SEARCH
Many readers struggle with the feeling that they just don’t “get” literature.
Confronted with the elaborate meanings, symbolism, suggestions, and allusions that some readers somehow conjure from a text, others may feel bewildered—“Was all that really in there?”—and wonder whether they simply didn’t inherit the literary gene. And so they set aside literary works, believing they’re just not capable of reading them “correctly.”
But it’s not that some people are born with the innate ability to interpret literature and others aren’t, although literary reading may come more easily to some than others. Rather, some readers have developed a habit—either by intuition or by training—of reading a book on multiple levels at the same time. A reader may initially concentrate on plot and character. A more analytic reading attends to larger patterns of meaning and to language, structure, recurring images, and more.
Also, “literary” readings do, on occasion, take things too far and invent complicated, esoteric layers of symbolism or allegory that aren’t really present in the book, which was meant to be read, first and foremost, as a story and not a philosophical manifesto.
That said, a serious work of literature usually has more going on than meets the eye.
So one of the main differences between reading practices is that one detects patterns—both within literary works and between literary works—that help him or her better understand the author’s deeper themes.
Learning to develop literary pattern recognition is perhaps the single best way to deepen your reading experience. It’s the key that unlocks the gate to the secret garden of literary interpretation. It is the wardrobe that leads to the Narnia of enhanced literary understanding, delight, and wonder.
As mentioned above, two distinct types of pattern recognition occur when we read deeply, and both matter in different ways for interpreting literature well.
Patterns Within a Work
Noticing and analyzing patterns of images, events, characters, words, and so on in a work of literature helps us to understand what an author is up to. We can break the process down into three steps: identify, interrogate, interrupt. To understand the three steps, we’ll work through an example from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment.”
- Identify
In “Crime and Punishment,” little rooms and small, confined spaces appear again and again. At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, is living in a tiny apartment, a mere attic, sometimes even described as a closet, in a stuffy building in St. Petersburg. Dostoevsky emphasizes this on the very first page or two of the book.
Later, Raskolnikov befriends a prostitute named Sonya who lives in a similarly claustrophobic little attic, and several of the book’s most important conversations occur there.
The image occurs again in the villainous Svidrigailov’s description of how he imagines the afterlife—”one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner.”
When the same or a similar image appears in a novel that many times, it’s probably more than coincidence. Whether the author is fully aware of it or not, this image or symbol in some way expresses an important idea in the novel, a central theme. It’s become entangled with the author’s core imaginative vision.
2. Interrogate
Once we notice that a certain word, image, character, or symbol keeps reappearing throughout a novel—once we’ve identified that pattern—the next step is to ask a simple question: why?
In “Crime and Punishment,” it’s not too difficult to see how claustrophobic spaces reflect the characters’ mental, emotional, and moral states. Raskolnikov has become obsessed with certain philosophical ideas of a nihilist, which have, in turn, led him to also obsess over the idea of murder as he isolates himself in his tiny apartment for weeks. He has created a prison in his own mind, shrunk the universe down to the cold calculations of his fevered brain.
Sonya, on the other hand, has become trapped in a prostitute’s life by her social circumstances, the irresponsibility of her father, and her own self-sacrificial nature.
Svidrigailov embodies the self-centered, nihilistic, and hedonistic worldview Raskolnikov toys with. His vision of the afterlife is one of despair: a vision in which the self has completely collapsed in on itself, rejecting the outside world and any objective meaning.
The physically claustrophobic spaces reveal, reflect, and even shape the characters’ inner states. That’s the basic reason for the pattern.
3. Interrupt
Finally, once you’ve identified a pattern and guessed why it’s there, one of the most useful interpretive techniques is to look carefully for moments when the author intentionally breaks the pattern. That can often tell you as much or more than the pattern itself.
Let’s look at the ending of “Crime and Punishment” (spoiler warning). After Raskolnikov finally confesses to the murder through the prompting of Sonya, who acts as a kind of conscience for him, he ends up getting sent to prison in Siberia. She goes with him but not to prison. So, another claustrophobic space (a prison cell), right? That’s what we’d expect.
