“Now, you can say your
Daddy is right and the other little child’s Daddy is wrong, but the universe is
an awfully big place. There is room enough for an awful lot of people to be
right about things and still not agree.” – Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan
A photograph on my Twitter feed caught my eye last week, of
a big block-lettered sculpture underneath the Brooklyn Bridge that says,
ostensibly in all caps, “OY.” Or, maybe it says “YO,” depending on where you’re
standing and who you’re talking to. The simple room for interpretation between
two letters was a catalyst for the
story in The New York Times that I read, under the headline “Oy or Yo?
Sculpture With Something to Say Lands at Brooklyn Bridge.” That something, of
course, is open for debate.
According to the story, if you’re standing in Manhattan you
will read an emphatic “yo,” but if you’re in Brooklyn, it’s obviously “oy.” The
artist, Deborah Kass, was said to be “enthusiastic about both words” and
refused to say whether one view of the sculpture is the definitive or correct
one: “It’s an open-ended question that people need to answer for themselves.”
The sculpture, of course, reminds me of a literary text.
I’ll articulate my point with an example: take the Vonnegut book quoted above
(my personal favorite book of all time, as an aside). John might approach it with a Marxist lens,
thereby reading Malachi Constant as a force of exploitation whose
transformation is a reversal of those most basic qualities. Paul might pick up
on the mother motif and apply the psychoanalytic lens, obviously invoking
Oedipus along the way. And George can look at the war between human-Martians
and human-Earthlings and concoct a race metaphor, perhaps utilizing the
references to Native Americans sprinkled intermittently to support a third
thesis of his own.
All three perspectives are have support in the text and can
certainly be related to other scholarship; none of them, at the end of the day,
can be justifiably be called more objectively right or wrong than another. It
should be clear by now that I find the deconstructionist theories of literature
to be the most logical and intuitively appealing – and therein lays a
potentially devastating problem.
If I am to accept that dueling interpretations are going to
be as equally right (assuming the evidence is just as strong in each case) then
I am accepting that no interpretation is the most right; if no interpretation is the most right, then what stake
is there in studying literature? Forget about being right – what’s stopping all
of us from being equally wrong? What meaning can be derived from a critical
analysis, if it has to be taken with an asterisk “but by the way, this is just how I sees it”? Is the pissing
contest of literary study really just pissing in the wind? What other questions
can I ask right now to advance your anxious existential crisis?
I can’t decide whether or not I’m approaching this topic
with the right set of assumptions or not, as perhaps the notion of “being right”
is ultimately incompatible with literary studies, or the contest is not a
contest at all. Even if it is hard to swallow, maybe we have to admit that we
will all just end up standing from different boroughs, peering upon the same
object and having something else looking back depending on where we stand;
maybe all of our Daddies are just as right as everybody else’s, too.
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