finding weirdly racist/otherwise “anti SJW” sailor moon fans is always wild because it’s like. why are you here. what do you get out of a series about japanese girls fighting for love and justice when you are so full of hate. what part of it appeals to you when it seems to be at odds with your very morals?
alright everyone i’ve been seeing a lot of lit crit discourse on my dash recently and it’s making me fed up so i’m going to (perhaps unwisely) wade in with my opinion.
so first off, let’s quickly sum up the two sides of the debate. one is saying that lit crit is pointless and writers don’t put symbolism in their work deliberately, and the other is saying that lit crit is a valuable life skill and needs to be taught. i am perhaps in a minority if i say that, while i’m more in agreement with the latter than the former, i do think that both sides have a point.
now, why do i think this? first off, i think the anti-crit argument often stems from lit crit being taught badly in schools. i know i hated that part of english when i was doing my gcses, and it was only when i got too ill to go to school and had to study my texts (a christmas carol, of mice and men, and a view from the bridge, if anyone’s interested) on my own at home that i started to really enjoy it. i think that’s because in lessons the teacher would often focus on the more superficial, ‘easily understood’ elements of symbolism. an example i’ve seen floating around a lot is ‘the curtains were blue’, with the anti-crit folks saying all that means is that the curtains were blue, and the pro-crit folks saying it can be symbolic, e.g. of a character’s sadness and isolation. again, i agree with the latter. however, when teachers focus on things like ‘the curtain was blue’ and only briefly touch on deeper symbolism and themes (e.g. colonialism, materialism, oppression) that can be frustrating, and lead students to think that lit crit is all about analysis of adjectives or metaphors and similes, when in reality it is far more than that.
i also think that it is important for lit crit to be a learned skill, as critical reading is vital not just for fiction, but in other avenues of life, e.g. in reading job descriptions, political manifestos, even posts like this, understanding both text and subtext is important.
now, onto the stickiest point i’ve seen floating around: do writers put symbolism in their work deliberately or is it all accidental? the answer, of course, is both. no writer is clever enough to catch all the symbolism they put in their work, but even if it is accidental, it is still worthy of analysis.
the fact is, accidental symbolism often stems fron the writer understanding their work and its themes so well that they put in clever stuff unconsciously, it just happens on automatic.
in my a-level drama i studied the play jerusalem by jez butterworth. it is a play with heavy themes and symbolism surrounding england and englishness: the good, the bad, and the ugly of it (also it is such a good play you guys omg). when i was researching social, cultural, and historical context for the play, i came across an article from the author saying that none of this symbolism was intentional. however, it’s still there, and it’s still part of what makes jerusalem such a good play.
i’ve had this happen to me as well. i recently got my first novel up to a stage of drafting where i’m ok with other people reading it, so i gave it to my mum (who was an english student at oxford and really knows her lit crit). at one point when we were discussing it she mentioned something ‘tying into the bigger theme of the underdog fighting back’, and i was floored. surely i’m not a sophisticated enough writer to have things like themes in my work? but the fact is, i am, and that theme was consistently portrayed throughout the whole book, despite it being entirely unconsciously.
symbolism can also be a combination of accidental and deliberate. to bring in an example from my work again, i’m currently writing a murder mystery, and i noticed that the colour red cropped up a lot around clues and suspects of the murder, so i’ve turned it into a motif. what started as accidental became deliberate, and the reason i spotted it is because i’ve learned lit crit.
tl;dr: lit crit is often taught badly, leading to people thinking it’s superficial and doesn’t matter, but it is still a valuable skill, and just because symbolism is often accidental doesn’t mean it’s not still worthwhile.
gjfj,gjr,rj you ever get so Woke that you erase an entire cast of characters and an author being Japanese because you can’t parse light skin characters as being anything other than White
