Maimonides: Misinterpretation

 

Miss Rhode Island misinterprets Stan Fields's question at the Miss United States Pageant in the 2000 movie Miss Congeniality

 

"[Y]ou should not hope [to find some signification corresponding to every subject occurring in the parable][.]" -Moses Maimonides (pp. 172-173, Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism). 

The thing that hit me most while reading our portion of Maimonides's Guide of the Perplexed was his belief about parables and their deeper meanings. As a lover of literature, I was often frustrated in my high school English classes because no one understood what the eyes of Dr. TJ Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby mean or what the ducks symbolize in The Catcher in the Rye. Although I was glad that neither Fitzgerald nor Salinger come right out and say what their respective symbols mean, I couldn't help but wish that they had put notes in the backs of their books to explain it so that my class wouldn't disagree with our teacher. With everything, we have to take into account a certain amount of misinterpretation.

I like Maimonides's idea that the reader must only be allowed a glimpse of the truth at first, and he or she will be able to have his or her own ideas about it, and then, later on, the truth will be revealed in its full form. In my opinion, this is a good philosophy because it still allows a little room for the reader to see things from his or her own perspective, for at least a little while, and then be shown the work from the writer's point of view. Sylvia Plath sort of does this in the seventh chapter of her iconic 1963 novel The Bell Jar, "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." It's pretty obvious what the symbolism is here, but I like Sylvia's use of it because she makes it clear without saying exactly what it is. She leaves room for someone to misread it, while others understand exactly what she means. There's freedom in that; she allows room for perspective in that.

Vincent van Gogh's last (speculated) painting, Wheatfield with Crows

In Art Appreciation last year, Dr. Zurinsky told us that Vincent van Gogh had finally reached the breaking point after years of depression, health problems, and unrequited loves. Although no one is 100% positive, it's widely accepted that his 1890 painting Wheatfield with Crows is the last painting he ever did. Dr. Zurinsky told us, in the delicate and soothing way she has, that the crows symbolize the depression and years of failure flying away from van Gogh, leaving behind the beautiful, radiant field of windblown wheat. Now, if you were to look at this painting without knowing it was his last painting and without knowing anything about his depression, you'd probably think it is just another wheat field. Like Maimonides says, looking at the painting at face value is just the outer shell, which is "beautiful as silver" (p. 171) as it is. After you learn about van Gogh's life, though, and after hearing what Dr. Zurinsky said about it, the inner meaning is golden. 

In the age of political correctness in which we live, misinterpretation plays a major role in our lives. To this day Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl is being challenged, "due to the complaint that the book includes sexual material and homosexual themes" (http://tiny.cc/on16b) and Mark Twain's The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn is being challenged because of its "racial slurs and the use of ungrammatical dialect (100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature by Karolides, Bald, and Sova). Most recently, the American Congress has been trying to pass a bill which would allow the censorship of the Internet, SOPA & PIPA. Although I certainly do not believe that one should use racial slurs or try to purposefully offend someone, it is my strong belief that the reasons Diary of a Young Girl and Huckleberry Finn have been banned/challenged over the years is from a complete misinterpretation of their content. Even though most coming-of-age teenagers don't say it out loud (and neither did Anne Frank, technically), they all struggle with their sexuality-- no matter the orientation. At least the girls reading Anne's Diary can relate. Huck Finn's challengers are completely ignorant, in my opinion, because they don't take into consideration that 1.) Twain is a Regionalist, and therefore captures the dialect of his locale, 2.) Huck Finn, despite his use of the n-word, maintains a close, brotherly relationship with the Black character, and 3.) Twain's purpose is not to offend, but to show that Blacks and Whites COULD be friends in time when people of different races weren't supposed to even speak to one another. Misinterpretation: a crippling force in this day and age. It would certainly have been helpful if Twain or Anne Frank had included a disclaimer with their works... maybe then people wouldn't completely miss the point.

http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/m/misinterpret.asp

Breaking the Mold

e.e. cummings is my favorite poet because he doesn't conform to the rules that traditional poets do-- capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure... none of it matters to e.e. cummings. Because of his refusal to fit into the mold, he broke through a lot of walls and that is why he became unique and loved by so many. 

Horace tells us that poetry, because it is an art, should abide by certain rules, or decorum. A few of these rules are: 

• the characters must act according to their ages and places in life (pp. 125-126)
• be inspired by life and keep your writing as close to life as possible (p. 129)
• don't let everything be obvious; leave a little mystery so that your work will be compelling and the audience will have to analyze the plot/characters (p. 126)

Although Horace seems very dedicated to his idea of the decorum, he does give the writer room to wiggle around and create something singularly his or her own. Horace's decorum, I think, is more of a suggestion, and that is what I like about him. I do agree with most of what he says, especially the three points I've listed above. 

Audrey Hepburn in a modest dress for the Oscars

Lady Gaga in a meatdress at the VMAs

However, while I, personally, like to have a guide to follow when I'm doing... well, pretty much anything, I think self-expression is more important than following a rubric. I think too much structure restrains the writer, and, if all writers followed Horace's decorum, we'd have thousands upon thousands of years of poetry that is just the same old same old. As much as I don't like Lady Gaga and her painfully strange costumes, I must applaud her for being "original" in a way that I don't believe anyone else has. On a larger level, breaking rules does a lot for society. If MLK hadn't broken the societal rules in the 1960s, we'd probably still be segregated. If the American revolutionaries hadn't fought back against British oppression in the 1700s, we'd speak with British accents. So, while I'm personally glad to have rules by which to go, I'm also glad that there exist rebels who are willing to break out of that quaint little box and do something totally ridiculous. What are rules if they aren't broken once in a while?

