How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by Thomas C. Foster

  Sometimes the season isn’t mentioned specifically or immediately, and this can make the matter a bit trickier. Robert Frost doesn’t come right out and say, in “After Apple Picking,” that it’s now October twenty-ninth or November umpteenth, but the fact that he’s finished his apple picking informs us we’re in autumn. After all, winesaps and pippins don’t ripen in March. Our first response may not be, “Oh, here’s another poem about fall,” although, in fact, this may be the most autumnal poem in the world. Frost expands on the seasonal implications with time of day (late evening), mood (very tired), tone (almost elegiac), and point of view (backward-looking). He speaks of the overwhelming sense of both tiredness and completion, of bringing in a huge harvest that p. 180 surpassed even his hopes, of being on a ladder so long that the sense of its swaying will stay with him even after he falls into bed the way a fishing bobber, watched all day, will imprint itself on the visual sense of eyes closed for sleep.

  So harvest, and not only of apples, is one element of autumn. When our writers speak of harvests, we know it can refer not only to agricultural but also to personal harvests, the results of our endeavors, whether over the course of a growing season or a life. St. Paul tells us that we will reap whatever it is that we sow. The notion is so logical, and has been with us so long, that it has become a largely unstated assumption: we reap the rewards and punishments of our conduct. Frost’s crop is abundant, suggesting he has done something right, but the effort has worn him out. This, too, is part of autumn. As we gather in our harvest, we find we have used up a certain measure of our energies, that in truth we’re not as young as we used to be.

  Not only has something come before, in other words, but something else is coming. Frost speaks in the poem not only of the coming night and his well-earned sleep but of the longer night that is winter and the longer sleep of the woodchuck. Now this reference to hibernation certainly fits with the seasonal nature of the discussion, but that longer sleep also suggests a longer sleep, the big sleep, as Raymond Chandler called it. The ancient Romans named the first month of our calendar after Janus, the god of two faces, the month of January looking back into the year gone by and forward into the one to come. For Frost, though, such a dual gaze applies equally well to the autumn and the harvest season.

  Every writer can make these modifications in his or her use of the seasons, and the variation produced keeps seasonal symbolism fresh and interesting. Will she play it straight or use spring ironically? Will summer be warm and rich and liberating or hot and dusty and stifling? Will autumn find us totp. 181ing up our accomplishments or winding down, arriving at wisdom and peace or being shaken by those November winds? The seasons are always the same in literature and yet always different. What we learn, finally, as readers is that we don’t look for a shorthand in seasonal use—summer means x, winter y minus x—but a set of patterns that can be employed in a host of ways, some of them straightforward, others ironic or subversive. We know those patterns because they have been with us for so long.

  How long?

  Very long. I mentioned before that Shakespeare didn’t invent this fall/middle age connection. It predates him by a bit. Say, a few thousand years. Nearly every early mythology, at least those originating in temperate zones where seasons change, had a story to explain that seasonal change. My guess is that the first thing they had to account for was the fact that when the sun disappeared over the hill or into the sea at night, the disappearance was only temporary; Apollo would drive his sun chariot across the sky again the next morning. About the time the community had a handle on this cosmic mystery, though, the next item on the agenda, or next but one, was probably the matter of spring following winter, the days growing shorter but then growing longer again. This, too, required explanation, and pretty soon the story had priests to carry it on. If they were Greek, they would come up with something like this:

  Once upon, etc., there’s a beautiful young girl, so stunningly attractive that her beauty is a byword not only on earth but in the land of the dead, where the ruler, Hades, learns of her. And Hades decides he has to have this young beauty, whose name is Persephone, so he comes up to earth just long enough to kidnap her and spirit her away to the underworld, which confusingly enough is also called Hades.

