“To Say in Words What Cannot Be Said in Words”

A tension has been on my mind for a while, between the stories we tell in fiction and the question of meaning. It was on my mind in September 2020, then again two years later, December 2022. It seems that perhaps every year in autumn I find myself thinking about this theme. Here I am again. It’s November 2023. I am asking again, what does a story really mean?

Since I taught it for the first time to students earlier this fall, I’ve been thinking about an idea in Ursula K. Le Guin’s introduction to her 1969 science-fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. “This book is not about the future,” she writes. “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” She calls her work a “thought experiment” and compares it to the work of scientists like Schrödinger and his famous cat.

But Le Guin goes on to approach the heart of this question of meaning, which is why her words form the starting point for this post today:

        In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find--if it's a good novel--that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how were were changed.
        The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.
        The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

That last sentence–that is the heart of this idea for me, and that is what I have been carrying with me for the last couple of weeks, turning that idea over in my mind, and I think it has an answer for me for the difficulty of meaning in a story. Let’s unpack this a little more. Let’s see what we can discover.

What’s the issue? Why does it matter whether something means or not?

In the literature curriculum of the International Baccalaureate, students explore “how language creates meaning.” Through their essays on literary works as a whole and in close analysis of short passages of text, in our class we are trying to pin down this esoteric process in precise terms–what is the meaning, we ask, and where has that meaning come from? To earn the top grades in the course, students have to rigorously show how particular words and authorial choices contribute particular meanings, how they impact the reader’s emotions and understanding, and how all of these textual features culminate in a work of literature’s comment on a broader theme.

And in many ways, I have loved what this framework has brought to my teaching and to my students. In particular, it has helped give me direction in a literature class. The class can have a common aim for looking closely at the texts we study. I have sometimes been confronted by the to-a-literature-teacher-or-a-writer-existentially-terrifying-question, what on earth are we actually studying in this class!? And this idea of the construction of meaning gives us an answer.

And yet the more I work with it, the more I sometimes feel uncomfortable. Because when we seek to identify the meaning of the literary text, when we seek to encapsulate a novel in a sentence, when we operate with the assumption that a story makes an argument, I am convinced that we are actually reducing the very meaning we seek to understand. When we state, as I routinely praise students for doing in my class, that “Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness argues that close interpersonal relationships can make intercultural understanding possible” or that “Wisława Szymborska’s poem ‘Autotomy’ presents humanity as ultimately isolated because of our impending death,” I fear that in attempting to understand, we have shorn away the very things that make these works of literature alive and breathing. I think it is like physics’s concept of the observer effect, that in trying to understand something, we change it. Or that the tool we are using to understand–in this case, a distilled summary of meaning–can never give us the whole truth of that text. The tool is blunt. It provides us with an answer to the question of meaning, but the fact that we have that answer obscures the reality that the summary of meaning contains only one thread, as observed by one reader in one context.

This is, I suppose, a question of interpretation. We interpret something in order to know its meaning, but we must not forget that the interpretation is not the thing itself.

Is interpretation dangerous?

Le Guin suggests that through encountering a piece of literature, “we have been changed,” although “it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how were were changed,” and here I think of Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” (and see the summary (ha!) here) in which she argues that literary critics’ focus on meaning as opposed to the sensory, aesthetic experience of a piece of art is destroying the art itself and our experience of it.

A month or so ago, I attended an online seminar with writer Jennifer Kabat. One of the ideas Kabat commented on that struck me was the way conventions within the literary world today insist on writers including only that which is useful. That is, we tell writers that they should prune away digressions or elements that don’t contribute meaningfully to a text’s purpose. Kabat is an advocate for experimental literature that pushes back against boundaries like these. She identified this focus on purpose with the capitalist idea that an activity’s (or a person’s) primary value lies in its utility, an idea that is foundational in American society but that can have dangerous consequences.

When Kabat expressed this idea during the seminar, I found it odd, perhaps more extreme than my own thinking was prepared to go (especially me as a literature teacher who, as I say, is always working with this idea of purpose in a text!). But As I’ve been thinking about it over the last weeks, I think it makes a certain sense. That when we interpret–when we say that a text means X, if to interpret is the goal of reading a text, then we make an assumption that to come away from a literary text with a good interpretation means that we have taken from it what should be taken. That is, we have sifted through the haystack and found the needle. We have panned the dirt and extracted the gold. We have mined meaning like a resource that we can sell. We have extracted from the text what can be repackaged for a good grade or, more sympathetically, for its applicability to our own lives.

What does that mean for the literature itself? What of the 99% of the work of literature that has not made it into our interpretation? What are we saying about the value of literature, if our mode of understanding privileges an extraction and distillation of meaning?

Literature for literature’s sake

In my teacher education program, I was taught that literary texts (or other texts) are tools with which we teach the skills of interpretation, reading comprehension, and the affective skill of reading for pleasure. We don’t teach literature, I learned. The gold is the skill that is learned from reading.

I wrote more about this idea in April 2021, and about why I now reject it. I think its danger is at the root of this same question of meaning. As a teacher and as a writer, I want to say that literature has value for its own self. That when we read, let us not be “reading for meaning.” I don’t have this well defined yet, but let us seek to know a work of literature closer to the way we would seek to know a person. And when we write, let us write to tell the story, or as the muse speaks through us, as the story or the poem exists in the world and we do our best to lay it down onto a page, rather than to express an idea. When we ask what does this story mean, can we understand that the meaning is only the story itself, not shortened, not digested, but the living thing, the thing that cannot be said in words, in words?

Le Guin says finally, at the end of her introduction–fiction is always metaphor. “A metaphor for what?” she then asks. That is, what is the meaning? She answers the question with her protagonist, Genly Ai, as real as a person, thus:

If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination.

Wishing you well for the coming couple of weeks. Thank you for stopping by to read.
Jimmy