My daughter has been in advanced placement English courses for most of her years in high school, but just as she sees the opportunity to read classics like 1984 as part of her assigned reading, she’s about to drop the class.
Why? Her workload involves not only juggling reading 3 stories simultaneously, but doing a breakdown of each chapter of each story. I understand the scholastic inclination toward analysis, the goal being opening a students understanding of the structure of storytelling; but the reality misses the mark.
You see analysis is in the eye of the beholder. Writing is a right brain activity, while deconstructive analysis is left brain all the way. No one has ever created a book, or a poem, or a song, or software, or a great pizza by analytical breakdown. First, you savor the pizza, you are moved by the poem, you relate to the novel’s characters. Perhaps the song means something to you that words can’t express, or you use the software without having to study its intricacies, it is intuitive to your very nature.
This is creativity. This is where our aspirations should lie. What’s compelling is the merging of elements, it is in this that we find satisfaction. Formulaic writing is something that is generally abhorred by all, yet forcing literature into a formulaic analysis is what we are taught. Is this what gets you off when reading? Is this really what makes you drive through that last 100 pages. I say it is not! That last 100 pages is the culmination of the elements of a novel, it’s where your comprehension of what the novel is really about begins to take hold of you. It is not a breakdown of how many granules of sugar it took to sweeten the apple, or how the molecules of butter merge with flour and air to for the crust of the pie; it is a sumptuous bite: sweet, salty, savory, flakey, gelatinous, mushy and more. It is the experience we seek. Why don’t we teach the experience? We should revel in the moments, in our senses. How does this make me feel? Can that experience be shared? Should it be? Is it uniquely mine?
These are the questions that matter when you’re eating a pie, reading a book, listening to a poem. Did the writer offer me something that meant something to me? Did it make me think? Did it make me laugh? The goal of almost anything should be to add something to a person’s life. Giving you the analysis you want to hear does nothing for either of us. Experiencing great art, literature, science, sport, food, these are the tastes of life we need to convey.
What we learn best, we learn through experience and cumulative analysis. I love Jhumpa Lahiri’s writing style. It is beauty in a way that I am unable to articulate. Analysis of The Namesake would provide me with nothing, for it is more than even a story. It transcends. The third person self narrative of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club changes the way I think about reading. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon challenges how we see perception within our own minds. Louis Armstrong’s It’s A Wonderful World makes us appreciative of all we have and regretful that we’re too fucking stupid to enjoy what we’re given. These works are historic, but they are historic because they are not analytical breakdowns of what we should listen to, or watch, or read. They are historic because they deliver the combined knowledge and experience of these individuals in a new and palatable way. The importance of palatability should not be underestimated in any of these instances. If they were not enjoyable, and relatable, no one would care.
There was a young man who did not perform exceptionally well in school. He dropped out of university and did not find math relatable enough to succeed at it. He instead worked at a patent office, seeing an overview of the thoughts of others. He discovered simplicity in the interrelation of ideas, the common threads that bound all things together. He did this not through left brain analysis, but right brain exposure to a collection of knowledge. Of course we know the young man was Albert Einstein, and we know of the results of his genius. But his genius was not a matter of learning each individual element to make a whole, his genius was in seeing what the whole could be from a summary of many wholes. Then he learned how the parts made sense within the context of his process.
I wish my daughter would have had the same opportunity in her class.
I hope that those of you who are here because you can write see that what you have to offer is making the elements of writing fit your vision, not trying of formulate what others did or did not do and then trying to repeat their process.
Peace out.
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