Edgar Allan Poe. I am Edgar Allan Poe, Professor of Artistic Interpretation at Oxford University’s Faculty of Arts and Letters. I am here talking to you about my new article “The Art of Interpretation: On the Role of Literary Theory in Artistic Creation.”
Your first article was “The Poetic Principle,” which so many critics compare to your latest one. You have said that the two pieces are completely different from each other. Could you explain that difference?
Sure. “The Poetic Principle” addresses the question of whether there is an ideal way to read a text, an approach that will make one enjoy it most, while my latest article asks more generally what the role of literary theory should be when creating art.
What do you mean by “art”?
I mean any artistic object or experience that has been created to evoke a response in an audience — a poem, novel, essay, play, painting, film, sculpture, dance performance, song…. Basically any artwork made with the intention of communicating something to an audience.
My article is mainly concerned with literary theory and criticism but also applies to artworks where interpretation is central: film studies and music theory come immediately to mind as obvious examples.
You write that critics who want readers to interpret
In the study of literature, a “close reading” is a careful analysis of a passage, a chapter, or an entire work, in order to understand it on its own terms. But how can one ever “closely” read a work as innovative and complex as Poe’s? How can one hope to untangle the many strands of meaning that he has woven into his stories?
[[Poe: The Art of Interpretation]] explores these questions through the lens of Poe’s only novel, [[The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket]]. Noted Poe scholar and [[professor]] [[Edgar Allen Poe]], along with other noted scholars, offers his insights into the narrative by carefully examining particular passages. These close readings reveal that Poe was not only a masterful artist but also an inscrutable riddler whose works reward careful attention and repeated rereading.
But the reason for this is that Poe, a professor at Oxford, is the most widely misunderstood writer in the English language. Most of his stories are not about murder or lunacy or supernatural doings. They are about art. In fact, Poe invented the literary-critical movement that today we call deconstructionism. He was doing so 150 years before Derrida and de Man, and he did it far better than they did because he knew how to be clear as well as profound, whereas they just knew how to be profound.
Art is a kind of power. It can’t literally change reality; no one will ever be able to draw a stick figure and make it come alive. But art can change your perceptions of reality, and thereby change what you think is possible or impossible, wise or foolish, valuable or worthless. Art can’t literally make you rich or make you a leader, but it can give you an appetite for the sort of thing that makes you rich or a leader.
Art is therefore dangerous because it changes what people want. And in some ways what people want isn’t even that much under their control; we all have appetites we don’t know much about. This is why some people are suspicious of artists: they worry that artists might
I asked Poe if he was worried about the future of his art. “Yes,” he said, “I have been concerned about that for many years. I have been concerned about the future of all art. The great difficulty which confronts us is how to interpret the work of an artist. You see, interpretation is a very dangerous thing, because it can be done in two ways: either actively or passively. And both ways can be equally destructive to the art being interpreted.”
“But,” I protested, “surely there is some middle ground? Some reasonable way to interpret another person’s work?”
Poe smiled sadly. “Of course there is a reasonable way,” he said. “The reasonable way is to interpret the work in line with what you think it ought to say.”
It was the year of the Exposition, you see. I had just returned from a tour abroad and my name was on everyone’s lips. This woman, this Miss Herring… she said she was a student at Oxford University, and that she’d heard of me. She wanted to paint me — to capture my likeness, as she put it. I didn’t give much thought to it at first; though I kept an open mind on the subject.
I went to her studio; her home, really. It was filled with portraits, mainly of herself but some of others as well. Some were good and some were not, but they seemed all alike in their self-possession. She asked me to sit for her portrait — to lie down on a chaise longue in the parlor and hold still while she worked on my face with a pencil and some paper. She said the pose would help her see things more clearly: she wanted to capture my essence in this pose, so that when people looked upon my portrait they’d know what sort of man I was immediately.
Her name was Miss Herring; that much is certain — or as certain as such things can be when memories are concerned — but other details are harder to come by: how old
I would say that one of the most important rules of writing is to be as clear and specific as possible. This is not to say that you should avoid being metaphorical or ambiguous, but that you should do so intentionally and with a purpose. Ambiguity can be an interesting tool for creating meaning, but it should never be an end in itself.
I’m personally very much interested in art that is built upon a structure of ambiguity, but I also believe that a project like this will only succeed if the ambiguity is resolved in some way: if it’s not just allowed to linger in the air, but rather comes together at the end.
My own work can easily be described as “sad” or “depressing”, but this is because my writing aims to confront difficult or unpleasant realities head-on. I think it’s better to acknowledge the problems we face, rather than try to sweep them under the rug or ignore them altogether.
Why do you think that “The Raven” is such a memorable poem? One reason, I suppose, is the fact that it’s so short. It can be memorized; it can be quoted from. Another is that the story of the poem is so powerful: a man and a woman who are deeply in love with each other, but who are unable to express their feelings for each other because of some terrible event in their past. There’s something tragic about that, and it forces the reader to imagine how he or she would feel if he or she were in the same situation. Do you see what I’m getting at?
The poem is perfectly constructed to draw people in and to force them to make an emotional connection with what they’ve read. And people do seem to feel a deep attachment to it. They want to find out what happens next, even though they know there’s nothing really happening. And they want to learn more about the lives of these two lovers. This desire leads them to seek out anything else written by Edgar Allen Poe, and perhaps even to read more poems that have some of the same elements as this one does—for example, stories about people who have become so consumed by an obsession that they’re willing to die for it. That’s
