Oh, dreaded high school English class. Where Mrs. ——— beats social truths out of poems and stories, and clenches the narratives in her fists to wring out all meaning. We are a species driven to find it. We poke lines of poems until their bruised, we prod paragraphs until their quaking, drenched in sweat, and ready to confess anything. And damn if that just doesn’t ruin the enjoyment of reading. If that’s all reading is about, why would anyone want to keep doing it?
I’ll admit, I love going through the exercises of finding meaning. Let me go to all the literature and English classes, where we have lively debates over the motif of red or the symbolism of birds. Attending reading groups where we uncover social values, both in the story and now. The very act of finding what is so significant about it. I even like how grammar and syntax contribute to the creation of that meaning. But after studying narrative health care in my MFA program, and beginning to teach how to close read to a creative writing class, and an experience teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I’m beginning to more deeply value the importance of honoring stories.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently read Daniel Handler’s memoir where he explored his own personal canon and expressed the idea that we like stories not because they teach us moral lessons, but because we enjoy their premise. Last fall when I used GGK to explore the concept of heroic journeys, I immersed myself in analogues and critical interpretation of the Arthurian poem, with the false belief that I’d be able to answer any questions the students had about GGK, particularly the one that perennially baffled me: the Green Knight’s challenge. I get we’re to suspend our disbelief with fiction. It’s magic. The Green Knight is from the land of Fairy. I know in the world of Fairy, anything is possible. But, living with the Western affliction of needing to separate fantasy from reality, I couldn’t wrap my mind around why the story was even being told. Why was the poem based around something so illogical and absurd as “If I let you chop off my head, you have to let me chop off yours”? We can reason that, of course that’s a silly challenge, one easy to accept. If I chop off your head, you won’t be able to chop off my head: you’ll be dead. Deal! But we also know the Green Knight is not of this earth, and so the story must continue after that. Through my study of analogues and criticisms, I began to understand the history of these challenges. They began to make sense in their own funny way. I was able to rationalize them.
Thus, in a way, I wrung GGK dry of its mystery. Yes, I appreciate it now in a new way, and I’m certainly not claiming I understand the “challenge” motif to its fullest, as I’m not a folklore scholar (and I don’t think anything is fully “explainable”). I value the depth of history in the poem, how the story’s elements reach back into different times and different values, indeed how the challenge in GGK is in conversation with all the other challenges ever written down. I can still marvel at the absurdity of it. But this interaction is different from honoring the story for what it is, holding it out carefully before me as I would a baby bird, with recognition that I’ll never really know how she’ll learn to fly, but I know she will.
So how does close reading honor a story without interpreting it to death? What I am finding through teaching a close reading process is that it’s imperative we suspend finding meaning or offering interpretation until the very end, when we explore our desires and the narrator’s desires (thus, finding meaning is not wrong or bad). It’s easy to slip into interpretation. But seeking a medical diagnosis is actually an excellent metaphor for why it’s important to suspend interpretation for as long as possible. If a doctor were to see her patient and only hear half the patient’s story, or even look at only half her body, and diagnose from only part of the information available about the ailment, chances are likely the doctor will misdiagnose. Why has the doctor only listened to half the story or looked at half the body? Maybe she has jumped to a conclusion because of past prejudices and experiences. The doctor missed a vital clue in the story because that clue didn’t fit in with the narrative the doctor developed based on the doctor’s past experience. Obviously the doctor’s knowledge and past experience is essential to the diagnosis, so it’s not that past experience is bad. It’s that the doctor failed to consider the whole story; she didn’t honor the full story of the ailment.
Just so it is engaging with a story as a reader and human who lives in the world. When we’ve read a story and not carefully attended to the many formal elements that make it up, when we’ve failed to consider time and frame, we begin to read into the story from our own experiences and prejudices, from our own perspectives, and fail to miss vital parts of the story because those parts don’t fit in with our projected narrative.
The more carefully and closely we read, the more likely we will read a story with accuracy and without projecting our own view points onto the story. This is vital to honoring others’ stories. And when we honor others’ stories, when we listen, we honor the beauty of being human.