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.

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