#40: Depth in literature

What is depth in literature?
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The DHM

In his Desert Island Discs interview, co-founder of disco group Chic, Nile Rodgers, said that every song he writes has a DHM – a deep hidden meaning. This is a ‘core truth’ which may differ to the apparent meaning of the song. On a similar topic, someone on a recent Radio 3 classical music programme thought that what gives a composition staying power, so that you return to it time after time, is intellectual content.

What is depth in literature?

So what makes a poem or novel deep? I’m not sure you can define depth as an abstraction — such a definition will inevitably be less attractive and complex than the process of finding and exploring those depths in particular pieces. It’s easier to say what it does than what it is, and easier again if we take an example. So here we go.

The Wye Valley    
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Depth in action

Here are a couple of lines of poetry I’ve been returning to in my mind recently, from Wordsworth’s Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, where he returns to a beloved landscape near the river Wye:

                                                Once again I see

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines

Of sportive wood run wild;

What strikes me this time about that second line is the thinking process it reveals. Why repeat ‘hedge-rows’? Or why not cut them all together and say: ‘Once again I see/little lines of sportive wood…’? Because you need to start from something you know — the hedge-rows, the common acknowledged way of describing something, then realise it’s inadequate (‘hardly hedge-rows’), then progress beyond. Perhaps too he is seeing it differently now, on revisiting it, and the former vocabulary is not enough. This seems to mirror a natural way of moving forward in the way you describe and understand something — start with what something is not, and try to progress from there.
And as so often in Wordsworth’s poetry, this thought process is part of the poetry – it’s not something that is discarded once the finished product is settled on. The process of composition is part of the poetry too.

But why break the second line there? Why not:

These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines of sportive wood

Run wild;

Because the wood escapes from the ‘line’ to the next, just as it escapes the edge of the field, and needs to be the subject, the moving force of the next line. And of course, those ‘lines’ are lines of poetry, which are less restrained here, a little wilder than they would be with a tighter form. And can you feel the determined unpunctuated rush of the wood in Wordsworth’s lines?

I had never thought before how breaking the line somehow adds energy, tension, a little suspense.

This is depth for me. It often seems to involve thinking about form as well as content (the ‘lines’ of poetry, and the way the lines are broken). It enables you to use the writing yourself, to think with — it is more than a product for you to say ‘that’s great’ and walk on. And here I am left with something I can move on with (why does breaking a line add energy?).

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How do we swim in depth?

So, is there a DHM (deep hidden meaning) in this poem? Deep, yes; hidden, I’m not sure. It’s more a case of approaching the deeper layers through the upper ones; they all contribute to understanding it and you don’t leave the most apparent meaning behind when delving deeper. Not only that, but studying a poem in this way increases pleasure in it — it comes from the same place as the reasons you like it. So this is different from deconstructing literature, a process which aims to challenge or undermine the most obvious, ‘surface’ meaning. In contrast, I would argue that my reading works with the poem’s preoccupations — repetitions and variations in the way we remember, for example — rather than against them.

And what about the music commentator’s view that depth implies intellectual content? Yes, but not only that. You don’t leave behind the emotional and depart into the realms of the intellect; in fact, I’m not sure you can have intellectual understanding that lasts without an emotional component.

Can you have comic depth?

But aren’t we getting a bit too intense? Must depth always be serious? I think it is likely to be. However, there are books I reread fairly often — which have staying power for me — which I would not describe as deep. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, for example. These are comic, and doesn’t comedy warn us about overthinking, short-circuit literary analysis (or any extended thinking process), encourage us to move on? 

The DHM in ‘Le Freak’.
Well, let’s take Rodgers seriously and try to find the DHM in ‘Le Freak’, his first choice for the island. In the interview he said this was a perfect example of a DHM, where childlike song rhymes ‘have to have a secondary if not tertiary meaning’. Here’s the first verse:

Have you heard about the new dance craze?
Listen to us, I'm sure you'll be amazed
Big fun to be had by everyone
It's up to you, it surely can be done
Young and old are doing it, I'm told
Just one try, and you too will be sold
It's called Le Freak! They're doing it night and day
Allow us, we'll show you the way

Secondary meaning? Breaking free of everyday constraints (Wordsworth’s ‘the heavy and the weary weight/of all this unintelligible world’)? Not being afraid to be different?

 

Nile Rodgers performing with Chic

#39: Buddhist sign

Is this true?

This sign in a local health food shop seems questionable to me. Why should the absence, rather than presence, of thought be desirable? What about trying to use our powers of thought to their fullest potential – is that not equally praiseworthy? Or even having the brain ‘fizz like a firework’, as Tim Parks puts it in his account of his search for a cure for chronic pain, Teach Us to Sit Still. Parks found meditation helpful and interesting, but was concerned that a quiet brain could actually diminish creativity.

The ‘Joycean buzz’

I also wonder whether it is possible to ever empty the mind of what neurologist Oliver Sacks called the irrepressible ‘Joycean buzz’ and A S Byatt, describing her literature-oriented character Frederica, a ‘chatty linguistic self’. Among my persistent ‘buzz’, for example, are dialogues with imaginary people and imaginary representations of real ones, snatches of songs, visualisations, problem-solving suggestions, the ‘pop’ of new ideas, intentional and unintentional memories, and a stream of other mental odds and ends, all often bringing with them intense emotions. 

I'm inclined to consider this a survival technique, as though the brain were constantly ticking over, scanning for problems to solve and meaning to make. I used to think of my imaginary dialogues as faintly embarrassing, then necessary, and now have actually come to see them as a sign of mental health, since if I am ever feeling particularly low they quieten down. This suggests that being ‘without thought’, as the notice above enjoins, may not be the healthiest option.

And yet I wish for more focus; not an empty mind, but a more disciplined one, which would include periods of quietness and much-needed rest from the inner chatter. But in my own experiments with meditation I find it singularly difficult to stop my mind wandering. My version of the sign would read: ‘a focused mind is something to aim for and a powerful tool’.

What do the scientists say?

So what do scientists say about our mental landscapes, and the need to tend them? A 2012 study tried to discover whether meditation can lead to longer-term changes in thinking and feeling which would last longer than the meditation session itself. Using a small sample of 24 people, it investigated mindfulness training and also compassion-based meditation, in which people are encouraged to have empathy towards others and view everything in the world as a source of support and benefit. They monitored participants’ amygdala, the part of the brain which focuses attention towards emotionally significant stimuli.

Results broadly showed that meditation can improve emotional stability and response to stress (at least, stress induced in test conditions). Those who had practised mindfulness meditation responded less intensely to pictures of human enjoyment and suffering, and to neutral images. Those who had done compassion-based meditation also responded less intensely to images of enjoyment and to neutral images, but those who did it most frequently showed heightened response to images of human suffering. For reasons I do not understand, this last finding correlated with decreased depression in these people. ‘Overall, these results are consistent with the overarching hypothesis that meditation may result in enduring, beneficial changes in brain function, especially in the area of emotional processing,’ says co-author Gaëlle Desbordes.

The mind’s effect on the body

And of course our mental and physical well-being are linked. The Radio 4 programme ‘Inflamed Response’ looked at some of the evidence that negative states of mind actually influence our physical health – it quotes one study of 42 couples, showing that minor wounds healed more slowly after negative interactions between them than after supportive ones. Another study quoted on the programme showed that people who feel that they are lonely are more vulnerable to illness.

So what would a research-supported version of the sign read? Something like: ‘meditation can improve emotional and physical health in the long-term.’ Less snappy but, in my view, more accurate and useful.