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Friday 2 January 2015

What did the author mean?

I spent an infuriating half an hour in the car listening to the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. Mr Vine was chairing a discussion about a blog post for the British Medical Journal, written by previous BMJ editor Richard Smith. In this fairly poetic blog, Smith breaks down a choice of four deaths (ignoring suicide) on their effect on family and friends. Depression, as he perfectly describes " the most awful as you are slowly erased", perhaps long before the body is ready to shut down. A sudden death on the other hand leaves relationships in a frozen state that may or may not be positive, leading to tragedy, guilt and regret.

Cancer, Smith proclaims, allows a period of contemplation and action. Allowing the terminal patient to, hopefully, bid farewell to family and friends and leave all loose ends tied up nicely. Smith, then ends with a flippant line about the wastage of research funds on cancer. Which, brings me to my frustration.

Vine repeatedly re-introduced the discussion along the lines of "Is cancer the best death?" and "Should we cut funding for cancer research as an editor of the British Medical Journal suggests?". This was followed by many callers voicing their disapproval of the premise; "Cancer's awful" "I watched my dad die from cancer" etc. To be fair, he did have a guest who was into her last months of terminal cancer and who agreed with the premise.

The whole discussion was infuriating because it reminded me of a meme that gets passed around the internet from time to time.  This meme, below, relates to literature teachers trying to teach students how to think about what the author means when they write "The curtains were blue", with the response being that "the curtains were fucking blue" and any other description is superfluous. Perhaps the sentence before the introduction of the curtains informed the reader of the curtain'owners cat passing away, or he is a retired ship captain longing for the sea. Both of these would change the motive for the author to tell you the colour of the curtains in his house.
To go through life believing that the "curtains were fucking blue", and I am in no doubt that they had that colour, is to completely forget how to read beyond the physical ink on paper/pixels on screen words that appear. Context is lost, and while an instruction manual may need the reader to take the words as unequivocal truth less the instructions can't be followed, other forms of writing and literature require the reader to question the meaning beyond the words.  

While trying to formulate this blog post, I was trying to think of an example of songwriter where a simple lyric on the page can see throwaway but with context opens up a whole world of interpretation. That line is taken from Bruce Springsteen's Cautious Man:

"He got dressed in the moonlight and down to the highway he strode , when he got there he didn't find nothing but road" 

Here, we have a guy standing on the road at night and nothing else. In the meme above, that is what the author fucking meant. That however loses all the power of what songwriting and literature in general sets out to do. In the context of the song, here is a man who is burdened with regret and longing, who is looking for an easy way out, symbolized by the highway but then finds that it can't solve his problems. The song comes in the middle of Springsteen's break up album, Tunnel Of Love, giving even more credence to the redundancy of the escape in the context of an adult relationship. Then, outside the context of the album, you have the author, Mr Car's and Girls, Mr Born To Run, writing about the highway being 'nothing but road?'. Sheesh, there's a whole autobiography in two lines of simple songwriting. 

To bring this back to the BMJ blog, Richard Smith uses poetic language and imagery to talk about the taboo subject of death. He does this to remain respectful of the whole topic of death and those facing readers who are facing it themselves or in their family, and at the same time to allow those not imminently facing it to understand it. The image of depression 'erasing a person' is one that will stay with me for a long time. The final line about research funding has a change of tone and style that allows it to come across as a punchline in the context of the text as a whole. 

It is this change in tone that Jeremy Vine missed in his chairing of the discussion, reducing the whole poetic piece to nothing more than words on a screen to push an agenda. Had he taken two or three minutes to merely recite the blog piece then his listeners would appreciate the beauty of the author's argument. 

By trying to reduce every small set of words to "what the author fucking meant" is to reduce our language and lose meaning, we will have static facts and data but no humour, empathy or allusion. 

So, next time you read a blog or listen to a song, please don't take two sentences which you don't agree with out of the sum of their parts and get angry. Instead, take it as a whole and try to understand what the author really meant and work out for yourself if you still agree.

Then, if it calls for it, get angry and phone in to the Jeremy Vine show.

Currently listening to: Megan Trainor, All About The Bass.

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