by VorJack
Back when I was an undergrad, I used to sit around the cafeteria table and listen to my friends discuss the latest fantasy novels. Robert Jordan was just hitting his stride about that time, and his Wheel of Time series was a popular topic. My friends would obsess about the characters, work out their genealogies, ponder the themes and subplots and try to ferret out all the hidden connections in the work.
Problem is, I don’t think many of those ideas were put there by Robert Jordan. I always had the nagging feeling that my friends were putting more effort into the books than Jordan himself. Later on I learned that many genre authors leave things intentionally vague. It allows them to stay flexible rather than being pinned down by things they’d previously written. The hints and mysteries were there so that Robert Jordan, Tad Williams and Mercedes Lackey could keep cranking out the books without getting bogged down.
Synthetic Scholarship
There are some truly impressive examples of people working out the details and finding hidden meanings to works, only to be proven completely wrong. The most famous example was Henry Littlefield’s theory that the Wizard of Oz is a parable of American populism and the silver standard. It’s a really impressive argument, loaded with tons of connections between populist ideas and symbolic representations within the work. It’s also wrong, as anyone who knew L. Frank Baum’s political leanings would realize.
A more modern example is the SNES game Chrono Trigger, a favorite of mine from back in the day. It’s a classic among video games, and it spawned the Chrono Testament theory. Based on the name, you can probably guess that it’s composed of biblical symbolism and themes supposedly woven into the game’s story. This theory should have died when it was revealed that none of the game’s creators were Christian, but it still seems to attract some attention.
And of course there’s the ever popular claim among some Christians that the entire Old Testament points to Jesus Christ. The original scribes would likely disagree, and millions of modern Jews live and read the Tanakh without accepting Jesus’ messianic claims.
Unanswerable Questions
Pullquote: Is each pattern equally valid, or is the creator’s pattern the only accurate solution?
Does it matter that these meanings aren’t original? What does it signify when you find a meaning or an idea in a work, but the creator did not put it there? Is the meaning not “real”? Imagine a connect-the-dots puzzle, where you find a way to make a Celtic knot-work design when the author intended it to be a giraffe. Is each pattern equally valid, or is the creator’s pattern the only accurate solution?
S.T. Joshi, a scholar of horror fiction, once disagreed with Shirley Jackson’s interpretation of her own story, “The Lottery.” Problem is, Joshi’s suggestion made more sense than Jackson’s did. In that situation, who do we side with?
I don’t have a solution to these problems of meaning, but I do have an observation and a warning. It seems to me that we’re actually too good at finding patterns. We find connections that do not exist and hidden meanings that were never intended. We are even more capable of getting carried away by our discoveries. I think that we should be cautious when we find ourselves caught up in the “real” meaning of a work — and this applies to Christians who are convinced they have the “proper understanding” of the Bible, and to atheist scholars who believe they’ve uncovered the fictional underpinnings of a gospel story.
Being interested in writing fiction for a living, this topic is of interest to me. When you’re writing a story, rarely do you think about the connections between things, much less the hidden meaning behind each one. If two characters connect in a way that is reminiscent of Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan, 99 times out of 100, it’s entirely coincidental, even for works of fiction made after the movie. After all, no one can accurately guess what connections people will make when they read something. There’s also only so many ways things can happen in fiction, and you’re bound to get some overlap that leads to unintentional meanings and connections.
For instance, the whole death and rebirth plot is just a powerful plot to have. It has nothing to do with knowledge of the Bible. I don’t think JRR Tolkien was thinking about Jesus when he made the great leader Gandalf die and come back. He was most likely thinking about how powerful it’d be to have such an important character die then come back as a surprise, and in a pivotal moment too, no less.
As for the interpretations of people’s work, while the creator can certainly clarify things, it’s ultimately up to the reader to draw meaning from what they’ve read. One thing I’ve learned from writing essays about fiction is that, as long as you have enough evidence in the text to support your stance it can be correct, even in the face of contradictory stances, because it can be supported by the text. It’s the writer’s job to clarify their meaning in the text as much as they can if they want people to only see their meaning and nothing else.
I very much agree with you. Your final claim is something I found bitterly did not wash in high school English, but it could be no other way.
As The Lord of the Rings was explicitly intended to be at least partially a Christian metaphor (it was also a new British mythology, among other things), I suspect you may have chosen a poor example.
I still got the idea across so the example is fine.
Tolkien vigorously denied that it was a Christian metaphor, and he was a harsh critic of the obvious metaphor in the work of C.S. Lewis.
