Missing the Point

Have you ever read a book, cover to cover, and upon reaching the end, you have the urge to flip back a few pages or chapters to see what you missed? Because you know that there must have been a key phrase or scene in there somewhere that would have unlocked the whole mystery of the book to you, so that you got whatever it was that the author intended.

Or perhaps you watched a movie, and it's interesting, and the acting is good, and the plot moves along, and then it ends and you think "That's it? Did I miss something? What was the point of that?"

I ask because I find I often feel that way. At the very least, I've felt that way about a few stories I've recently read and the movie I've most recently seen.

My spouse and I saw "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" on Thursday night and it was everything I said above, interesting story, good acting, nice film-making, decent plot. But something, somewhere was missing from it for me. Or at any rate, I felt I had missed something. What was the movie intending to show? Was it simply an unconventional love story? How two people so different kept coming back to each other again and again? Was there some symbolism I was missing (in the clock, the hummingbird, the postcards, the very virtue of Benjamin's curious case), did they all represent something? Was there some deeper meaning that I couldn't fathom? And if not, shouldn't there have been?

I suppose the best case can be made for it being simply a love story, how fate caused two people to fall together again, even in the most difficult of circumstances. But of course, fate didn't cause them to continue to impact each others lives; they made conscious or semi-conscious choices to return to each other, and to accept each other, time and again. They also made conscious or semi-conscious choices to abandon each other, even though they loved one another. It was romantic, in a way, because they eventually reunited, but the bulk of the story, they weren't really together. And, frankly, for the bulk of the story, the title character didn't do anything. Anything at all. Nor, as far as I could tell, did he learn anything. Nor did he seem to grow older mentally and emotionally even as he grew younger physically. Again, not that he had to change or learn or grow. But if the point was to tell a story about how a man lived his life growing younger, wouldn't you think there would have been some moral that we could have derived from that? I didn't see a moral. But then, maybe I just missed it.

Similarly, I recently read a novel that my spouse took out of the library for me. It is called The Cello Player and since I had played the cello as a child, it seemed like it might be of interest to me. It is a German novel by Nicholas Kruger, translated into English, about a German composer. According to the front flap, it is about his relationship with a woman, a cellist (and why call it The Cello Player as opposed to The Cellist? Isn't "cellist" a much more convenient way to translate "cello player." I mean, isn't that why the word "cellist" exists, so we don't need to go around calling people "cello players.") But I've got to tell you, the relationship, such as it was, was so . . . I don't want to say it was a minor part of the book, because of course it wasn't. But it always seemed to be tangential to the point of the book. The composer, who told the story first-person, always seemed to be focusing on something else, other than the cellist. And yet from the descriptions on the inside jacket cover, it made her out to be some treacherous vixen. I didn't see it. I still don't see it. It makes me want to read a review of it, so that I can see what I missed. Or the Cliffsnotes, if they exist. Which they don't, because frankly the book is not really good enough for Cliffsnotes to exist. Maybe a review. Or something that would explicate it.

I don't mean to put these artistic works down, either, by suggesting that they don't have a point. My sister-in-law, who is an artist by training, recently said that she thinks if the artist can convey his point without having to explain, than the work is "good" art, whereas works which fail to make their point to the viewer without needing a paragraph of explication are less successful. I'm not in complete agreement with her on that; I think that aesthetic beauty should count for something in addition to the "point" that the artist is trying to make, whether he or she be a painter, composer, dancer, sculptor or writer. And I have read some very good books lately where I missed the point completely until I read the introduction or end notes where it was explained in clear English to me (Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury stands out as an example of a story where I had no idea what I was reading until I received the guidance of the Epilogue).

Here's the thing: I'm a relatively intelligent man. I should be able to figure out what the artist is trying to do, right? And, if he or she does it well, it should reveal a whole new world, a whole way of looking at things, right? At some level, that is the purpose of art. So my failure to get the point ends up being a failure to understand something new about the world, a failure to have my eyes opened in a new way, a failure to be exposed to new thoughts or to encounter old thoughts from a different perspective.

So what's my point? I'll spare you the flippant "I dunno." My point on the most basic level is, I wish I had the ability to grasp exactly what the artist intended with every work of art. But sometimes, I have to think that it is not my failing that prevents me from grasping an artist's intent, that it is the artist's failing as well. And when the artist fails, two things happen. One, people still look for meaning, for a message in the work of art, sometimes stretching themselves beyond the point of credibility to give a sense of meaning to the work, over-analyzing and over-interpreting. And two, the actual meaning, the message that the artist intended to convey to audiences that caused him or her to start the work of art in the first place, tends to be covered up by the attempted analysis of the critics. Perhaps my sister-in-law is right, that the best art should require no critics at all, because the message will be so clear that each of us will understand it without need of explication.