"Puff, the Magic Dragon" and the Value of Literary Analysis

Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary responds to the urban legend that his song “Puff, the Magic Dragon” is an extended metaphor for drug use. He then mockingly applies the critical lens of drug metaphors to The Star-Spangled Banner, before the group launches into “Puff.”

During the song, we see a montage of people in the audience of all ages singing along; the unspoken message is clearly “Don’t analyze, just enjoy.”

I wonder if I can use this in my literary criticism class. This won’t be the first time that a work that was created by an artist who had one particular vision in mind was taken up by a group of people who saw something different in it.  Should we just accept the Coca-Cola commercials that try to make an iced beverage part of wintertime Christmas rituals? (Ever wonder why Santa wears red and white?)  Should we accept what the recording industry tells about the technology behind file-sharing — that because it can potentially be used for copyright violations, the technology itself should be illegal?  Should the ancient Romans have accepted their bread and circuses without troubling themselves to question the motives of the politicians who supplied their entertainment?

I don’t at all mean to suggest Paul Yarrow has any sinister motives (well, except for that incident with the 14-year-old fan back in 1970); rather, I’m gathering notes for my “Literary Criticism” class, for which I expect I will have to overcome some resistance to the value of theoretical readings.

Any group of specialists will have their own jargon, their own methods, their own shortcuts, their own sense of identifying the boundaries of received knowledge, and their own threshold for noticing where what looks, to an outsider or beginner, like a simple concept (such as “the author’s intended meaning”) reveals great gaps that invite further exploration: By “author’s intention,” do we mean the author’s intent when he wrote the first draft, the author’s intent when the poem was first published, the author’s intent when he agreed to censor certain passages in order to get it a wider printing, or the author’s intent when he changed a few words years later when re-publishing the work in an anthology, or the author’s intent when a reporter tracked him down years later and asked him some questions about the poem in question?

I do point out to my students that lit-crit isn’t “anything goes.”  There are more *possible* interpretations than *probable* ones, and Occam’s Razor reminds us that even the *probable* interpretations are not always *necessary*.

2 thoughts on “"Puff, the Magic Dragon" and the Value of Literary Analysis

  1. Thanks for your comment, Mike.
    This little deconstruction of “authorial intent” is a calculated argument that I make (early in my introduction to literary studies class, or in a literature survey) in order wean students from the notion that their job as a reader is to locate and repeat the “correct” meaning of a text.
    Most of the students in the 300-level Lit Crit class will already be ready for critical analysis, but I’ll give them a reminder anyway. Many of my students, even the ones who are well-read, seem to have brought with them from high school the idea that my job involves telling them the “correct” meaning of a passage. I have seen many students operating under the assumption that, once they find a quote from an author (or listen to what the director says on the DVD commentary), then their job is to report their finding (without any further intellectual activity on their part).
    I wasn’t actually thinking of Sontag, but thanks for the suggestion. What you see here is a fragment of my introductory lecture, responding to the initial resistance that some students felt when I asked them to focus so much proportional time on the intellectual and critical methods, re-reading the same handful of works though different lenses, rather than surveying a genre, period, or theme.
    In my opening lectures in lit classes, I often introduce John Ciardi’s phrasing, “How Does a Poem Mean?” (as an alternative to the question, “What does a poem mean?”). And an extended trope I use in most of my literature classes is “The Big Dusty Book of Literary Meanings” (telling my student that no such book exists, that my job isn’t to read them off the “official” interpretations for them to memorize and spit back, etc.).
    I do want to free them up from the box of “Write down the correct interpretation when the teacher mentions it, then spit it back for points on a quiz.” And the “possible / probable / necessary” distinction is there to keep students from going too far in the other direction, treating literary criticism as the invention and identification of hypothetical under-turtles.
    I want them to know, with Foucault, that “This is not a pipe,” but also know, with Freud, that “Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.”
    Of course, I can lecture all I want, but the only way to get them to understand all this stuff is to ask them to try out a series of critical lenses for themselves, and see where the inquiry takes them. It’s a once-a-week night course, so I’m aiming to fill up the first class period with more than the usual amount of lecture material.

  2. Dennis, how close is the argument you’re observing (at least I get the impression you’re observing it, rather than making it) to the one Sontag makes in “Against Interpretation”? It seems to me like your fourth paragraph at least parallels in some ways the case she makes against the excesses of literary-critical hyper-hermeneusis; the notion that there’s always an additional meaning hiding behind the one we see, to the point where it’s meanings behind meanings, turtles all the way down, and always another critic’s turtle waiting to climb in at the bottom of the pile.
    I think Sontag’s essay is a product of her time and her influences, and I disagree with a good part of it, but her final two sentences always strike me as a wonderful rhetorical turn, and I wonder what you and your students might make of her position: “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. . . In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

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