A question has been presenting itself to me throughout the year in my AP English class each time we discuss something we've read, be it a novel or a short story or a poem. We are given a list of things we need to recognize about the piece of literature and be able to explain it. And we are then told to write an essay about how the author used literary elements to portray a theme or an idea or something.
And the question that always plagues me: Did the author actually think about this stuff when writing it?
As a writer, I tend to take a different approach to analyzing litereature than my classmates. They have no problem at all with these assignments. I, however, find myself caught in a black abyss of eternal confusion. They see symbol after symbol, anaphorism and metonomy, syntax techniques supporting the theme, and I'm sitting in my own little corner with an insight into human nature that has nothing to do with anything but the actions of the characters in response to the events. I understand that there is symbolism, but at the same time, I know that the writer may not have even known it was there. Things like that tend to sneak by when they are engrained into the society a writer lives in.
I know for a fact that I have a hard time grasping this sort of thing simply because, as a writer, I merely seek to portray my characters as real, to give the reader a look into his/her own soul, so that they may better understand themselves and the world around them while etting some entertainment out of it. Occasionally I'll throw in my view on, say, politics, or something else along those lines, but it is always apparent and is not the reason I am writing.
And so I am left wondering, am I alone, or do other writers also not think about every little literary element when writing? I know for a fact that some did. My hero and inspiration, Edgar Allan Poe, was one who obsessed over each and every word he wrote, wanting to make it perfect and get his message across so powerfully that it could not be ignored. But do we study Poe in my advanced classes? No, we study novels that to me come across as being written to entertain first, and make a point second.
Sometimes I wonder if one of my novels will one day be studied in a literature course. I wonder if people will try to dissect it and find hidden meanings that are merely placed there by the reader. It makes me laugh, and at the same time, it makes me wonder why literature is taken so seriously. You don't have to understand an idea completely to take it away with you. You don't have to be able to put what you learned from reading something into words to prove that you learned it.
I know that not every great writer could possibly have fretted over such things as metonymy. It's just something that works its way into the words one writes. And it frustrates me that my mentality as a writer prevents me from understanding and being aware of these literary elements I've never even heard of before. It would be nice if my teacher would accept an essay from a writer's point of view, instead of a scholar's. Perhaps then she would understand that I am not being lazy, and that it is simply the way my mind works that makes the class difficult for me.
I want to know if any of you deal with these same difficulties. Is it just me, or is it a writer thing?
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