Dissection of Literature, or Torture?

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Throughout this course we have spent numerous class periods dissecting novels, stories, movies, all with one intent: to find a true purpose within it. Many times, as with the Memento discussion, we end right back where we started.

In Cat's Cradle we argued over and over again "what was the truth of the novel?" Did Vonnegut pick a side between science and religion or were they always held in a constant dynamic tension? Finally, we decided that although everything in the book was a "shameless lie", we became more aware of our own search for a true purpose and also of how "shameless lies" can portray the truth.

In Memento, no such conclusion was reached. Emphasizing Vonnegut's idea of the foolishness of humanity, we dissected every part of the movie trying to figure out what was the 'truth'. Who was actually being deceived and who was most responsible for this deception? At the end of the discussion though, once we concluded that nothing was certain, we still had no idea what to think of it. We wanted so badly to realize what the truth was, to find some angle within the movie.

Our insistent analyzing of the movie as a result of our constant search for the truth reminded me of the poem Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins. In his poem, Collins describes his desire for the reader to simply enjoy the poem and the details it presents. He wants the reader to experience it by feeling it, but instead the reader insists on dissecting it until there is nothing left. As readers we are constantly searching to determine what the text means; experiencing it is not enough. This was laughed at by Vonnegut and then disputed by Mitchell Sanders in The Things They Carried. Like Collins, they wished for the reader to experience the story rather than search for truth or morals within it. In Memento we did the same thing. We analyzed every part of the movie but we still realized we would never know what was the truth. We dissected the movie too much, as sometimes happens in literature.