, moving etc.), should, if he wishes others to be similarly pleased, endeavour in his own words, with only the book itself as his source, to induce them to read it for literary pleasure. When they have read it, some readers will (I suppose) wish to ‘criticize’ it, and even to analyze it, and if that is their mentality they are, of course, at liberty to do these things – so long as they have first read it with attention throughout. Not that this attitude of mind has my sympathy: as should be clearly perceived in Vol. I p. 272: Gandalf: ‘He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.’ 

(2) I have very little interest in serial literary history, and no interest at all in the history or present situation of the English ‘novel’. My work is not a ‘novel’, but an ‘heroic romance’ a much older and quite different variety of literature. 

(3) Affixing ‘labels’ to writers, living or dead, is an inept procedure, in any circumstances: a childish amusement of small minds: and very ‘deadening’, since at best it overemphasizes what is common to a selected group of writers, and distracts attention from what is individual (and not classifiable) in each of them, and is the element that gives them life (if they have any). But I cannot understand how I should be labelled ‘a believer in moral didacticism’. Who by? It is in any case the exact opposite of my procedure in The Lord of the Rings. I neither preach nor teach.

Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition (pp. 580-581). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

In addition, here is an excerpt from C.S. Lewis, which Glyer referenced in her book, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in a Community.

Many reviewers said that the Ring in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was suggested by the atom bomb.  What could be more plausible?  Here is a book published when everyone was preoccupied by that sinister invention. Here in the center of the book is a weapon which it seems madness to throw away, yet fatal to use.  Yet, in fact, the chronology of the book's composition makes the theory impossible.  ("Modern Theology")

I was disappointed that Bishop Barron did not say something along these lines when the conversation took a nosedive, but I imagine it's hard for a host to be too critical in this kind of interview.  Meanwhile, I am left wondering if I should bother with Wildcat, or if I should give it the same authority as...kitty litter.