The Curtains Were Blue

If you follow book or author groups on social media, you have probably run into this meme at some time or another:

I hate it so much. So, so goddamn much. It’s just the worst, the laziest piece of criticism. I hate it on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin taking it apart.

We’re already in trouble because we don’t have any context. We don’t know who ‘he’ was and we have no other textual clues about his state of mind. Certainly, if there was no other indication that ‘he’ was depressed then, yes, it is a bit of a leap.

Let’s say for the sake of argument, though, that your massively overworked English teacher doesn’t have the time to make shit up, and the text contains other indications that ‘he’ is depressed. The colour of the curtains could very easily be interpreted as the author adding a detail to emphasise that point. Maybe it’s not the author’s intent, but it certainly isn’t the huge reach that the meme is implying. But here’s the thing: the author doesn’t even need to have done it deliberately! He or she could have been writing about the room of a depressed person and the colour of the curtains turned up purely through word association. English criticism is about picking apart things that aren’t immediately obvious — and this includes things that might not be immediately obvious to the writer.

“But sometimes curtains are just blue!” Look, I can absolutely believe that, in a description of a real-world house with actual curtains, the colour might not mean anything significant. Perhaps the occupant of the house had blue curtains because they were depressed, or perhaps it was to match the fabric of the sofa. Perhaps blue was not a favoured colour but were just on special, or perhaps they were left there by a previous occupant, whatever. I get it! But a fiction author isn’t describing an existing place, they are imagining it into being. They are imagining a room, perhaps decorated by a character who they also imagined into being. Describing how those characters chose to decorate their home is a great way of demonstrating character. It’s right up there with clothing choices and what car they drive for shorthand characterisation.

All of this is to miss the point a little, which is what is what the English teacher is doing and why. What they are doing is making the very simple case that every book – just like every movie, every song, every work of art ever – comes from a series of choices. The author doesn’t have to mention the curtains at all! You can describe a room without mentioning the window dressing, or you can just not describe a room in detail. The author made a decision to mention the curtains and made the decision that they should be blue. Why? The English teacher is working on the assumption that some sort of thought went into these decisions, and that the intent of that thought was to support character and theme. The meme assumes… I don’t know what? That the author threw a dart at a list of furnishings and hit ‘curtains’ and another at a list of colours and hit blue? And somehow that thinking this is more respectful to the author? I don’t even know.

And then there’s the question of what the author intended, which is actually more complicated that

 In my novel Champagne Charie and the Amazing Gladys, overprivileged drunk Charlie Decharles’ character arc follows him becoming less self-centred and someone who works to help others. As part of that arc, he is injured in the leg while trying to rescue a man. His father is also described as having a leg injury from his naval service. Obvious English teacher interpretation: Charlie’s path is leading him to become more like his heroic father.

But did I intend that, imaginary English teacher? What if I ‘the wound was in the fucking leg,’ did you think of that?

Well, in the first draft, it actually was kind of like the ‘curtain is blue,’ thing. Charlie was injured in the leg for no better reason than because leg and upper arm are the designated ‘hero gets a flesh wound but is fine really,’ spots. It wasn’t until I was doing revisions that I noticed that his injury mirrored his father’s. I nearly changed it for the sake of variety – until I realised that it worked in terms of character development. Charlie and his father don’t interact a great deal in the course of the novel, so this symbolic connection was actually useful. I wrote an arbitrary piece of description then left it in as a deliberate choice to support character development.

Admittedly, this creates a problem with the English teacher model, because the English teacher in the meme assumes a singular reason for a particular writing decision, when actual writing decisions are made, remade, unmade, whatever. However while it weakens that side of the Venn diagram, it blows the other circle out of the water. Writing decisions are even less arbitrary than the meme insists on. Understanding that helps us understand the work of art itself and just as importantly it helps us make our own art.

I’m not going to lie. I did high school English, and sometimes I did think the teacher was reading too much into something. It does happen. But the solution to ‘reading too much into something’ isn’t ‘don’t read enough into anything.’ It really isn’t. I just wish that instead of posting this meme people would just write ‘English wasn’t my favorite class in high school.’ That’s really what they’re getting at.

Addendum: While I was writing this, I was listening to music and David Bowie’s song Sound and Vision came on. It includes the lyrics:

Blue, blue, electric blue
That’s the colour of my room
Where I will live
Blue, blue
Pale blinds drawn all day
Nothing to read, nothing to say
Blue, blue

If you read that and think he’s making a value-free statement about home décor, I don’t know what to tell you.