Recommended Reading

Yesterday I administered the final exam for my class on Contemporary British and American Short Stories, and in flipping through my students' analyses of Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain," I was mildly satisfied that if I had taught my students one thing, it was that one will derive very little of value from literature if one simply reads stories and asks, as my students so often had: "What does this story mean?" By mid-semester I had weened them off of this tendency and convinced them to think more critically about different facets of the stories, rather than assuming (often in error) that there was one singular, immutable moral lurking beneath the surface of each text.

I was recently reminded of the origins of their tendency to simplify and essentialize. All authors are clearly trying to assert something, one reasons: why not just find out what that assertion is and be done with it? In this recent essay on the relevance of literary criticism, Elif Batuman put the problem somewhat differently:

I was immediately convinced by Tolstoy’s claim that the only accurate, and thus really truthful, interpretation of “Anna Karenina” was a word-for-word retelling; and, since “Anna Karenina” already existed with 100 percent word-for-word accuracy, what use was Strakhov? Who cared what Strakhov thought Tolstoy meant, when Tolstoy himself had put an enormous amount of time and effort into writing down precisely what he meant?

Her answer to both conundrums (conundra?) is perhaps persuasive, perhaps not.