Aristotle: Action is Character

Although I usually don't like Aristotle, I believe much of what he says about tragedy in Poetics is true: "For (i) tragedy is a representation not of human beings but of action and life. [...] [P]eople are of a certain sort according to their characters, but happy or the opposite according to their actions. So [the actors] do not act in order to represent the characters, but they include the characters for the sake of their actions" (Norton Anthology of Theory & Criticism 93). As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his notes on his last novel, The Last Tycoon, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." And, as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words. When we see a movie or a play, we don't really have the knowledge we need to judge a character on who they are as a person. All we're given is what they do. Hamlet, for example, is probably not someone many playgoers see as being level-headed or right; on the contrary, it's likely that we wouldn't see Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird as a villain, because everything Atticus does in the book is in order to help his children or his doomed client. Atticus says on page 33 of To Kill a Mockingbird, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Since we, as the viewers or readers, aren't able to know characters on a personal level, viewing these characters by their actions is the only way we're able to "climb into [their] skin." Apart from soliloquies, which are few and far between, in a play we're not given too much insight into someone's soul. Aristotle's demand that a tragedy include defining action for a character is vital for the development of a character in the eyes of the viewer or reader. As Aristotle says in On Rhetoric, "[C]haracter is almost, so to speak, the most authoritative form of persuasion."

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Underground Man in his novel Notes from Underground is the prototype for the Anti-hero, who is paralyzed by his or her fear of action. We are told the story of the Underground Man from the Underground Man himself, so we are seeing who he is by his thoughts and words. Although it's obvious that the Underground Man yearns to have companionship, he is paralyzed by the fear that he will be humiliated and judged. On one occasion, the Underground Man coaxes Liza, a prostitute, to his home under the pretense that he is interested in more than just sex. Liza thinks that he sees her as a person. The Underground Man, almost threatened by the possibility that he and Liza could be friends or even lovers, ends up blasting Liza with insults, which crushes her. From Liza's point of view, the Underground Man is simply cruel, but we know that he is using his cruelness as a defense mechanism. It is the Underground Man's INACTION that causes him to plummet even deeper into isolation, and this is why, I think, Aristotle makes such a big deal out of characters being defined by their actions rather than the other way around; at the end of the day, it's not what we believe that makes a difference-- it's what we DO.

Ode to the Anti-hero

Plato and Today's Culture

Although Plato lived 2,300 years ago, his ideas about poetry and knowledge are still very relevant today, not only to today's literature, but to the way in which human nature functions. "The point is that a young person can't tell when something is allegorical and when it isn't, and any idea admitted by a person of that age tends to become almost ineradicable and permanent," Plato argues. "All things considered, then, that is why a very great deal of importance should be placed upon ensuring that the first stories they hear are best adapted for their moral improvement." In today's world, when violence has become a major theme of TV shows, movies (like this [VERY VIOLENT] clip from American Psycho), video games, and even music, Plato's argument  certainly still holds some ground. Does early exposure to violent videogames like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty help to program kids to be violent people? Should the violence we watch for entertainment value be held accountable for killing sprees and other acts of violence? Plato's view on this subject plays a major role in the Nature vs. Nurture debate, even if he isn't given his due credit. Futhermore, his argument can be supported by cases of domestic violence. According to the Domestic Violence Roundtable, children who experience domestic violence are more likely to develop abusive and violent tendencies; boys who witness their fathers abusing their mothers are likely to grow up and abuse their wives and children too-- as children, they learned from their fathers that abuse is a simple way to get what they want and to resolve issues. Clearly, Plato's idea about a youngster's learning/environment is something that is important to consider even in today's world, and the question is still being raised: should violence and other indecent acts (sex between unmarried persons or teenagers, thefts, etc.) be allowed to be portrayed in the media? What are these portrayals' long lasting effects on the world?

Plato also theorizes that writing will cause people's minds to be foggy. "Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make things they have learnt disappear from their minds." While this can be read on a much deeper intellectual level, when I first read this passage, my thoughts immediately jumped to movies and books. In 2012, when movies have become a staple to weekend leisure and a way to escape, it's often hard to keep a clear, realistic head. For instance, while girls, like myself, KNOW that romance isn't always the I-waited-for-seven-years-and-now-I-have-you Notebook story, or the perfect damsel in distress scenario in which the handsome prince sweeps us off our feet and carries us off to a better life, we keep telling ourselves, "It happened for Noah and Allie, maybe it can happen for me too..." While being an idealist isn't necessarily all bad, it certainly leads to quite a bit of disappointment. We let books, magazines, and movies generate this picture in our heads that Mr. Right will be our Romeo, when he will most likely be just as flawed as everybody else; we expect Bradley Cooper and end up getting Rob Schneider. There aren't enough Abercrombie & Fitch models for all of us. So, the fact that Billy broke Sally's heart in 9th grade, and again in 10th, and yet again in 11th and 12th won't matter when Billy shows up in Sally's yard throwing pebbles at her window, because people in movies mess up all the time, habitually, and end up being the much sought after "One." The media causes us to not only think about, but BELIEVE with the utmost strength, that what is written is reality. Plato's argument was relevant in his time, sure, but, in my opinion, its relevance has only intensified with the widening of availability of media.

This clip from the movie (500) Days of Summer is a perfect example of this. Tom, a (literally) hopeless romantic who was influenced at a young age by The Graduate and sad British pop songs, is in love with Summer, a girl who doesn't believe in love or relationships.  Obviously, Tom's let his dreams of perfection make him fly so high in the clouds that reality completely crushes him.