Yes. Tolkien thought that allegory was the author forcing meaning on the reader, instead of letting the reader do their own thinking. LotR is kind of generally Christian in that there is an ultimate good versus an ultimate evil, and Tolkien himself was very religious, but it was explicitly not intended to be a Christian allegory.
I got in so many arguments with my first year English professor in college over this exact issue! It is a fine line when interpreting literature, in that sometimes you view the work in the way the author did not intend. I think it ties in with the quote, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I am also interested in fiction writing, and I think that part of being a writer means that you draw not just from your imagination, but your experiences. And if you are also an avid reader, others ideas are bound to have an impact on your work in ways you don’t see.
At the same time, I think there is such a thing as going overboard with interpretation as well, ie. Bible Codes.
“Pareidolia: Pareidolia (pronounced /pærɪˈdoʊliə/) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.”
Or maybe seeing the face of Jeebus in a grilled cheese.
I think this right here is the foundation of, or at the very least a significant catalyst for, all religions, and most so-called supernatural phenomena that don’t have obvious scientific explanations (like the Northern Lights or Ocean Phosphorescence).
You beat me to it. This was my first thought as well. Especially when you have people that go off the deep end, and find these hidden codes that spell out all sorts of things.
To be clear, what I mean is wee find or see what we want to find or see, and sometimes our imagination just runs wild.
All things happen in Fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of Five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5.
The Law of Fives is never wrong.
HERETIC! It’s the Law of Threes! Fives are an unrecognized offshoot of the Law of Threes!
:P
You’re both heretics … Prime numbers are the Devil’s work!
I think you’re right. Years ago, when I was in college, I remember talking to a friend of mine who was an artist. She told me that people would read all kinds of meanings into her work – assuming that she (the artist) put them there, but she didn’t. People see connections that don’t exist, and think it’s clear that the artist intentionally put them there. Even back then, I remember thinking how her experience mirrored the way religious people read meanings into texts and into events in the world around them.
I’ve pointed this out to Chirstians before, if you didn’t have 2000 years of Biblical scholarship telling us how to see Jesus in the OT, no one would see it, at least not in the scale that they claim.
I need to not post comments in the morning without my glasses. It sure looked like “Christians” ;-)
*passes a cup of coffee to you*
Anyone who’s ever written knows (or should know) this.
I’m a published writer (shush I published it! Who cares if it was an epic fail!) and it’s always amused me to see how people read the things I write and… well, never thought of it.
My short story was a fable about a horse who is born weak and fragile; he is bullied in his foalhood by other foals and grows to be an antisocial bastard of a stallion; he is then chased and captured by humans who torture him (a human, mainly), is raced, loses, and eventually gains freedom.
I wrote it when I was nine.
To anyone who’s seen or read The Silver Brumby or The Black Stallion, it’s a pretty straightforward plot. Thing is, both stories are utterly unknown over here and so – people who’ve read it read all kinds of meanings. I’ve even had one person tell me it’s about how winning sometimes is a bad thing (because the colt loses the big race and because of it manages to get free, which he wouldn’t have if he’d won). Nah, really, nine-year-old me was just sick of seeing characters always win and be the best on everything.
It’s awesome. It does wonders for the writer’s ego to see people digging through the text, trying to find the hidden connections.
It seems to me that we’re actually too good at finding patterns. We find connections that do not exist and hidden meanings that were never intended. We are even more capable of getting carried away by our discoveries. I think that we should be cautious when we find ourselves caught up in the “real” meaning of a work — and this applies to Christians who are convinced they have the “proper understanding” of the Bible, and to atheist scholars who believe they’ve uncovered the fictional underpinnings of a gospel story.
We’re pattern finding machines. Our brains have been tuned to find patterns – probably as a survival mechanism back when the guy who could spot the signs of a lion in the woods was more likely to survive than the guy who couldn’t. We find a lot of false positives, but that’s just how the brain is tuned – seeing something that isn’t there is in the long run better for survival than NOT seeing things that ARE there. And that’s actually been quite good for the species as a whole – art, science, technology, philosophy – all of these are the result of our pattern finding brains.
And “finding hidden meanings that were never intended” is actually not a bad thing – as long as we realize that those hidden meanings that we’ve found are pointers to things about our own selves and our own psychology and probably aren’t grand sweeping “Truths” with a capital-T. Despite my atheism I still enjoy reading certain books of the Bible for those hidden meanings that speak to me – Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, Jonah, Job, Mark – as with any great book when I read them, I pick up more than the author intended because I bring my own experiences into the reading. The way I understand those books probably says more about me than it does about authorial intent, especially given that I have little way of knowing what the intent of each of those authors was except from what I read into the text.
