Stop reading too much into lit

While discussing “The Catcher in the Rye” in my English lit class last semester, a fellow student raised his hand to unpack Holden Caulfield’s fashion choices.

“I think it’s significant that the hat Holden wears is the same color as his dead brother’s hair.”

I cringed, and then had a realization: I am an English major who hates English classes.

Like most of my peers, I was an avid reader and writer growing up, deeply appreciating literature and its power. I became an English major because I wanted to pursue my passion for words.

As a bonus, English has been “trending” in recent years, with more employers than ever hiring English majors for their critical thinking and writing talent.

Once upon a time, nothing excited me like attending my first collegiate English course. Sitting in a small-sized class with equally bright, eager peers, talking about books all day — it was the stuff of my dreams.

But a few weeks into my first lit class at Pitt, I realized that I don’t like discussing books all day. At least, not in the structure many English courses follow.

The problem with the typical discussion-based English literature course is that it ignores pleasure.

Certainly, many books are intended to educate and inform. But so many others exist to provide joy, understanding and escape — they are purely entertainment. “Gone Girl” and the “Twilight” series are stories fans love, but ones with questionable amounts of depth. Nonetheless, they end up in literature course curriculums.

Plenty of books connect education and enjoyment, occupying a space between these categories, but deciding which lens to use to see the author’s “intentions” is difficult. There’s no way to objectively compare the personal experiences reading provides, so relying on those different experiences to discover a single correct meaning is misguided.

Spending three days a week in a course that systematically tore my favorite books apart was actually not, as one might assume, a very fulfilling experience.

Breaking down the comment that made me question my entire collegiate path uncovers my core problem with analysis.

“Significant” doesn’t mean anything by itself. Upon hearing it, everyone else just nods thoughtfully, like, “huh, never thought of it like that.”

Often, the class accepts declarations of significance and moves on, or perhaps the professor asks if anyone else has anything to add. Rarely do people press the original commenter to tell why they believe this moment is significant.

The second half of the sentence pokes at symbolism — the great, all-knowing power, the white whale of the literary world. Practically anything can be a symbol for anything else. That’s the problem.

Like the word “significant,” saying an item is a symbol is an easy way to avoid actually explaining anything or proving you deeply read the text.

Perhaps the color of Holden’s hat really does stand for his profound loss and deep yearning for his late brother’s company. Or, maybe, just maybe, he really likes that color and thinks he looks great in that hat.

I understand that I may sound shortsighted, and that the point of an English course is to analyze literary texts. But there’s only so much to scrutinize before overdoing it.

When we start questioning every interaction between characters, every decision the protagonist makes, every word the author writes, we devalue the work. The hat is probably just a hat. It’s OK to admit that. There are bigger things to discuss in this tome of young adulthood.

I agree that there are obvious benefits to discussing our takeaways, an author’s techniques, the characterization and plot. Doing so increases our understanding of the novel and its meaning. But we can’t take it too far.

Sten Carlson, a creative writing professor at Pitt, agreed that people tend to overvalue traditional literary breakdowns.

“Analysis is a really poor tool in a lot of ways,” he told me. “There’s not a lot to be learned from interpretation.”

How do we solve that problem?

“[Analysis] is like looking for some kind of key that will unlock a piece and reveal its mysteries,” Carlson said. “But real meaning is made in the encounter between the piece of writing and the reader.”

Everyone’s real meaning is different. It doesn’t help the class to have to act like we accept others’ ideas as significant. My personal understanding puts less weight in hats.

In his 1990 book, “Is Nothing Sacred?,” Emory University professor and Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie famously wrote, “Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.”

The key phrase there is, “within the secrecy of our own heads.”

Reading literature is a personal experience. English courses should seek to promote the idea of interpreting literature as an individual endeavor rather than stressing an analytic environment.

Still, group literary discussions aren’t fruitless. We can use them to discuss the wide impact and noted interpretations of novels, such as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”

We should also certainly share our interpretations with each other, but we must accept that there is no single answer. We must be able to disagree with and challenge other people’s readings.

Literature’s uses and intentions are a hundredfold, but the main reason for literature is self-education and personal enjoyment.

I worry that too often, English courses forget or ignore the real wonder of the written word in favor of empty discussion cycles. We can’t substitute the pleasure of learning and growing through literature for participation points.

Write to Emily at eks50@pitt.edu