Tag: English

Connecting Dots like Batman and Sir Percy Blakeney

The human brain is remarkably lazy, in part because it is very easily overwhelmed. This is why the field of clear vision in humans is so limited. If you’re reading this post on a desktop, then your eyes are filtering out the ribbon on the edge of the screen and even the other words in this paragraph. Even if you’re reading this on a cell phone, your eyes can really only pay attention to one line. If your brain were actually able to process all of the information in the ultra-HD resolution your focused vision has, your skull would have to be significantly larger. So, our smaller brains prioritize and try to create shortcuts to make things easier.

One of those shortcuts is pattern recognition. Patterns are basically cheat codes that help people get through life. Obviously, some people are better at recognizing patterns than others. (There are those genius children who just somehow know the prime numbers, for instance.) Even if you aren’t one of those instant pattern recognizers, your brain still operates on patterns. Your body (theoretically) has a circadian rhythm that works with sunrise and sunset, and people repeat their morning routines over and over through habit. Following the pattern means the brain doesn’t have to think as much. Our brains are hardwired to find order and make connections, even if there are no real connection to be made.

All of that is a long-winded way to say: we’re talking about T.S. Eliot and his idea of “tradition,” from his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” For those who know their Tolkien, tradition vaguely similar to Tolkien’s theory of “the pot of story.” The (very basic) idea of tradition is that all stories and related things (like poems) are connected to each other. Every time something new gets added to the mix, it slightly alters the meaning of everything that came before it. For you visual types, this metaphor might be helpful: all of the books are on one big library shelf. Every time a new book gets added, all the other books have to shift around a bit to accommodate the newcomer. Obviously, not all of the old books are affected in the same way by the new books–some will have to shift around more and some will barely move a millimeter. But how exactly does this idea actually work in a non-metaphorical way, and what does it have to do with patterns?

Perhaps the easiest way to understand the idea of “tradition” is by looking at it in action–through the eyes of just one individual. And to make it really simple, let’s take a stupid example. Let’s say Jane watches Disney’s Pocahontas and she loves it. The characters in that movie are stable and mean certain things: Pocahontas is a brave Native American who teaches a white man what the earth means to her people, and John Smith is a hero who learns how about another culture with an open mind. Now let’s say Jane has a serious lapse in judgement and watches Pocahontas II: Journey to the New World. (Spoilers, but seriously, don’t watch this movie. It’s a travesty.) In this movie, Pocahontas goes to England, and John Smith is no longer a curious hero; he’s. . . well. . . he’s a bit of a jerk, and Pocahontas finds another man to marry. Now, let’s apply the idea of tradition. If Eliot is right, Jane won’t be able to watch Pocahontas again without her view of the film being influenced by her knowledge of the second movie, even though the first movie was made without a sequel in mind. Nevertheless, it would be very difficult to watch the relationship in the first movie again without it being soured by the knowledge of what happens later. That’s what tradition looks like in action–new things influence the old canon. But . . . how does this apply to patterns?

The idea of tradition is actually at the root of people finding random connections (patterns!) between ideas in books. Things don’t have to be as closely related as the two Pocahontas movies and often aren’t. For example, if you read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school, then maybe the ideas you picked up about race relations from that book would carry over and influence how you would read Shakespeare’s Othello, a story about a Moor in a cast of white characters. Your brain might say, “Oh, these two books have race as a theme. They aren’t historically connected, but maybe I can take what I learned about race from this 1960s book and apply it to the Shakespeare play.” Our brains like to lump things into categories in order to make sense of them; patterns make it so much easier. And that’s how the two ideas relate: Eliot’s idea of tradition is what legitimizes people finding those patterns and themes across books in different genres.

Eliot’s idea was somewhat revolutionary. The idea that old stuff influences new stuff is obvious. The old is the muse for the new–for example, Batman is heavily inspired by the vigilante justice found in The Scarlet Pimpernel. After all, people really only can be inspired by what already exists, because they can’t use the future as a reference point. Eliot, however, asks a different question. What if Batman could influence Sir Percy Blakeney–“that demmed elusive Pimpernel”? Now isn’t that an interesting thought. Obviously the woman who wrote about Sir Percy didn’t have Bruce Wayne in mind, but imagine Jane read the Batman comics first and then read about Sir Percy. She would probably expect certain things of Sir Percy because her brain found a shortcut between the two men with pattern recognition: socialite hiding vigilante operations. And that’s just one example; there are hundreds more. Eliot captured in one word how the human mind operates and its love for patterns.

Many times, the connections drawn between works are really only useful or meaningful to the people who’ve found them, and in my last post, I implied rather heavily that historical context should always be taken into account when reading literature. Patterns are not sufficient for literary analysis. But I can’t force people to turn off their brains and stop making connections. The insights people have actually can be useful in helping other people better understand their metaphorical bookshelves. So who am I to tell people not to connect the dots? The picture is different almost every time–connect away!

Why I hate English

I once had a teacher who gave the excellent advice: Seldom affirm, seldom deny, always distinguish. This advice works well in most circumstances, especially in debates where both sides have a lot of nuance. But there are two places where this doesn’t work particularly well: YouTube thumbnail titles and headlines. So, apologies for the unnecessarily dramatic headline. But if it got you reading, it worked.

And actually, to be perfectly fair, the title of this post isn’t entirely untrue. I do hate English–at least, I hate the conventional way English and literature is taught in schools. I abhor the kind of English that kids complain about in high school. That kind of English has become an internet joke:

Book: “The curtains were blue.”