But here Dostoevsky inserts an important variation on the pattern: When we meet Raskolnikov in Siberia, at the very moment that he finally surrenders his pride and egocentric theorizing and accepts Sonya’s love, he is actually outdoors, in a wide-open space.
“In the vast steppe, bathed in sunshine, he could just see, like black specks, the nomads’ tents. There there was freedom, there other men were living, utterly unlike those here; there time itself seemed to stand still, as though the age of Abraham and his flocks had not passed. Raskolnikov sat gazing, his thoughts passed into day-dreams, into contemplation; he thought of nothing, but a vague restlessness excited and troubled him. Suddenly he found Sonya beside him.”
The meaning is clear: Even though Raskolnikov is now physically “confined,” serving a sentence of hard labor in Siberia, he has become spiritually free–or at least begun the process of entering into true freedom. Similarly, Sonya is freed from her morally questionable life as a prostitute. This is reflected in the wide-open landscape, the opposite of the little closet where the characters found themselves at the beginning of the novel.
Patterns Between Works
Patterns between works occur when a work of literature uses existing yet unspoken symbolic conventions. In other words, certain situations, images, or symbols have been used to mean the same thing in many different literary works across the centuries. These situations and symbols, therefore, since they recur in the same or similar way in many different works, have come to have fairly definite meanings that we can be pretty confident of. When a work uses a symbol in this conventional way, it participates in the larger pattern.
Where do these patterns originate? Partly through gradual development and repetition within the literary canon, partly from what seem to be existing archetypes present in human consciousness itself.
This is the premise behind Thomas Foster’s book “How to Read Literature Like a Professor.” In it, he attempts to break down some of these accepted-yet-unwritten literary conventions. For example, he suggests that in literature, when a character goes on a trip, she or he is almost always engaged in a quest, which means a transformative journey of the soul. Or again, he says that when characters eat together, it signals communion and unity. Likewise, rain typically symbolizes purgative cleansings and new beginnings. With that said, Foster notes that symbols often have more than one meaning, so he warns readers against a reductionist interpretation of any particular symbol.
Foster also notes that much of Western literature uses basic patterns or episodes from the Bible, Shakespeare, or Greek myth; learning to recognize a repetition or variation on the fall of Oedipus, the wanderings of Odysseus, or Hamlet’s revenge is a powerful interpretive tool. It helps the reader instantly understand what larger literary conversation the author seeks to enter, what kinds of tragic or comic overtones he’s invoking, and even where the story is likely headed. Recognizing a pattern requires a certain familiarity with foundational literary works, of course, although good introductions or commentaries can help.
Colors, animals, seasons, directions, and the traditional “Hero’s Journey” also have traditional meanings. A resource such as “The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols” can help you get a handle on them.
But a complete list of such patterns is beyond the scope of this article—and, in fact, no such complete list exists because symbol patterns are not an exact science. While these patterns are helpful to know, it’s important to remember that literature is not simply a code that we can crack. While patterns of symbolism with fairly stable meanings do exist in the vast body of literature passed down to us, those patterns aren’t absolute, and literary criticism will never be as simple as identifying symbols and thus arriving at certain, predictable meanings.
Recognizing patterns is, at best, just one tool (albeit an important one) in the literary reader’s extensive toolkit—which must also include historical awareness, philosophical literacy, a capacity for delight, astute intuition, humble appreciation, human empathy, openness to mystery, and an awareness that a great work of literature can never be fully “boxed in” by neat little symbolic correlations, or any other system, for that matter. Like the living human beings they reflect, great works of literature can never be fully “systematized” or fully “solved.” That’s part of their appeal.
Though it isn’t desirable or even possible to memorize some long list of symbols and their meanings, it can be helpful to learn some of them, and, more importantly, to develop a habit of looking for patterns in the material we read. It will get easier with practice, and, most importantly, it will enrich your reading experience.
What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to features@epochtimes.nyc.