  p. 182 Ordinarily the theft of even a beautiful young girl by a god would go unchecked, but this particular girl is the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of agriculture and fertility (a happy combination), who goes instantly and permanently into mourning, leaving the earth in perpetual winter. Hades doesn’t care, because like most gods he’s very selfish, and he has what he wants. And Demeter doesn’t care, because in her selfishness she can’t see beyond her own grief. Fortunately, the other gods do notice that animals and people are dying for lack of food, so they ask Demeter for help. She travels down to Hades (the place) and deals with Hades (the god), and there’s a mysterious transaction involving a pomegranate and twelve seeds, of which only six get eaten, in most versions by Persephone although sometimes by Hades, who then discovers he’s been tricked. Those six uneaten seeds mean she gets to return to earth for six months of every year, during which time her mother, Demeter, is so happy that she lets the world grow and be fertile, only plunging it back into winter when her daughter has to return to the underworld. Hades, of course, spends six months of every twelve sulking, but he realizes that even a god can’t beat pomegranate seeds, so he goes along with the plan. Thus spring always follows winter, and we humans aren’t buried in perpetual winter (no, not even in Duluth), and the olives ripen every year.

  Now, if the tellers of the tale were Celts or Picts or Mongols or Cheyenne, they’d be telling a different version of this tale, but the basic impulse—we need a story to explain this phenomenon to ourselves—would remain constant.

  Death and rebirth, growth and harvest and death, year after year. The Greeks held their dramatic festivals, which featured almost entirely tragedy, at the beginning of spring. The idea was to purge all the built-up bad feeling of winter from the populace (and to instruct them in right conduct toward the p. 183 gods) so that no negativity would attach to the growing season and thereby endanger the harvest. Comedy was the genre of fall, once the harvest was in and celebrations and laughter were appropriate. Something of the same phenomenon shows itself in more modern religious practice. Part of the immense satisfaction of the Christian story is that the two great celebrations, Christmas and Easter, coincide with dates of great seasonal anxiety. The story of the birth of Jesus, and of hope, is placed almost on the shortest, and therefore most dismal (preelectric) day of the year. All saturnalia celebrate the same thing: well, at least this is as far as the sun will run away from us, and now the days will start getting longer and, eventually, warmer. The Crucifixion and Resurrection come very near the spring equinox, the death of winter and beginning of renewed life. There is evidence in the Bible that the Crucifixion did in fact take place at that point in the calendar, although not that the birth took place anywhere near December 25. But that may be beside the point, because from an emotional standpoint, and quite apart from the religious significance of the events for Christians, both holidays derive much of their power from their proximity in the calendar year to moments on which we humans place great emphasis.

  So it is with books and poems. We read the seasons in them almost without being conscious of the many associations we bring to that reading. When Shakespeare compares his beloved to a summer’s day, we know instinctively, even before he catalogs her advantages, that this is way more flattering than being compared to, say, January eleventh. When Dylan Thomas recalls his enchanted childhood summers in “Fern Hill” (1946), we know something more is afoot than simply school being out. In fact, our responses are so deeply ingrained that seasonal associations are among the easiest for the writer to upend and use ironically. T. S. Eliot knows what we generally think of spring, so when he makes April “the cruellest month” p. 184 and says we were happier buried under winter snows than we are having the
earth warm up and start nature’s (and our) juices flowing again, he knows that line of thought will bring us up short. And he’s right.

  Seasons can work magic on us, and writers can work magic with seasons. When Rod Stewart wants to say, in “Maggie May,” that he’s hanging around too long and wasting his youth on this older woman, he makes it late September. When Anita Brookner, in her finest novel, Hotel du Lac (1984), sends her heroine off to a resort to recover from a romantic indiscretion and to meditate on the way youth and life have passed her by, what point in the calendar does she choose?

  Late September?

  Excellent. So Shakespeare and Ecclesiastes and Rod Stewart and Anita Brookner. You know, I think we might be onto something here.

