There is always the danger of over-analysis coming between the reader and author, a danger of which O'Connor was keenly aware.
(Read her letter of March 28, 1961, to a professor of English who shared with O'Connor his students' interpretation of "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Her letter begins: "The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be." It ends: "Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it. My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock."
This is so true in my experience, I've just thrown my hands up after wasting three consecutive lunch hours trying to get any good perspective about the "Southern Gothic" overtones in the novels of William Faulkner.
The intelligent and hard working author whose name and book title shall best remain anonymous, went to extreme lengths to link our boy W F with the gothic implications of Freud and Jungian psychology and the Gothicism of Faust and Dickens: She draws a direct link between Gothicism and Surrealism, and she develops such thought provoking chapter titles as "Sanctuary: The Persecuted Maiden, or Vice Triumphant"
The book was a brilliant example and masterpiece of the sort of scholarly correctness which stuffs full the shelves of libraries all over the world: and a totally baffeling ball of baloney - one which I can't imagine even the most arcane of graduate students or literature buffs outside her own narrow clusterfuk of overly-educated cronies could comprehend and follow along for much longer than a three dollar cup of coffee. File 13! Forget the foot notes. Tell us a story, daddy!
No comments:
Post a Comment