I think it’s a delicious irony that selection for pattern recognition has resulted humans who refuse to recognize evolution.
This search for ways to apply extraneous meanings is exactly why I hated all my high school English classes. I would just sit there the whole class thinking, “…or maybe it’s just a story“.
Ditto.
This. Over and over again.
There is a lot of literature on the fact that in emergency situations, people search for patterns they recognize and behave as they did last time they saw the same pattern. Even if that pattern is not there, people will search for clues to “find” it. Usually, that means we search for patterns that mean ‘normalcy’ for us; things that make us comfortable. This is why people don’t evacuate – every other time there was a storm, people think “I was fine right here at home and this storm seems just like the last one.” Emergency responders, planners, and managers know very difficult to change patterned behavior in humans.
Chrono Trigger FTW!
One of the best RPGs of all time…
Years ago I used to do a lot of “writing” (really, it was more like story-direction) for a live roleplaying group. I was consistently astonished at the connections people were able to discern between things that I had come up with, but quite honestly, had never occurred to me. I considered it a compliment that people were interested in it and invested enough to dig these things out of what I’d come up with.
Of course, I played on that, too. Sometimes I ended up confirming the connection in some later event. At other times, I purposely worked around it so as to come up with something they didn’t expect. I guess you could call that “devious” or something, but really, I had no choice, if I were to keep things interesting and unpredictable, yet still keep everyone involved and happy by occasionally confirming some of their interpretations and predictions.
The assumptions people make about things … and further, assumptions about their meaning, based on the assumptions people make about it … can and do interfere with understanding things. There are some mysteries that have yet to be solved, and the reason they have not, may well be related to the assumptions people have made about them. For example, the Phaistos Disc has not yet been deciphered. Most attempts at making sense of it, to date, have assumed its content to be language of some sort. This may well be the case … but we don’t actually know that. It might contain some other kind of information, such as ritual instruction, or calendrical data (which may or may not be directly related to a language), or a mnemonic device (wherein the symbols “trigger” other information), or perhaps even a map (geographic, or astronomical), or any number of other things.
At any rate, it is human nature to assume that something which appears to have meaning, actually does have meaning … and once one has decided that, it’s not that far of a leap for people to assume they know what its meaning must be. Unfortunately they’re not always in a position to really know either that the thing has any meaning at all, or that if it does, the meaning they’ve discerned is the correct one.
Ooh, ooh, may I?
Maybe it’s because the Creator put it there!
[/snark]
By the way, me, two, or three, or four about literature classes in high school. When the teacher finally revealed the true meaning, my unuttered reaction was almost always, “How do you know?”
I think it’s more a case of consumers of art being naive about the process of making art. If they’re not observing patterns in the art itself, they are taking a cue from what most average people know off-hand about art. They may or may not be over-estimating their own intellect.
1. Artists do make deliberate choices.
2. People do not only recognize patterns, but also are mystified by strong coincidences, which are just details that matter to them. These details and the time you noticed them may seem themselves divine message or just a miscalculated connection between the artist and the consumer.
3. Sometimes these details do matter as intended by the artist. Sometimes, they know you are dumb and just want to make money. Not always, but something in this category.
4. Most of us are trained at school in the appreciation of intellectually analyzing books, their themes and symbolism, etc. Other art as well.
5. Art is created out of nothing – perhaps over-analysis of this very fact can create even in the secular population the idea that “good” art, art that touches you must have placed every effect as a perfect detail, just like, uh, the earth. [My idea here is that when people claim god made the earth in every detail, like say, bananas, they are looking for harmony and ignoring disharmonious things]. In art, whatever makes you receive the thing seems intentional, and able to ignore disharmony, perhaps the bigger picture or the artist’s actual intention. Likewise, the artist is also human and is processing their art through their lens – they are not a magician, not everyone has the same life experience as another, so their coincidences to you seem meaningful, therefore intentional, based on your own priorities. Sometimes they match and sometimes not.
6. Sometimes, artists claim supernatural events created the art. Not all artists claim this or some artists for every piece that they’ve worked on. I have felt this momentum myself. It feels pretty intense. Sometimes in interview, an artist may reveal that some pieces were created through them from some other source. When you like something, it might be natural to assume all art is essentially created this way, and no matter the artist’s intention, the “real” message still gets through, because you perceive it.
