2 Chapter 2: Some General Considerations Regarding Textual Analysis

Some General Considerations Regarding Textual Analysis

What is Analysis?, Analyzing Works of Fiction: Some Dos and Don’ts

                So first off, what is analysis? What does it mean to analyze something?

To analyze means to break something down into its constitutive parts or systems in order to understand it better. A mechanic analyzes the functioning of a car by looking closely at the performance of its battery, its fuel injection system, its alignment, and so forth. A doctor analyzes the functioning of a human body by looking closely at its respiratory system, its nervous system, its digestive system, etc., and the various organs and organic chemical balances involved in these. As analysts of works of fiction, we are concerned with how language comes together to produce meanings both subtle and obvious, so we will need to examine the various systems that function within prose narratives –not, like the mechanic and doctor, to see whether they are working or not, but to consider how they are functioning in producing the various meanings that comprise the work of fiction. This will involve considering how plot structure, point of view, character development, setting, symbolism, and so forth feed into the development of theme—the ideas the story is conveying (indirectly) through the artful construction of narrative. Going through is process is how we arrive at a careful, textually grounded interpretation of a work of fiction. How we analyze the aforementioned formal elements of fiction, one at a time, will be the subject of the following chapters.

But first some general things we both should and shouldn’t do when analyzing works of fiction. For starters, it might seem common-sensical to look at the act of interpretation as trying to figure out what the historical personage who wrote the work of fiction meant to say, that is, the author’s intention. However, in their immensely influential article “The Intentional Fallacy,” William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley make a compelling case that to attempt this is to commit a fallacy—a false or misleading attempted application of logic. Wimsatt and Beardsley draw on the old adage “the proof is in the pudding” to make their argument: if something intended can be apprehended in the final product, then it is there; if it isn’t, then it doesn’t matter what the craftsperson intended. Let’s say, literalizing this expression, that I meant to make you a pudding, but ended up giving you a bowl of water, almonds, and twigs because I’m not a good cook—you would logically say that the defining aspects of a pudding (a sweet, dairy-based dessert of thick and smooth consistency) are absent in the dish I made, so regardless of whether I meant to make a pudding, what I gave you is not a pudding. Likewise, if meanings can be parsed out by a well-versed, attentive reader, they are there, otherwise they aren’t. Another way to think about this is that a piece of fiction exists as a set of only potential meanings until someone comes around to make sense out of it (much like the proverbial tree that falls in a forest with no one around). If the writer of the text was skilled at their craft (and you wouldn’t likely be reading them in college English class if they weren’t), and you carefully apply the analytic methodologies outlined in this textbook, then chances are a lot of the meanings you will pull out of the text are those the writer meant to put in there. But it doesn’t matter if they were intended or not, even when we have access to journals, letters, or prefaces where the writer outlines what they meant to say—if the meanings are there, they are there, as long as you can provide sound textual evidence to support your interpretations. This is true for reasons beyond what Wimsatt and Beardsley note as well. For one, we know from the field of psychology that humans have a conscious and an unconscious mind; sometimes we make a Freudian slip and convey a meaning we didn’t consciously intend to put out there. For example, we can imagine an author who had serious “mommy issues” and, without necessarily meaning to, wrote all of his female characters as either idealized saint figures or reprehensible, socially undesirable types. The author may not have intended to convey the theme that male-dominated society is traditionally uncomfortable with female behavior falling outside of certain narrowly defined gender roles; he may have thought he was writing “the Great American Novel” about some intrepid order of experience or other, but the fact would remain that the aforementioned misogynistic theme was present in his book. There is also the fact that writers may pick up on certain cultural or historic currents that seep into their work without being consciously apprehended (if we could ascertain that) and that the creation of meaning by language is by nature slippery and unstable, as the philosopher Jacques Derrida has shown us. But let’s not delve too deeply into philosophy of language now. Rather, we can look at an illustrative example from the life of the U.S. American author William Faulkner. Faulkner was once speaking to a group of graduate students at the University of Virginia, one of whom complimented him on the development of a certain theme in one of his novels. Faulkner paused, then said he hadn’t meant to put that theme there, but sure, he’d take it.

So if we aren’t trying to figure out what the author meant to say, what are we doing when we analyze works of fiction? We are carefully examining how all of the meaning-producing structures in the work of fiction are producing meanings, in isolation and in conjunction with each other. We are considering, for example, how character development (i.e. characterization) puts certain ideas “into play” in the work of fiction. But of course characters don’t exist in vacuums – they do things, so character is intimately bound up with plot, and they occupy various places, so character is intimately bound up with setting.  Characters, or aspects of characters like their names, might also be symbolic or involve allusions to other texts, but let’s hold off on these topics until a later chapter.

Works of fiction, even fairly short and/or seemingly straightforward ones, always contain multiple meanings simultaneously. But we can’t try to account for all of these at the same time in the same act of interpretation, otherwise our interpretation will come off as “schizophrenic,” as lacking coherence. So interpretation is always selectively focused, like wearing a pair of glasses tinted a certain color that allows you to see some things clearly while blocking others out. If, for example, you see a work of fiction dealing with questions of the natural world and environmental sustainability, just focus on breaking down the places where and ways that the text deals with those issues, setting aside other themes you may see being developed – unless, of course, they are intertwined substantively with your theme of focus. For example, this same text may also deal with questions of male and female gender roles as a way of implicitly showing how rapacious attitudes towards the natural world are a product of a toxically patriarchal capitalist culture.

You may naturally ask at this juncture, if there are multiple simultaneous interpretations of a work of fiction always possible and there isn’t a single definitive interpretation that is “getting right” what the author meant to say, why don’t we fall into a situation of pure relativism where any interpretation is right and equally valid. That is, if this isn’t like Algebra, where there is generally one objectively correct answer, how can your instructor give some interpretations an A grade and others a C? Well, it is about how sound your interpretive argument is and how well it is grounded in evidence from the letter of the text, either by way of quotation or paraphrase. You have to “show your work” to make clear how and where the text is creating the nuanced ideas you are attributing to it. If you tell me that the novel The Great Gatsby is about the risk of extraterrestrial invasion, I would generally have to say that you may have some basic reading comprehension issues. But if you tell me that it is about the recklessness of the laissez faire capitalism of the 1920s and you develop an argument that includes points like the scenes of drunk driving in the novel can be read as symbolizing a broader social recklessness, I’d say that you are engaging with the text in a compelling manner. So it is all a question of how carefully and with how much attention to fine detail that you approach that text through the analytic methodologies outlined in this textbook. There are no definitive, exhaustive “right” answers in this discipline; if there were, there would be no need for new scholarly articles on Things Fall Apart or The Grapes of Wrath, because someone would have gotten it “right” by now. But there are better and worse interpretations, and these involve how well one offers a close reading of the ways a text has used narrative to produce meaning.

Becoming skilled at this process involves developing a critical sensibility, a kind of sixth sense for what is prominent, foregrounded, and significant in a given text being analyzed. This involves considering how the work of fiction at hand is like other works of fiction, how it is different or idiosyncratic, what forms of repetition or parallelism the text sets up, what it emphasizes or draws particular attention to, and other similar considerations. This textbook will lay out a number of pointers and, where they exist, interpretive short-hands, but like any process – writing, playing a sport, playing an instrument—the only way to get good at this is through doing it again and again and getting feedback from those more experienced with the process you are trying to become adept at (in this case, your college instructor). The more that you read critically/analytically, the more you will develop a sense of what to look for in the act of textual analysis. But the following chapters will set up a framework for you to begin to develop as an analyst of works of fiction, beginning with a consideration of plot.