I remember a fable I heard once, from some origin that I can no longer locate. I think I was told this story by a speaking voice, perhaps by a teacher at school, perhaps elsewhere. The situation of its telling has thus vanished, but I remember the story perfectly. Let me share it with you now.
Once upon a time, an old man stood guard on the city wall. He watched the million travelers going in and out under the gate. At night, he shut the wooden doors, and in the morning, he opened them again. So many travelers passed through from so many different places, that the old man felt that the whole world was passing through those gates, and passing out again each day. And the old man knew all the residents of the city. He had seen them from his watchtower year by year, the ways they walked and spoke, the ways they interacted with one another and with the foreign travelers. He was a man of great experience and wisdom.
One day, a traveler approached the gate, but he did not hurry through like the others. Instead, he looked up at the gatehouse and called to the the old man, “Greetings! I have traveled a long way in search of a new home. Can you tell me, what are the people like in this city?”
The old man studied the traveler and considered the question. He called back, “Tell me about the people in the city from which you came.”
“Very well,” called the traveler. “The people in my old city were wonderful. With the kindest hearts and the most open arms. They gave everything to help those in need–how hard it was for me to leave that place.”
“Well, it so happens,” the old man called, “the people of this city are just like that. They will greet you warmly. They will welcome you into the city. They will buy what you may have to sell at a fair price. They will speak good of you to others. They are precisely like the people you describe.”
“Ah,” called the traveler, “thank you.” And he crossed under the city gates.
Later that same day, a second traveler approached the gate, but he too paused before the portal. He looked up at the gatehouse and called to the old man, “Greetings! I have traveled a long way in search of a new home. Can you tell me, what are the people like in this city?”
The old man studied this second traveler and considered the question. He called back, “Tell me about the people in the city from which you came.”
“Very well,” called the traveler. “The people in my old city were devils. With iron hearts and deceiving looks. They took everything they could from those in need–how ready I was to leave that place.”
The old man nodded. “Well it so happens,” he called, “the people of this city are just like that as well. They will not greet you but spurn you. They will resent your presence in the city. They will cheat you out of any goods you have to sell, and they will speak nothing but ill of you to others. They are precisely like the people you describe.”
“Ah,” called the traveler, “I see.” And he turned away from the gate to continue his long journey.
The story, when it was told to me, was about a positive attitude. The attitude you bring to a situation determines its course. That what you expect to see, you will.
When I consider literature, I see in this fable the most extreme form of Reader Response criticism possible–the old man believes that it is the reader alone, irrespective at all of the actual facticity of the city he guards, it is the reader alone who determines the meaning. The reader will always find in a text confirmation of their prior beliefs. The text itself is essentially a mirror, reflecting back to the reader what that reader already sees in the world. The text has no power to change hearts or minds. The text itself lacks any substance.
I contrast this fable with stories in which people’s most deeply-held beliefs are changed by external circumstances. I think of Pip in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, whose beliefs about his love Estella are sorely disabused, and I think about Estella herself, who at the end of the novel says that she was “bent and broken, but—I hope—into a better shape” by life’s cruel turns, that the personality instilled in her by Miss Havisham’s instruction was changed utterly by the realities she encountered.
I think too of a more modern fable, “On Discovery” in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men. In that fable, the explorer Tang Ao arrives in the Land of Women. Because Tang Ao is “not on guard against ladies,” he allows himself to be easily captured by the women, and indeed, “if he had had male companions, we would’ve winked over his shoulder,” Kingston writes, in a kind of kinky bravado.
But Tang Ao’s expectations are quickly proven false, as he is stripped and chained, as his ears are pierced and his feet bound. Arrayed in golden jewelry, powdered face and painted eyebrows, Tang Ao eats the “women’s food” that “improved his womb.” The bandages from foot binding, when they were taken off to be washed and changed, “were embroidered with flowers and smelled of rot and cheese. He hung the bandages up to dry, streamers that drooped and draped wall to wall. He felt embarrassed; the wrappings were like underwear, and they were his.”
Through these violences, Tang Ao’s whole identity is changed. Near the end of the fable, dinner guests refer to Tang Ao with the pronoun “she,” as Tang Ao serves the dinner. The great trauma inflicted has changed Tang Ao utterly, and the expectations he professed upon his arrival have been thoroughly repudiated. The old man on the gate would have been wrong to say that the people of the Land of Women “are just like that as well.”
I used to teach “On Discovery” in an exurban high school in Minnesota, in which the culture of hegemonic masculinity ran strong. Male students often found the story uncomfortable, but I was impressed how ready they were to engage with it. We used Kingston’s fable to talk about how society forces people to change their identities–immigrants forced to assimilate into a new society, for example, their home cultures devalued. I see in Kingston’s text today, especially after reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, an indictment of the structures that lock women into subordinate roles in society. I have always thought that Tang Ao is meant to represent a man, and Kingston is portraying a role reversal, in which the women dominate him. Now I wonder whether Tang Ao is meant to be a universal human being, and what happens to [and here I would like, for generality, to use the gender-neutral pronoun them] is what happens to human beings who are assigned “female,” and through the way these people are treated, their identities change.
But none of the teenage boys in my class ever expressed the interpretation I thought they might, that the story was about the contemporary feminization of men, which proponents of various men’s rights movements blame for so much ill in society, akin to the idea of white people’s “reverse racism.” I feel surprised still today that no one voiced that kind of interpretation. Perhaps they knew that I, a gay teacher, was probably a liberal and so they kept their ideas to themselves. Or perhaps I had judged them too readily, and they understood the feminist argument in Kingston’s work.
In this brief teaching story, perhaps I needed to rethink my expectations of my students. They, I like to hope, were rethinking their expectations of a story that made them feel uncomfortable. Perhaps all of us learned something.
In our reading, there is an interplay between our prior ideas and the text. When we read with cursory speed, read without deep thought, then perhaps indeed the text becomes only slightly less than a reflective surface that sends our own ideas beaming back to us. When we do apply deep thought, to purposely interrogate our initial impressions, or when we read in a community of other readers who bring their own interpretations, then the text takes on more of a detailed surface of its own. We can see new things in it, and it can change us.
As writers, what does this mean? How might we express specific ideas, or how might we recognize the multiplicity of interpretations available to readers? Perhaps there is a tension between these two wishes, or perhaps they work together, for it is through alternative interpretations considered side by side that we come to closer examination of a text itself, in order to judge among them. Ambiguity thus on the one hand might be a failure of communication by the writer; on the other, that very ambiguity perhaps enables the deep thinking that keeps the text present in our minds.
What do you think? Are there texts that have changed your mind, or changed you at a deep level? Has your interpretation of certain texts changed over time as you have changed as a person? As a writer, how to you negotiate this question of ambiguity verses seeking to present a clear, specific idea?
Best wishes for the coming week,
Jimmy
Words like trees 
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