When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
About five years ago, the online world of literary criticism (see: People Who Thing ‘Literary Criticism’ Means ‘Literary Disparagement’ and Are Mad They Had to Study English at School) were all at once taken by the sentence, “The curtains are blue.” What could that possibly mean? Melancholy? Innocence? Fear? No, it means none of those things, because it means that the curtains are blue. Maybe it’s the author’s favorite color. Maybe it’s the color of the first thing they saw when they looked up from the story. (I can see some of you clicking ‘Back’ now, so please bear with me.)
Robert Frost once admitted that The Road Not Taken was not written with a message about conformity or individualism in mind. It was, in fact, quite literal: he and his friend, Edward Thomas, frequently went for walks in the woods, and every time they happened upon a crossroads, Thomas insisted that they take the more overgrown path, and invariably regretted it. Frost wrote the poem primarily as a joke, meant to make fun of Thomas’ “crying over what might have been.”
This isn’t news to many people, being one of the most often-quoted examples of the argument that literature isn’t as “deep” as critics make it out to be, and that symbolism and esoterica are made up by English teachers to find meaning where there isn’t any.
I am now going to make a very bold claim: finding meaning where there isn’t any is the very point of literature.
The words you are reading right now, the words I am writing, they didn’t always mean something. Once upon a time, someone decided that letters have sounds, and their sounds have meanings. Once upon a time, someone gave words definition. Once upon a time, a little girl pressed her palm to a cave wall, and tens of thousands of years later, we found it and concluded that in this cave, there was life.
Intention, in the end, means very little, and what is conveyed means so much more. The matter behind a work of art is determined by the audience. They say that how we interpret a piece of literature reveals us more than it does the artist. And they are right.
When Thomas first read Frost’s poem, he didn’t get the joke. He called it brilliant. Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference. Maybe this was never meant to muse upon how easy it is to take the worn, common road, and how daring it is to take the other. Maybe this was never about taking a risk and choosing to walk away from the crowd. But maybe that doesn’t matter. Not when a thirteen-year-old traces these words with a reverent finger and makes up her mind to do something different. Not when a classroom quietens as everybody takes a moment to wonder which road they would have picked, certain it would have been the second, knowing, dreading, that it would have been the first.
Literature is not the thought that goes into the words, or the ink that first pens them. It is the dust that settles over them, the smudges and the tears and the dogeared pages. A book gets thicker every time you read it. A poem doesn’t mean anything until you dig into its marrow and squeeze out what blood you can.
And that’s what we have always done — we see a rose and name it ‘love’. We look up at the night sky and draw pictures among the stars and call them constellations. We draw lines on a map and fight wars over them, and when we see the sunlight dappled beneath a tree, we call the clouds the heavens.
There is no meaning, not in anything. There never was. So we find our own.