English Teacher: “The blue is meant to symbolize Thomas’ deep inner sadness and desperation.” (Or insert something else completely made up here)

What the author meant: “The curtains were blue.”

Yeah. That English. The kind where a high school kid can pick up a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (a medieval poem that cannot be read by modern English speakers without a translation), see the word “gay,” and assume it means homosexual. (I mentioned translation, right? And…medieval?) We live in a world where students can make up whatever they like, and teachers absolutely eat it up. Which is why today we’re going to be talking about the pitfalls of a school of thought called “New Criticism.” Before we do that, though, we’re going to talk about target audience.

First, we have the idea of an “Ideal/Implied Reader.” (For those who care, this is terminology pulled from reader-response criticism.) The words sound esoteric, (and they are, welcome to academia) but it’s basically a person who shares roughly the same assumptions as the author. In laymen’s terms, it’s the target audience. The Ideal Reader of a Shakespeare play is the person watching it in Shakespeare’s day; they have roughly the same cultural mindset, and the audience member would understand all his jokes without needing footnotes. Even YouTubers have “Implied Viewers.” If you follow one YouTuber for any length of time, you’ll notice that their videos start to become more niche, and they might even have inside jokes with their audience that new viewers might not understand. That YouTuber knows who his Ideal Viewers are, and he caters to them and their expectations.

The second (and related) concept is the “Informed Reader.” The Informed Reader is the person who is not a part of the target audience, but someone who can do the leg work and figure out what’s going on. That typically means doing a little bit of research–for example, to be able to judge a Shakespeare play, sometimes you need to read the footnote that explains a joke. (It’s probably sexual, by the way. Basically half of Shakespeare is sex.) The Ideal Viewer of one of those sappy Christian movies is a Christian, but that doesn’t mean an atheist can’t watch one and critique it. If the atheist were an Informed Viewer, he’d do a bit of hunting around to see why Christians thought that way.

Do those two concepts make sense? Good. Forget about them for now; we’ll come back to them later. We’re going to be talking about New Criticism. Obviously, I can’t cover everything in one blog post, but I’m going to do my best to boil down the Most Important Idea. Today, I’m going to be pulling from an essay called “Criticism as Pure Spectulation” by John Crowe Ransom, one of the most influential New Critics.

The most basic part of New Critics is this equation: Literature=fact+”x”. This may sound strange, but the equation actually works very well. The “fact” is the subject matter. For example, the “fact” in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” is that there is a man standing in his doorway, a raven flies into his study and keeps saying “Nevermore,” and the raven freaks him out. The “x” is all the fancy stuff–the meter that makes the poem sound all creepy, the word choice, and the repetition that simply doesn’t work in outside of poetry. A teacher once told me that the “x” is what’s lost in translation; try as you might, if you translated this poem into Spanish or German, you’d lose part of what makes this poem this poem. No matter how good the translator is, there is no way he can capture the essence of a poem in its native language. They can get the “fact” part across all right, but the “x” eludes them. This is what distinguishes literature from things like science and essays. (This blog post, for example, could be translated into another language with very few problems, but poems are a different ball game entirely.) Because literature is so distinct, (it’s the only discipline that has an “x,” after all) usually New Critics analyze only the text itself.

This is the way most people are trained to “do English,” whether they realize it or not. English teachers have their students identify the “fact” (What is this story/poem about? What happens?) and then, they have students analyze the “x” (What type of meter is this, and how does it contribute to the poem? Do the color of the curtains add to the story, and if so, how? What is the tone of this poem, and what words indicate this?).

Obviously, this is an oversimplification of New Criticism, but this idea is one of their core tenants. And their equation is actually very useful, as far as it goes. Applied correctly, New Criticism works pretty well for modern people reading modern things–Americans can read and understand things written in the colonial era and beyond with very little explanation. As an American, the ideas of freedom and liberty just make sense to me. I don’t really need any context for Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.” I can read poems written in modern English and separate the “fact” from the “x” to write a poetry analysis, and that’s a skill I have thanks to New Criticism. And it works really well for literature where I already have a basic understanding of the history.

The problem is that this system easily lends itself to abuse. Remember our Ideal and Informed Readers? New Critics can very easily fall into the trap of assuming that they are always the Ideal Reader, no matter what. After all, if you take the text all by itself, you’re allowed to assume the book means whatever you’d like it to mean. You don’t have to do any research into why or how the book came about. This is why that teacher is able to say those curtain symbolize Thomas’ inward depression spiral. She doesn’t have to figure out why the book is that way; she can make the book however she wants.

Obviously, no one should judge a system only by the abuse of that system. Most people don’t judge playgrounds for being dangerous if one child climbs to the highest point and then jumps off of it. But if multiple kids start to climb up and jump off, the question is eventually asked: What is it about this playground that makes children want to jump off of it? Why is this playground easily abused? Maybe it’s because it’s too easy to get to the top, or maybe it’s because the playground is too boring and kids want to make it more exciting. New Criticism doesn’t exactly encourage people to get whatever they like out of the text, but there don’t appear to be any barriers either. They don’t force a reader to take history into account, nor should they, but gentle encouragement might be helpful.

To illustrate, in the beginning of the movie “Hitch,” Hitch explains that 60% of human communication is body language, 30% is tone, and 10% is words. Imagine if all you ever got was the words. While Hitch is probably exaggerating, the point stands: Text matters, but context is everything.