Sunday, February 6, 2011

Yo Mama! Interpretation and Pattern Matching

There was a time when interpretation was the most vexed issue in literary criticism: What do texts mean? How do we figure them out? Is there only one valid interpretation, or many? As far as I can tell the debates have largely subsided without having been resolved. For better or worse, critics simply go about the business of offering interpretations without debating whether or not, or how, it is proper to do so.

I have little desire to reopen those discussions. Rather, I want to suggest that the relationship between a text and its interpretation is one of pattern congruence. A pattern in the source text matches one in the interpretive text and so the latter is said to interpret the former. But one could run it the other way, using the literary text to interpret some other text, or set of events. That’s what I want to do in this post.

Rather than using a literary text, let’s use this simple cartoon by Nina Paley:

Timing

Paley titled the strip “Timing.” When I published it here a couple of days ago I gave it a different title “Mubarak to Egyptions.” That is, I gave it an interpretive title. Or, if you will, I asserted that Paley’s cartoon is a useful way of interpreting certain recent events and statements.

What I had in mind, of course, was Mubarak’s assertion that, while he was tired and ready to step down, he feared that Egypt would descend into chaos if abdicated his responsibilities as leader. So I am interpreting Mimi – the creature who falls and crashes – as Egypt. Mubarak therefore must be Eunice, the one who helpfully stretches her hands out and offers to catch. But, alas, is too late.

I don’t really know what Paley intended this cartoon to mean, but I have no reason to think she meant it as a comment on Mubarak and Egypt. Nor does it matter whether she meant that. What matters is the pattern. Does the cartoon depict a pattern of events that matches a pattern of events in Egypt? The cartoon is relatively simple, the pattern of events in Egypt is rather complex. In imposing the cartoon on these events I’m using it as an “interpretive lens” to highlight certain features in those events, finding a pattern in them.

Now consider this cartoon, which Paley has titled “How to Win an Argument:”

How to Win an Argument

This one may require a little interpretation if one isn’t familiar with the use of “So’s yo’ Mama!” as a gambit in verbal jousting. Mimi’s (Nixonian) declaration of victory in the final panel is perhaps more transparent.

Slavoj Žižek used this maneuver in the interview I linked to yesterday:


Starting at about 2:50, and especially from 3:30, he recalls the conventional idea that democracy is a specifically Western idea and so is foreign to Arabs and Muslims. He then offers the current protests in Egypt as effective refutation of such views.

From a logical point of view he hasn’t made his argument, not at all. After all, we have no idea how things will play out in Egypt or whether a democracy will evolve if the protesters succeed in unseating the current regime. No doubt Žižek is capable of making such an argument. But that isn’t what he does in the interview.

What is does in the interview is, for all practical purposes, to say: So’s Yo’ Mama!

It’s a surefire topper.

4 comments:

  1. What you are suggesting is key to how I understand the migratory legends I look at and indeed how they survive through long periods of time.

    Ive been fooling about with Emanuel Fremiet a French artist who started to produce a range of interesting sculptures, which first appeared in the same year as Darwin's origin.

    I think its a nice example of this processes in action.

    Ive collected a range of later images and related source material on the blog if you are interested. The motifs are far older.

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  2. That is, the patterns are stable from legend to legend even though the specific characters and events may differ?

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  3. Surprising stability, given it's early adaption to written form. I would have expected to see a loss of form and more variation.

    It has an interesting switch from male abductor to female victim around the 12th century in part of Europe but still maintains all other aspects.

    It suggests to me something which is constantly repeated i.e if an oral tale does not have a context in which to repeat it becomes lost in memory and fragmented.

    In order to achieve this it demands an environment with multiple contexts which spark its repetition.


    It needs an ability to look like a lot of different things. The surrounding landscape contains enough objects with a similar enough pattern to which it can attach.

    I termed it a pattern of reinforcement. I would be tempted to view it as a potential form of niche construction but my grasp of biology is still not so hot so may be wide of the mark on that.

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  4. "It needs an ability to look like a lot of different things. The surrounding landscape contains enough objects with a similar enough pattern to which it can attach."

    Nice.

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