ZapTown

There’s an easy appeal to see why people read their own metaphors into works of fiction. We like to use mirrors to help us define ourselves, after all—and good works of art (film, painting, photography, prose, etc) are as good a mirror as any. I had one friend in university who said she wouldn’t date anyone who liked American Psycho (The Brett Easton Ellis book, not the movie). Her rationale was because anybody who had it on their bookshelf and was willing to talk it up to others wasn’t the sort of person she was comfortable opening up to—that they’d be keeping something from her. This was pre-internet 2.0. With the influx of websites that let you categorize and collect your own taste in books, movies, songs, and any other bit of pop esoterica you can think of, this impulse is likely stronger than ever.

The other thing about interpretations is that they’re FUN. Even if they don’t fit smoothly over a text (Especially if they don’t fit smoothly over a text, in some cases) it can be almost exhilerating to sweat and shift and hammer them down. For example, in Fitzgerald’s THE GREAT GATSBY, yes, Gatsby represents the self-made success, able to hold everything in the world except for the one thing he’s chasing—love, but what if Gatsby doesn’t just represent success. What if he represents the twentieth century itself, and the promise of the modern age? It might take a bit of work to retrofit the book’s plot to an analysis of the transition to 20^th century north america and the pursuit of easy money by the best and brightest, but you could likely get an essay out of it. And if you don’t take it too seriously, it adds some depth to the novel and helps exercise your grey matter. One thing that happens though, is that once you get in the habit of disecting books this way, it becomes more and more tempting to do it with other texts, a habit that can be hard to break.

American Gods, for instance—a popular and award winning Neil Gaiman novel. Recently had a discussion about it with a friend (For those who don’t know, it’s a fairly epic road-trip/contemporary fantasy of a guy named Shadow across America, set against the backdrop of a war between old ‘immigrant’ deities and new ‘modern’ ones representing technology, commerce, TV, etc.) where we took turns arguing about the possibility of subtext, not that there necessarily is any apart from a good story, mind you, just that it would be easy for an enterprising person to take the book and use it to promote their own arguments (at least, that’s what I thought. My friend thought it might be a bit more difficult).

For instance, politics. The split between the Gods in the novel is essentially a two-party struggle between old (conservative) and new (progressive) forces. Without delving into spoilers, it’s not unfair to say that there’s a lot of pressure on unaffiliated or apolitical deities to pick sides, and support one faction over the other. Without going into spoilers, it’s fair to say that while the political subtext doesn’t quite lay smoothly over Gaiman’s story (although seeing ‘belief’ and therefore ‘popularity’ as the root of a God’s strength does have some political parallels), it is fun to pretend it’s political commentary. And it doesn’t really damage the story. I imagine everybody who has their favorite books has a few favorites that they like to read into, just like a lot of movie fans have some films they like to read their own subtexts into. Now I’m going to have to try and come up with a list of a few stories I’ve done that with.