Streetcars and Literary Analysis: Where to Stop?

Is it possible that, within modern literary discourse, we have lost something amidst the milieu of interpretations and criticism?  Put simply, by approaching literature with set purposes and agendas, are we overlooking the simple, intrinsic value that a first impression imparts?

Saturday night I attended an operatic performance of A Streetcar Named Desire.  I arrived with an open mind, knowing only that a man would cry “STELLA” extremely loudly–for reasons I knew not–and that it had confused some friends in the past.

I enjoyed the play.  The last three minutes, however, left me with a powerful sense of awe.  I spent the next two hours trying to wrap my mind around what just transpired; as of the next morning, my head was still spinning.  While dizzy and confused, I loved every moment and was left wanting more.

This is what quality theatre, and literature in general, can and should do.  Rather than merely entertain, the skilled storyteller crafts characters and plots that, in their exhibition, rewards an attentively open audience with a gift, a secret.  They hold the power to reach deep into the recesses of existence, retrieving and bestowing lessons of human experience.  Whereas we, the audience, are left to attentively receive, reflect upon, and internalize (or reject) these messages.

However, as IR blogger Jacob Culberson rightly points out, literary studies of late has become “a lieutenant and petri dish for the sociologist, himself but the academic advisor to a political machine.”  Rather than allowing authors to simply make their points, to receive their messages, we have been laden with the many lenses of “scholarly” interpretation.  Yes, one may delve further into a work through psychoanalyzing or examining its implied treatment of economic stratification, learning much and gaining insights, but one should first relinquish to the writer and allow his tale to be told uninhibited.

In his introduction to Streetcar, Arthur Miller explained that one must be open to the play, respecting the work and allowing its organic nature to take life in the viewer’s soul.  “Streetcar is a cry of pain,” he says; “forgetting that is to forget the play.”  Likewise, in the rush to pinpoint Shakespeare’s sexuality or explain the Marxist critique of Streetcar, perhaps we’ve simply missed the point.