Abstract Schemas and how they Blind Us
When someone picks up a brand new book, they read it, understand the plot, analyze what it really means, then applies that knowledge to their lives. This is how near everyone digests a text. This is essentially what we call Interpretation. But what if one of these steps are fundamentally flawed? Take a look at the images here taken from the book The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. From these images, you may get a sense of what is happening in the text. You may assume (rightfully so) that Dickens wrote the text, and an illustrator (in this case, Luke Fildes) read said text and made illustrations to match the text. But what if I told you that this was not the case? In Phillip Gaskell's A New Introduction to Bibliography, it said that the printing plates that held the text and the illustrations were shipped to the printing houses separately. So as it turns out, it was not the choice of the author or illustrator as to where the images went, but rather the publisher/printer. This means that the images could quite possibly be in the wrong order.
Maybe we as readers/digesters of literature assume that the author/illustrator decided where the images go based on our schemas of interpretation. Schemas, for those who don't know, are basically lists that describe objects in our brain. For instance, you know what a table is because it has the legs and the tabletops and sometimes a base. With schemas, you can not only tell what something is but apply it to other things to figure out what they are. Like physical objects, humans have schemas for abstract objects as well, like for interpretation. We have been taught what interpretation looks like and how we do our own interpretation. Within that schema, we naturally make the assumption that, in this case, author and illustrator deliberately placed images in a place. But as we can see, this is not the case. This means our schemas on interpretation really blinds us to the possibility of better interpretation on a greater understanding of what is in front of us. It is really important that when we interpret any sort of art or literature, we challenge everything that is in front of us and challenge its legitimacy and origins.