  Interlude – One Story

  p. 185 WE’VE SPENT QUITE A WHILE thinking about specific tasks involved in the activity of reading, such as considering how this means x, that signifies y, and so on. Now of course I believe “this” and “that” and x and y matter, and on some level so do you, else we would not be at this point in our discussion. But there’s a greater truth, at least as I see it, behind all these specific interpretive activities, a truth that informs and drives the creation of novels and plays and stories and poems and essays and memoirs even when (as is usually the case) writers aren’t aware of it. I’ve mentioned it before and have employed it throughout, so it’s no very great secret. Moreover, it’s not my personal invention or discovery, so I’m not looking for credit here, but it needs saying again, so here it is: there’s only one story.

  p. 186 One story. Everywhere. Always. Wherever anyone puts pen to paper or hands to keyboard or fingers to lute string or quill to papyrus. They all take from and in return give to the same story, ever since Snorgg got back to the cave and told Ongk about the mastodon that got away. Norse sagas, Samoan creation stories, Gravity’s Rainbow, The Tale of Genji, Hamlet, last year’s graduation speech, last week’s Dave Barry column, On the Road and Road to Rio and “The Road Not Taken.” One story.

  What’s it about?

  That’s probably the best question you’ll ever ask, and I apologize for responding with a really lame answer: I don’t know. It’s not about anything. It’s about everything. It’s not about something the way an elegy is about the death of a young friend, for instance, or the way The Maltese Falcon is about solving the mystery of the fat man and the black bird. It’s about everything that anyone wants to write about. I suppose what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human. I mean, what else is there? When Stephen Hawking writes A Brief History of Time, what is he doing except telling us what home is like, describing the place where we live? You see, being human takes in just about everything, since we want to know about space and time and this world and the next, questions I’m pretty sure none of my English setters have ever really pondered. Mostly, though, we’re interested in ourselves in space or time, in the world. So what our poets and storytellers do for us—drag a rock up to the fire, have a seat, listen to this one—is explain us-and-the-world, or us-in-the-world.

  Do writers know this? Do they think about it?

  a. Good heavens, no.

  b. Absolutely, yes.

  c. Let me try again.

  p. 187 On one level, everyone who writes anything knows that pure originality is impossible. Everywhere you look, the ground is already camped on. So you sigh and pitch your tent where you can, knowing someone else has been there before. Think of it this way: can you use a word no one else has ever used? Only if you’re Shakespeare or Joyce and coin words, but even they mostly use the same ones as the rest of us. Can you put together a combination of words that is absolutely unique? Maybe, occasionally, but you can’t be sure. So too with stories. John Barth discusses an Egyptian papyrus complaining that all the stories have been told and that therefore nothing remains for the contemporary writer but to retell them. That papyrus describing the postmodern condition is forty-five hundred years old. This is not a terrible thing, though. Writers notice all the time that their characters resemble somebody—Persephone, Pip, Long John Silver, La Belle Dame sans Merci—and they go with it. What happens if the writer is good is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers. So that’s one answer.

  But here’s another. Writers also have to practice a kind of amnesia when they sit down or (like Thomas Wolfe, who was very tall and wrote on top of the refrigerator—really) stand up to write. The downside of the weight of millennia of accumulated practice of any activity is that it’s very . . . heavy. I once psyched out a teammate in an over-thirty men’s basketball league quite by accident. We were practicing free throws p. 188 before a game when something occurred to me, and like an idiot I couldn’t keep it to myself. “Lee, have you ever considered,” I asked, “how many things can go wrong when you shoot a free throw?” He literally stopped in mid-shot to offer his view. “Damn you,” he said. “Now I won’t make one all night.” He was right. Had I known I could have that kind of effect, I’d have warmed up with the other team. Now consider Lee’s problem if he had to consider not merely all the biomechanics of shooting a basketball but the whole history of free-throw shooting. You know, not too much like Lenny Wilkins, a bit of Dave Bing, some of Rick Barry before he switched to the two-handed underhand shot, plenty of Larry Bird (but don’t plagiarize him outright), none at all of Wilt Chamberlain. What are the chances any of us would ever make a free throw? And basketball only dates back about one century. Now consider trying to write a lyric poem, with everyone from Sappho to Tennyson to Frost to Plath to Verlaine to Li Po looking over your shoulder. That’s a lot of hot breath on the back of your neck. So, amnesia. When the writer gets to work, she has to shut out the voices and write what she writes, say what she has to say. What the unremembering trick does is clear out this history from the front of her mind so her own poem can come in. While she may never, or very rarely, think at all about these matters consciously, she’s been reading poetry since she was six, when Aunt Tillie gave her Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, burns through a couple of volumes of poetry a week, has read most of Wallace Stevens six or seven times. In other words, the history of poetry never leaves her. It’s always present, a gigantic subconscious database of poetry (and fiction, since she’s read that, too).

