In Defense of the Blue Curtains
I’m sure we’ve all seen the Tumblr post about the blue curtains: the one that said the curtains are blue, not because they represent the depression of the protagonist, but because the author chose a color at random or the protagonist’s favorite color is blue. The hallmark of a new take on literature, the “blue curtains post” takes literary criticism to the literal level.
There’s a problem here, and it’s not the creator of the blue curtains post. This phenomenon has touched the academic world as well. Scholars and internet dwellers alike write that readers assign arbitrary meanings to images and devices in literature to fulfill a need to create meaning where there is none. Naturally, the common claim is that the author did not intend the blue curtains to mean anything.
To get to the root of this issue, we must examine how literature is taught in the modern education system. We’ve all had those English teachers: the ones who assign annotations for a grade and tell us what a literary device should represent. In a system where our understanding of literature—of art—is marked by point totals, it is all too simple to denounce the source of frustration. The complexity of classic novels makes it easy to analyze a text “incorrectly,” and as such, the texts we study in school lose their appeal because we associate them with the cruelty of academia. We resent authors for making our lives more difficult, and we resent our lack of ability to find a deeper meaning in the text. In the end, we forget that authors, like ourselves, wanted an outlet through which to describe the human condition.
Despite or, arguably, because of our experience with deriving themes from texts, we view themes as academic. Yet when we take a step back, it is clear that these themes are universal because we are humans like the author. That’s what makes literature so profound, but in the modern education system, we lose sight of that.
This is what drives people to hate poetry and literary fiction; and the thing is, that’s only natural. For a long time, I believed I hated reading because of a teacher I used to have. She required systematic annotations to force us to think about what we read, and I and everyone else I knew thought that was useless. Back then, we wouldn’t have annotated had she not forced us, so perhaps it was the only way to create an understanding of the text, but when I reflect upon it now, I realize that that prevented us from feeling the text. Even though we knew what happened on each page and which literary devices were present, we saw the text as an animal to be dissected and not something to be absorbed, something to be appreciated.
My current English teacher requires us to simply read a text; in the following class, we reread and discuss how it makes us feel and how the author makes us feel that way. This is a better approach to literary education because literature is inherently discursive. Readers can discover meanings in a text on their own, but they are supplemented by the interpretations of other readers. Such a dynamic is institutionalized in professional academia through literary criticism, so why is it not widespread in secondary education?
The answer to this question returns to why some denounce study of literature. The flawed way some educators teach literature makes feeling and finding meaning difficult. In the absence of incentive, why read or try to understand why others read? Even now, it’s a challenge for me to read because I often don’t know why I’m reading or what I’m getting from it. It takes time to realize the value of literature, even for someone like me who has always claimed to love it, but sometimes, all it takes is a new method.
Last weekend, I tried something new when I read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (I would recommend it to everyone who can sit through a few initial chapters of boredom). I tried to feel the text. I marked down the lines that I liked, as well as images and devices that repeated throughout the novel. I wasn’t creating meanings; instead, I let them reveal themselves as the novel progressed. By the end, I felt like I gained something, which is what matters.
Ultimately, feeling the text allows meaning to become clear to the reader. By preventing young readers from feeling literature, the education system prevents them from understanding the nature of meaning. It exists whether we detect it or not, and it exists regardless of whether the author intended it to. We are not searching for meaning where it doesn’t exist. Rather, we are discovering one meaning within an infinity of it.
In the end, the blue curtains can mean and do anything because you are in control of your feeling of the text. Isn’t that what makes literature worthwhile?
