On Art

I remember a day when paintings served the sole purpose of portraying beauty, when art was purely aesthetic, when novels were pages of nice sounding words strung together. Rhyming picture books lined my shelves; they encapsulated everything, appealing to both the eye and the ear. A drawing of Edward the Emu fascinated me much more than Van Gogh’s Starry Night. In television, Bugs Bunny’s wit and goofy animated portrayal kept me much happier than would have a movie like Citizen Kane. The simplicity of children’s art exuded an especially appreciable elegance.

When I was younger, my wee friends and I did not fight over the meaning of Edward the Emu’s expression and we did not joust over the possible societal ramifications of his words. We enjoyed them, they made us smile, they made us feel “warm and fuzzy” at times. Even when I would happen upon a big-people book and make it all the way through, I either enjoyed the story or I didn’t; I never thought twice about the symbolism within and the author’s interpretation of the work. However, as time passed and my superiors squeezed knowledge into my brain, I learned that some people considered literature and art to have deeper, subtler, hidden messages embedded within their texts, not immediately visible to the naked eye. In order to illuminate these hidden messages, they developed the art of analysis, a method of attempting to articulately interpret what is “hidden” within a work of art. Apparently, great works of fiction held secrets that could only be unlocked through careful nitpicking and a keen eye, secrets that, once understood, imbued the work with a much more grandiose existence. In my experience, it seemed that these secrets were supposed to be inherent, that with enough examination, anyone could glean the “true meaning” of nearly any artistic piece. Of course, when studying something like poetry, for example, I also came to understand that as long as I wrote an analysis well enough, most of my teachers would not dock points for an unusual interpretation. I learned in class to state what I thought a poem meant under the pretext of stating what it actually meant.

A question that often arose during an analysis session regarded the importance of an author’s own interpretation of his work. It seemed that the goal during analysis was to try to follow the author’s train of thought and see exactly which symbols and hidden messages the author had hidden for the reader to find. Success in analysis somehow amounted to agreeing with the author’s perspective on the world and understanding the intended message. After all, why would someone writing a book go to all the trouble of hiding a message within its pages if he did not intend his readers to find it. Somehow, it appeared, the author’s own interpretation carried much value. He provided us with a mess of jigsaw pieces and it was simply our task of putting them together to form a picture. But still, was the message actually present in the work, or was it just constructed by interpretation? Was there only one way to put the puzzle pieces together? After all, the author only gave us pieces, never a box to look at.

Because any novel, essay, or poem is just a series of letters and punctuation thrown together in an organized way, a computer can express it as a sequence of ones and zeros, just a long list of binary code, millions upon millions of puzzle pieces. Of course, though a computer can easily translate that code into letters and words again, it is impossible for a computer to detect the “hidden message” within its code; it can put the picture together, but never see it. We can never create any kind of scientific instrument or algorithm able to objectively measure the purpose of a literary or artistic work. Sure, a machine can measure its complexity, the level of vocabulary it used, but no constructed machine could ever “understand” it. Therefore, a specific interpretation cannot possibly be inherent to a piece of art; its meaning cannot possibly be objective. Meaning, symbolism, and the like must be subjective.

I think the idea of meaning being subjective is certainly more romantic than the contrary, and I am rather glad for that. If meaning were objective, we would find ourselves with a finite end to any literary discussion, and though the discussion itself might be of interest, once finished, we’d have nothing left to speak about. In fact, if our goal were to find an objective meaning, we’d be doing no more than simulating the work of a computer, and creativity would lose its purpose. Fortunately, meaning is not objective; it is determined by the interpreter. An interpretation of Slaughterhouse Five completely opposite to Vonnegut’s does not carry any less value than the Vonnegut’s own. The interpretations are simply two different ways to put the jigsaw pieces together, each yielding an equally lovely picture. Though the two pictures may differ in almost every aspect, we do not derive understanding solely from the book’s puzzle pieces. Some of this understanding must come from within us as well, from our own perspective, from our own mind-set. We must determine how to morph a pile of jigsaw pieces into an image. Everyone, of course, looks at the world through at least slightly different lenses, so everyone wields a unique interpretation, a unique image, and none is the superior. Even if the author intends a certain message within his work, that does not at all imply that that is the only message we can identify.

Nothing possesses an objective interpretation or meaning, so it is up to us to supply one. Typically we apply “meaning” to “art,” that is, to paintings, novels, poems, sketches, sculpture, anything created creatively by humankind. However, because it is subjective, artistic understanding can be no more inherent in a human-made work than it in a work of art created naturally. Because the value comes from within our mind-set and perception, no more meaning exists in a Hemingway short story than in a leaf falling from a tree, for example. In fact, one could write equally charming analyses of both.

Natural works of art constantly surround us, from sunrises to snowflakes, from lush valleys to barren mountains. Unfortunately, we often forget that even though nature did not consciously create sunrises or snowflakes, we can still elicit meaning from any object, any occurrence in life. Symbolism and significance are not any more present in works of fiction than in our own lives; we simply tend to spend all of our time looking for meaning in the former, and forget that we can glean just as much meaning from within the latter. Real life is also made up of jigsaw pieces, it just happens that a lot of them are upside down or under the couch.

Because they exist within our own minds, symbolism, connections, subtle relationships, static and dynamic characters, and hidden messages are all right around us all of the time. We just have to start looking for them. The people who realize this most, I think, are non-fiction writers. How non-fiction short stories or autobiographies yielded so much symbolic imagery always bewildered me. I believed that I could not write anything non-fiction remotely as deep as these works simply because my life was not nearly as symbolic, because things didn’t work out so perfectly fittingly all of the time as they did in the famous stories. However, the lives of good non-fiction writers are often not any more organized or planned-out or symbolic than my own life or that of anyone else. Good non-fiction writers just have a knack for knowing where in their lives to look for art.

Hidden messages, significance, and value are all subjective. We can and should supply them to each and every object and occurrence in our lives, for meaning is by no means explicitly confined to art crafted by humans. Deep understandings and interpretations surround us perpetually, and all we have to do is realize that. Of course, we should also realize that sometimes the deepest message of all is to not forget to recognize that most straight-forward loveliness in art and in life, the simple beauty that first makes us smile.