psychotherapy:
Years ago, when I was teaching in the legendary English Department at SUNY/Buffalo, one of our poets, Jerry Maguire,convoked a group to read poems. Jerry’s idea was to bring poets and critics together in order to compare their readings.
What happened surprised me, at least, and, I think, just about everybody in the group. It turned out that poets and critics read poems quite differently.
The critics concerned themselves with things like repetitions and contrasts of themes and meanings. The poets, however, paid attention to repetitions and contrasts of vowels and consonants, rhythmic patterns, and all kinds of features of the sound of the poems. To be sure, there was a certain amount of overlap, but nevertheless, the poets and the critics were reading poems quite differently.
Now, it turns out, they may have been using different systems in their brains. Kenneth Heilman, a neuropsychologist at the University of Florida, has a fine paper setting out the “information-processing approach” to the various aphasias. He lists eleven different aphasias, and his paper uses the kind of block diagrams computer programmers use to distinguish and interrelate them…
This reminds me of a topic that I occasionally remember.
I was reading Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee for a course and was assigned the task of leading a discussion about the book based on an article of my choice. I don’t remember the named of the article or the exact phrase the author used, but I was intrigued because it offered a reading that didn’t rely on allegory (as a lot of post-colonial lit does…). Rather, the writer posited that our impulse to allegorize diminished the meaning of the text.
Picking it because I thought it ~scandalous~, I imagined that it would be fun to stir things up in my class a bit. We were left with the question of what the text means if we are to resist allegory. I didn’t feel like I was in too deep then, but now I’m mostly certain that I definitely was treading in uncharted waters. I’ve read The Pleasure of the Text and “Against Interpretation” which seem vaguely related to this issue, but even now I feel unsure.
I decided that the easiest section to try reading “against allegory” would be the part where the commissioner of the colony has sex with/rapes the mute, one-legged “barbarian” girl. For me, if I couldn’t allegorize and interpret, I thought the “next best thing” (because, I am a critic) would be to focus on what I can only describe now as the tactility of the words. There is more than one way to say everything, so why this word, I asked. Without meaning, a word is just letters and sounds. I can’t remember any particular phrase or passage here, but I think there were descriptions of the comissioner’s and the barbarian girl’s bodies….
But to my original point, the Psych Today article reminds me of that day in class try to read like a “poet” as a “critic.” In my line of study, I always want to know what it means, but there is some value in the actual words too.
But then again, it’s possible that I don’t get it at all.
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