Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [58]
Figure 3.2
Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1871.
REUNION DES MUSEES NATIONAUX, ART RESOURCE, NY. James Abbott McNeil Whistler.
The writer who can offer a careful description of a subject’s key features is likely to arrive at conclusions about possible meanings that others would share. You may not agree with the terms by which we have summarized the painting, and thus you may not agree with such conclusions as “the mystery of self-sufficiency.” Nor is it necessary that you agree because there is no single, right answer to what the painting means. The absence of a single right answer does not, however, mean that all possible interpretations are equal and equally convincing to readers.
Here are two guidelines to be drawn from this discussion of analysis and summary:
Describe with care. The words you choose to summarize your data will contain the germs of your ideas about what the subject means.
In moving from summary to analysis, scrutinize the language you have chosen, asking, “why did I choose this word?” and “what ideas are implicit in the language I have used?”
Figure 3.3
Summary and Analysis of Whistler’s Mother Diagram
ANALYSIS AND PERSONAL ASSOCIATIONS
Although observations like those offered in the “Interpretive Leaps” column in Figure 3.3 go beyond simple description, they stay with the task of explaining the painting, rather than moving to private associations that the painting might prompt, such as effusions about old age, or rocking chairs, or the character and situation of the writer’s own mother. Such associations could well be valuable as a means of prompting a searching piece of expressive writing. They might also help a writer to interpret some feature of the painting that he or she was working to understand. But the writer would not be free to use pieces of his or her personal history as conclusions about what the painting communicates, unless these conclusions could also be reasonably inferred from the painting itself.
Analysis is a creative activity, a fairly open form of inquiry, but its imaginative scope is governed by logic. The hypothetical analysis we have offered is not the only reading of the painting a viewer might make because the same pattern of details might lead to different conclusions. But a viewer would not be free to conclude anything he or she wished, such as that the woman is mourning the death of a son or is patiently waiting to die. Such conclusions would be unfounded speculations, since the black dress is not sufficient to support them. Analysis often operates in areas where there is no one right answer, but like summary and argument, it requires the writer to reason from evidence.
A few rules are worth highlighting here:
The range of associations for explaining a given detail or word must be governed by context.
It’s fine to use your personal reactions as a way into exploring what a subject means, but take care not to make an interpretive leap stretch farther than the actual details will support.
Because the tendency to transfer meanings from your own life onto a subject can lead you to ignore the details of the subject itself, you need always to be asking yourself: “what other explanations might plausibly account for this same pattern of detail?”
As we began this chapter by saying, analysis is a form of detective work. It can surprise us with ideas that our experiences produce once we take the time to listen to ourselves thinking. But analysis is also a discipline; it has rules