  You know by now I like to keep things fairly simple. I’m no fan of the latest French theory or of jargon of any stripe, but sometimes we really can’t do without it. What I’m talking about here involves a couple of concepts we need to consider. p. 189 The first, as I mentioned a few chapters back, is intertextuality. This highly ungainly word denoting a most useful notion comes to us from the great Russian formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who limits it pretty much to fiction, but I think I’ll follow the example of T. S. Eliot, who, being a poet, saw that it operates throughout the realms of literature. The basic premise of intertextuality is really pretty simple: everything’s connected. In other words, anything you write is connected to other written things. Sometimes writers are more up front about that than others, openly showing, as John Fowles does in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, that he’s drawing on the tradition of the Victorian novel, and on the works of Thomas Hardy and Henry James in particular. At one point Fowles writes an especially Jamesian sentence, full of embedded clauses, false starts, delayed effects, until, having thoroughly and delightfully aped the master, he declares, “But I must not ape the master.” We get the joke, and the punch line makes the parody better than if he’d pretended he was up to nothing very special, since it says with a wink that we’re in on the whole thing,
that we knew all along.

  Other writers pretend their work is completely their own, untutored, immediate, unaffected. Mark Twain claimed never to have read a book, yet his personal library ran to something over three thousand volumes. You can’t write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) without being familiar with Arthurian romances. Jack Kerouac presents himself as a free spirit performing automatic writing, but there’s a lot of evidence that this Ivy Leaguer (Columbia) did a lot of revising and polishing—and reading of quest tales—before his manuscript of On the Road (1957) got typed on one long roll of paper. In each case, their work interacts with other works. And those works with others. The result is a sort of World Wide Web of writing. Your novel may contain echoes or refutations of novels or poems you’ve never read.

  p. 190 Think of intertextuality in terms of movie westerns. You’re writing your first western; good for you. What’s it about? A big showdown? High Noon. A gunslinger who retires? Shane. A lonely outpost during an uprising? Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—the woods are full of ’em. Cattle drive? Red River. Does it involve, by any chance, a stagecoach?

  No, wait, I wasn’t thinking about any of them.

  Doesn’t matter. Your movie will. Here’s the thing: you can’t avoid them, since even avoidance is a form of interaction. It’s simply impossible to write or direct in a vacuum. The movies you have seen were created by men and women who had seen others, and so on, until every movie connects with every other movie ever made. If you’ve seen Indiana Jones being dragged behind a truck by his whip, then you’ve been touched by The Cisco Kid (1931), even though there’s a strong chance you’ve never seen The Cisco Kid itself. Every western has a little bit of other westerns in it, whether it knows it or not. Let’s take the most basic element, the hero. Will your hero talk a lot or not? If not, then he’s in the tradition of Gary Cooper and John Wayne and (later) Clint Eastwood. If he does speak, just talks his fool head right off, then he’s like James Garner and those revisionist films of the sixties and seventies. Or maybe you have two, one talker and one silent type—Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Your guy is going to have a certain amount of dialogue, and whatever type you decide on, audiences are going to hear echoes of some prior film, whether you think those echoes are there or not. And that, dear friends, is intertextuality.