Douglas Bush:
https://bit.ly/2S2XTNR
Me To A Friend:
I missed the subtlety and complexity in Bush. The dilemma I read him to point to differs from the one you describe. I will say I skimmed over his examples of New Criticism gone awry but think I got his main points that include its excesses and its tendency to dismiss both scholarship and the specifics of a work’s context, including its times and the author too. And he proposed his own solution, which I noted twice, and seems obvious: we need both in judicious measure.
But you pose a false either or: scholarship as against simply reading the work as it presents itself to us in our time. I fail to see this binary.
For one, we need to understand a work as product of its time or we simply fail to understand it. A simple example of that is our need to read the glossary footnotes in Shakespeare to understand properly his use or language and what mores, idioms, conventions and folkways he may be specifically invoking.
And for two, good works span time. So that even if as we understand a work in relation to its time, we integrate that with our response to it given our own time.
Your binary raises a dilemma that doesn’t exist.
Theme is simply the ideation of what the work is about, what the artist intended as conveyed by the text, and, as the NC noted, once the work is out there, it may speak to us differently than what the author intended. Which is part of what it means when we use the metaphor of autonomy to describe the status of a work of art. The theme may be a moral, a specific idea, a revelation of some insight into certain types of characters, the nature of the world, or anything that a work gives rise to.
We don’t have the benefit of the canon for receiving the value of current works so we do the best we can without that aid.
There’s a distinction that must be made in relation to interpretation insofar as interpretation is the idea(s) binding the work. And my sense is that you conflate both sides of the distinction. And it is precisely what arises as a generalization from a reasonable reading of the work as to what it’s about, and which generalization is supportable from what is in the work as against ideas external to and often remote from the work that are imposed upon it.
That imposition has at least two springs:
one is simply a wild interpretation that the work can’t support, which is in effect imposing something on the work it can’t plausibly bear;
the other is, as noted, some kind of presupposition, an ist, an ism, an overarching theory of something or other, that the work is thought to illustrate.
My sense is you sometimes use the second half of the broad distinction I draw to argue that the first is mere chimera, a tissue of abstraction.
I think of good movies and novels by theme. It may not always come out because getting to theme is hard work that takes disciplined thinking and it’s easier to make off the cuff comments along the way. Short poems, like the ones I send my kids, are easier to come to thematically because they’re short.
In a nutshell, the inability to say what a work of literature is ultimately about is a failure ultimately to understand it. I don’t want to harp on the last few poems we argued over, but in all three of them I struggled with them till I could formulate what made them cohere, which is to say, articulate their themes.
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