Machines for meaning

The best books don't mean one thing. They are machines that can be used to generate all kinds of ideas, including contrasting ones.

Amor Towles, The Writer's Library

Amor Towles

The point Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility, makes in the lines quoted above is one I have made numerous times in this blog, including most recently in "Shifting truth" (July 3). I have never made it as well, however.

A great novel is "a machine for meaning," Towles says in an interview reprinted in The Writer's Library. That is, it generates meaning, but not the same meaning each time to each reader. Good books are worth rereading because there always seems to be saying something new. They keep giving us a new way to view the same story, a new way to interpret what that story means.

As Towles puts it, "great works can discover different ideas, feel different emotions, draw different conclusions, and support the validity of their impressions by pointing to various elements of the text."

Yet this is true not only of novels. It is also true of poems. And songs. And classical music. And folk tales. And the parables of Jesus. And, for that matter, all of Scripture. And great paintings and sculpture.

In other words, art of any kind is a machine for meaning. And that is how to determine whether something is art or not. To insist that art has but one meaning is to destroy its artfulness.