I used to fantasize about becoming the kind of author who ends up a classic. Wouldn't it be awesome if my stuff became required reading? Ended up on those college reading lists? Got bought in bulk for literature classes?
Then I started taking literature classes, and had to analyze stories, and find out what the author really meant, and started hating things I'd actually quite liked on the first four readings (I mean, srsly, you can only analyze "The Tale-Tell Heart" so many times before you end up despising it like you've never despised anything before in your entire life). Then I decided that this sort of fame might not be so desirable after all. I think that's when I began using abundant expletives. That way lay safety. Relative. Who the fuck knows what's going to be acceptable in literature class twenty years from now?
So maybe it's a little grandiose to imagine you are going to be the shit someday. Still, it's fun to think about. Until you start thinking of all the horrible things that could happen if you become as famous as you dream of.
Like the above. Which, thinking about it, makes me think it might be a good idea to produce an annotated version of each volume, wherein it is explained, in plain English even an English teacher should understand, that "the curtains are fucking blue because I didn't type green instead. Full stop."
How about you lot? Do you have scars from overzealous analysis? Silly fears about fame?
5 comments:
It's a parody on 'Marley & Me' by John Grogan, which contains the actual line
'The curtains were green' ;-)
Just thought you'd like to know that ;-)
I read somewhere that Mark Twain hated the idea of literary analysis. In fact, a friend of mine who had to write a paper on (guess which? Huck Finn) wrote the paper about Mark Twain's opinions about said essays, and how she could not complete the assignment as asked due to fears of Twain's ghost coming back to haunt her. It was an awesome essay. The teacher did not sympathize.
It's interesting how many people get author's intentions wrong. In fact I know of one comic writer who was present during a class on one of his stories. The teacher presented the meaning of the story, and the author politely corrected her, that was not what he intended in writing that. The teacher, without missing a beat, told him that the meaning of the story did not always correlate with what the author intended!
Re: Jacobs statement this shows the arrogance of the professor knowing more about what is in the authors head than the author. Of course its typical of academia, they think they know all. Twain of course in Huck Finn said that there was no motive or point to the story and that anyone seeking one would be shot. I had the same experience with a High School teacher who said to disregard what the author said.
You probably all know this, but for some reason it seems appropriate to this post:
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
-Walt Whitman
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