Eco, Derrida, Burke, and Tompkins walk into a bar…*

*Inspired by The Pain You Seek

‍ ‍Authors can do whatever they want, but they always have a purpose.

My high school English teacher said this to our class one day. It was a challenge—go figure out what the author intended. But it also came with an unspoken warning—be careful, you can be wrong. We didn’t have free rein to just create any interpretation we wanted. It had to stay within the lines. Testing the boundaries of our budding literary analysis was the game.

During my early college classes devoted to teaching methods, I was assigned to do a sample lesson centered around interpreting a text. I remembered back to a lesson he taught us on the opening chapter of George Orwell’s novel 1984. The significance he teased out of seemingly simple imagery and word choice amazed me at the time, and I wanted to replicate parts of that joy of discovery, but I couldn't remember everything he said. So, I got in contact with him, and the conversation (as best I can remember) went something like this.

‍ ‍Me: “I really want to teach Chapter 1 of 1984 for my Intro to Methods class. What source did you use to come up with all of that really interesting analysis?”

‍ ‍Him: “Oh, I basically made all that up.”

I felt betrayed. If you made it all up, I thought, then how do you know it was right?

The alchemy of analyzing literature had not revealed itself to me yet. It wasn’t until later in my studies, before I stepped into the classroom as a teacher, that his confession—I made all that up—hit more like an emancipation. Eventually I gathered the tools to understand the intersection of how to read and interpret a text.

Umberto Eco gave me the author-centered theory that the writer’s text has a fixed meaning and there are limits to how it can be faithfully interpreted.

Jacques Derrida gave me the reader-centered theory that language is liberated from all fixed reference and can be freely assigned meaning once it is read.

Kenneth Burke gave me the theory that an author creates the message in response to their personal context, and the reader interprets it based on their personal context. He called them “terministic screens.” Sometimes they mesh, and other times they don’t.

Jane Tompkins gave me the theory that it isn’t just what a text means, it is what a text does for the reader that interacts with it—and its function can be different depending on the time period and the culture that reads it.

Armed with these complimentary and sometimes competing lenses, I set out to make my students discerning aficionados of literature. It was an approach that served me well and brought on enough interesting discussions to fill a career.

Later, when I handed an early draft of my upcoming novel The Pain You Seek to half a dozen beta-readers, I was interested to see how they would react to what I had intended and how they individually interpreted those aims. Would they understand the motivation for my protagonist Claire? Would she read as an authentic person? Was she sympathetic? Did the sympathy go only so far? Could they relate to her? (This last one produced some very interesting follow-ups….)

I got a variety of responses. Some I anticipated, some I did not. Some I had to carefully weigh if I wanted to make changes. Others could co-exist with the text even though Burke would say our terministic screens did not “mesh.”

What I discovered when writing the novel was that I was operating under two sets of rules. On the one hand, I built a career of believing that students needed to understand the intended themes behind any given piece of literature. Only after they could demonstrate that ability, could they riff on it—within reason. They had to stay faithful to the original to some degree. On the other hand, when I was writing I wanted to be Umberto Eco, but I needed to submit to the reality that there is a fair amount of Jacques Derrida out there as well. I needed to be comfortable with that.

It has been a wonderful challenge, one that has allowed me to practice what I taught for decades. I am excited to see what you think of Claire and the conflict in which she tangles herself once The Pain You Seek is released later this fall.