Making Peace with Our Patterns: Coherence

Hanging On to Everything

Sorting through our first ideas about meaning (and even our second and third ideas) is common to reading critically. We may have abandoned some of our first list of Notices when we could discover no Significance to them. We almost certainly set aside several of our guesses for Significance when we found they didn’t form any kind of Pattern. 

But now, we get to make a harder choice. I’m going to encourage us at this stage not to eliminate any of our Patterns. It’s tempting to say, for instance, that you can see how three of the Patterns you discovered hold together but not a fourth one and so discard it. Don’t.

Instead, choose to discover not whether it fits, but how it does. This is one of the most important parts of discovering “deeper meanings” in literature, in embracing what seems to be a contradiction, a paradox, a more nuanced connection than you might have first imagined. 

Coherence Behind the Distractions

Here’s an unexpected idea. The poems and stories we read aren’t asking us to whittle their meanings down to a single sentence or a multiple choice answer. Good writing can’t be reduced this way: it’s “irreducible.” Instead, it moves in the opposite direction, broadening and thickening with each Pattern we find and fit into the Coherent whole. 

This couldn’t be more true than it is in Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” video. What Patterns have we found here?

• We have a video of contradictions: Patterns of violence, patterns of dance and joy, images in the foreground different from those in the background, objects from across the past several decades.
• We can see that the violence can be seen as ritual, as entertainment, or as horror, sometimes all at once. But Gambino’s expressions don’t help: they move so quickly from emotion to emotion that they seem unrelated to the backgrounds.
• But if this song is about America, we also have to notice that nearly all of the visible faces are black Americans. This all may represent the black experience (as the final chase scene suggests).
• The lyrics are packed, too, but speak frequently to not “slipping up” and imagery of dehumanization (“You just a barcode”).

If we’re careful not to set any of this aside, we see that, no matter what violence is committed, when or for what reason, it is an act which dehumanizes black Americans and demands that they continue to celebrate. But celebration and dance is never enough–bombarded with emotions they must almost randomly guess what is appropriate to a scene. (Or perhaps just bear down upon non-emotion against inner feelings of conflict.) And those scenes of entertainment, of celebration and dance in the foreground, make it hard to see or even understand the violence, anyway, most times: the man falling from a balcony, the SWAT team crossing, etc. The entertainment (performed by Glover as Childish Gambino) works to distract us from seeing anything else. Does black response to black violence form a screen or distraction from the horror behind it? 

And what is that white horse parading through? One of my Significance meanings guessed it could be a sign of the Apocalypse (the “Pale Horse” is the first one), but I’m not sure, yet, if that will fit into this, unless what we are being distracted from literally is an Apocalypse.

And what are these complicated and contradictory meanings we find? We call them themes.

We’re Not Going Anywhere

This can be confusing, even dizzying, as we consider the thickness of this brief video’s meaning. But what we must not allow ourselves to settle for is something like, “‘This is America’ is a video about how awful violence is to black people.”  As I am fond of saying on the Literary Nomads podcast, you aren’t wrong, but you’re maybe only 18% right. 

Coherence is about assembling our Patterns, about recognizing that texts and the languages we use in them get thick, get complicated, but that we can walk right up to that complexity and find our way into it by using our process: Notice-Significance-Pattern-Coherence. 

What reading critically does not allow us to do, though, is what we’ve come to expect from reading: quick entertainment, quick answers, “takeaways,” a ‘solution’ that we can leave behind when we’re done with it. Instead, we walk into the complexity. 

And we stay there, uncertain and questioning, learning from it. 

Instead, we walk into the complexity. 

Want More Still? Literary Nomads

The Literary Nomads podcast helps listeners see connections that we all make in our readings, in our language, in our cultures. It’s more about reading itself, how we make meaning, how we discover it, and what uses we put it to. 

Three episodes from Journey 5: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” talk at length about “Coherence” and uncertainty and keeping our questions with us. Give them a listen here!

Deeper Reasons

For those interested in the more academic, researched basis for this approach, I lean quite a bit on the phenomenology of reading and reader-response criticism, which emphasize the active role of readers in creating and discovering meaning.

My “Coherence” stage here aligns most closely with Wolfgang Iser’s concept of how a text and reader are co-creators of meaning. The reader remains at the center of the interpretative experience but enters into the text to discover its logic of pattern rather than just her own. But this inevitably creates gaps or indeterminacies, Iser’s terms for my contradictions and questions. Our active efforts to resolve these, embracing contradiction and seeking the “fit,” pushes readers into more complex thinking. And of course, the reading experience remains a subjective field, where our work here is naturally accompanied by uncertainty and discomfort. Uncertainty, however, is not a failure but an indicator that we have arrived closer to a text’s real work on us.

A lot of work has been done in the field after Iser’s works, The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading (1978), especially in cultural context, intersectionality, and digital humanities; more, a quick overview of Iser appears to expose criticisms of ignoring history, of the role of community, or relativism, and how actual real-world readers work differently than implied readers. These are valid criticisms, and I will address them as we move forward.

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