7. If you are an artist yourself, you may think you’re deep. You might know and appreciate the process you go through, so art that appeals to you might be assumed to be also as deep, as well thought out. In general, people are looking for evidence that someone else agrees with what’s uppermost in their mind. That’s when they find what they are looking for, because it’s everywhere. How many, when they are new in a relationship, only hear the love songs on the radio? Same when you just broke up.
8. Especially where fantasy occurs (and all books are fantasy of a sort), I think this appeals to people on the level that they are trying to solve a mystery. What that thing “really” means. If it is a scarecrow with no brain, what is he “really.” Once you’ve sorted all that out, and he has several counterparts for other brain-like elements, you’ve detected a pattern. They are not real creatures, so they must assemble a pattern of something.
8a. I forget what essay I read, here probably, that was written for one cause but was appropriated for another cause, or could apply to any bugbear. “Horton Hears A Who” is a good example of this. If you are moralizing something, you can find a moralizing story and spin it to sell anyone, and think you have cracked a code implied heavily by the artist or author. “Puff the Magic Dragon” is another popular example, claimed to mean nothing but a boy and his imaginary friend, who grew out of it eventually, but nearly universally believed to “really” be about the youth culture and how pot sets your mind free, and the dangers of conforming to the establishment. By the same token, religious people read too much into some books and ban them because they seem to encourage satanism. They might ban their kids from watching “Sesame Street” because there’s a vampire and they heard Bert and Ernie were gay.
I guess in summary, pseudo-deep? If I claim to understand the “real” message, I’m deeper than you who only read it for fun. I’m intellectualizing something because art is only properly appreciated by intellectuals. Not just the realm of religious paranoiacs who don’t want their children to accidentally read into the hidden messages, which they aren’t yet intellectual enough (maybe?) to appreciate.
In even more summary, I think humans are too smart and wasting a lot of intellect on trivialities. Maybe. I do it, so it must be universal! It’s a source of enjoyment to not just like art, but to use our brains at it, and a source for the artist to not just let a thought pass, but to create art about it, in a great sense, to study it at length and work it over. To appreciate art is to not just go, “yeah, like it,” but to analyze the process, to study it at length, to be along the whole ride with the artist, to really dive in and “get it,” whether or not you get it or in fact, miss it.
Never thought about it like this before, very good point though. I guess we should all think a little more while we try to fit the pieces together and no one should think they know it all.
-Billy
P.S – It was 100% grammatically correct :P
> It seems to me that we’re actually too good at finding patterns.
Natural selection favors a tendency to find patterns whether or not they exist. When a primitive man noticed the pattern that certain noises mean a hungy animal is near… or that people who ate a certain berry tended to die… that skill was quite useful in helping him survive and pass on his DNA. Too little pattern-finding is a big problem.
Too much pattern-finding, on the other hand, has less serious consequences. A primitive man believes dancing in a certain way bring rain, even though in fact there’s no corrolation. So he ends up dancing unnecessarily. Excessive dancing has its drawbacks, but it will hardly prevent one from living and procreating.
Oh, yeah, don’t forget the best example. Put on The Wizard of Oz without the sound, and just when the MGM lion roars, start playing Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” The connection is just astounding. I know intellectually that the pattern shared by the two works is mind-created. And yet when Roger Waters sings “Who knows which is which, and who is who…” at exactly the time when the Good Witch and Bad Witch meet… your jaw’s gotta drop.
I keep meaning to do that.
But after the requisite preparation, my burning desire to do this suddenly dissolves into a burning need for Doritos.
Her name is Dorothy.
FWIW I found this article on the New York Times Web site, on the topic of what drives people to find patterns and meaning in gibberish: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health/06mind.html
Damn! I just came here to post the same article. In the research described in this article though, the subjects weren’t exactly finding patterns in gibberish – it says, “In fact the letters were related, in a very subtle way, with some more likely to appear before or after others.” The results showed a significant improvement in ability to detect patterns that were actually there, for people who had previously been told a nonsensical story over those who heard a story that made sense. What would be interesting would be for them to follow this with another experiement where the letter strings truly are gibberish, and try to find out what makes people see patterns that aren’t there.
Good analysis. Reminds me of a book club analysis of a novel I wrote. They asked me if the title character was a Christ representation. I had never thought of him like that, but I answered them that I could understand how they came up with the notion and I could see some Christ-like characteristics in the character. He was, after all: young, male, sage, likable, and was killed. Of course, he was also a stoner, a poet, very much into women, killed in a completely random, wrong place-wrong time manner, and in my mind when I wrote the book, was really the manifestation of the protagonist’s alter ego, as well as (simply and un-symbolically) his brother and a nice source of conflict.
And that’s just from an insignificant little novel.