On Analyzing Deeply

By Mae McDermott, Deputy Editor; Edited by Rebecca Brutus, Senior Nonfiction Editor and Blog Content Editor

Image by Sam Fuller

I’m writing this because my Writing Major/English Minor academic position thrusts me headfirst before the speeding car that is analysis. It seems that every student must, at some point or another, stare into its blinding headlights. But I never could have been prepared for its blunt, gleaming hood, the impact of which is enough to drive one to drink heavily and unrepentantly, so as to block out all sensibility to meaning.

In Intro to the Short Story, I hear what a story means, almost line by line, symbol by symbol, rather than uncover meaning organically. I am dismayed to find that my private findings never align with what I am told. In Poetry I, at the mention of some poems’ smart detail by one of my peers, I curse myself for missing what I should have caught. Every academic field seems fraught with analysis, which asks us to look and then look again. And so, as happens for students of all kinds, the time in my schooling has arrived when I discover that my once freeing vocations of reading and writing are in fact loaded with methods, prescriptions, guidelines to function effectively as a reader and thinker. In such a setting, learning easily becomes competitive, pressurized, and panicked.

My perfectionism, forged through 13 years of fear-motivated public schooling, won’t allow failure—I always need to be right. And I haven’t received anything less than a B since my angles of projectiles quiz in Honors Physics my freshman year of high school, which I remember because I cried in class, retook the quiz, and got an A. And so I apply my overworked-student brainpower to craft analysis and writing. I read and write about Gabrielle Calvocoressi and feel the way gears spark against each other angrily, the need for coherence and understanding urgent.

But in my endeavors, I am sad to feel for the first time in many years that I am straining to find meaning. Rather than exploring a poem in a non-dire setting and generating a natural response, I am trying to interpret the right thing, wary of what words will yield what grade. I am trying to tailor my reading. And so my reading comes from nowhere. Means nothing.

This is not to say that these classes and their assignments are unfair or unhelpful. Learning the craft and ancestry behind something is rewarding, and vital in producing an informed writer, artist, architect, accountant, teacher, person. Furthermore, no class sets out to be burdensome; I struggle largely due to my own fear of breaking the rules I’ve learned when I approach a written word, or try to write my own. But amidst the analysis-heavy classes and my unwavering schoolgirl eagerness to be correct, I realize that not only am I burnt out and disillusioned by reading and writing—a horrifying thought—but I run the risk of creating meaning within a piece I have no creative right to. I have no ownership over any creation, not even my own; I have only the unique relationship I forge with it as a reader or a writer. And although this is a relationship I can sharpen with learning, there are no gold stars to be earned, no blue ribbons to be awarded.

That is, one reads Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” about how Josephine Mallard, a woman with a heart condition, initially grieves her husband’s death and then feels unexpected, racing excitement at the possibility of an unsupervised, untethered widow’s life. And one can constellate meaning like mad within these 1,005 words. There is the constricting historical era, setting, and society into which the story fits; dissonance between Josephine’s outward expression of her feelings and her internal dialogue; themes such as lifelong oppression and resentment culminating in newfound glee strong enough to kill the narrator stone dead. (Read “The Story of an Hour.”)

The inherent fuel behind reading analysis is the assumed reader-writer relationship, the belief—and trust—that Kate Chopin, or Sara Teasdale, or Sei Shonagon planted everything in their work on purpose for us to find. That they crafted details to elicit a particular reaction and mold the reader’s experience. And they are all gorgeous, thoughtful, deliberate writers in their own unique ways.

But think about when you create. No, not in the throes of editing, revising, tightening, painstakingly cutting what you first brought to the page. I’m talking about what we do at the outset. Fingers poised over a keyboard, pen poised over page. The delicious rulelessness of the moment in which there is nothing except what we wish to record or rid ourselves of or see outside ourselves. We fill the page or screen with pre-edited, delicious melodrama, and if we are brave enough we do this in spite of fear, staving off thoughts of editing. It takes a shape, basic, humble, honest, necessary… but in this moment we do not craft. Or, I certainly don’t. Rather, we follow the ugly, base impetus to flush ourselves of a feeling, dwell on where we’ve been, or see what we would like to see. It is reckless and animalistic.

And in this incendiary moment Chopin wrote a story in which a wife hates her husband so much that when he makes a surprise return, she dies at the sight of his eyes. (Jesus. Read “The Story of an Hour.”) It is striking and extravagant. And though she must have expertly revised toward that final shape, my experience is that while we may consider clarity of communication as we rewrite, the essence of a piece lies in the impetus of its creation, and we write toward the truth of that inkling. I believe the shape of Chopin’s story found itself within the bounds of the initial freedom and abandon that brought it about.

Writers are assumed to be painfully deliberate, and assumed to serve the reader. But I’m not sure I ever existed to Chopin, or Teasdale, or Shonagon. In editing, perhaps. But not in that haze of writing. Not, I believe, in the intimate exchange among writer, idea, and cradle of the page. The idea that art is oriented from the start toward someone or something has puzzled me as a writer for many years, because tailoring words to a certain person intimidates me away from the page. My responsibility to the work itself feels paramount, so I write toward nothing but the shape for which my piece feels destined. My writing experiences bleed into my reading, and I wonder: Was she really thinking of my experience? Or was she just working intimately and lovingly with her piece, finding the best form to tell a singular truth? Regardless of the art’s intended destination, there is something much more precious in the creation of these works that I simplify by reducing them into objects intended to receive my judgment and be broken down rather than the living, breathing things they are. To go about reading and writing this way diminishes the value of the work.

I am not refuting the importance of analysis. At its best, it is a joy and pleasure, and even at its worst, it is a skill and a potential window into depth that brings us closer to the fields we love. Also, with relation to writing and reading specifically, I am not refuting the important role of the reader, who mentally brings printed words to life. But the danger is privileging our desire to make sense over internalizing what a piece presents to us. The danger is inventing language to explain what we yearn to see rather than homing in on appropriate language, objectifying an essay, poem, story, or any work of art rather than regarding its delicate life with care and sensitivity. Constructive analysis does not mean imposing order upon a work, nor does it mean approaching art as a problem and analysis as a solution.

As a reader, I have been wrenching art from the page and shaking it like a child shakes a piggy bank in hopes of finding quarters. In doing so, I dilute a thoughtful, well-crafted work into a search for answers. That in itself is a dismissal of artistic intent, because I mine and ravage for what may not exist rather than explore what the piece shows me. I reduce it into something tied to the time and place in which I try to generate answers smart enough to compete with those of my peers—even though our interpretations are in no way quantifiable. The behavior is aggressive and reductive; it’s a dismissal of the gorgeousness of creation. How could I ever think any piece simple enough for me to take it apart? How could I lose touch with my love for these words?

Maybe I want love to be simple rather than straining. Maybe I want to open a book and feel the way I can circle on the page, carve a sparkling green line into used-book off-white. Maybe I want to open the cover like a peel off an orange, smell the husky sweetness of the page. I want to feel the way words find me, and be open to the finding. I want to dot lines, images, and words with hearts… I will know why the heart gleams on the page. And yet I will not. I will hug the space of mystery, hug the question with no answer. Think, this is beautiful, and I don’t know why.