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The riddle is an ancient and persistent literary form. In Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar Viktor Shklovksy writes about riddles:
Hegel wrote in his Lectures on Fine Art that “the riddle belongs to conscious symbolism.” What is the riddle’s answer? It is derivation of meaning. According to Hegel, the riddle consists of “individual traits of character and properties drawn from the otherwise known external world and, as in nature and in externality generally, lying there scattered outside one another, they are associated together in a disparate and therefore striking way. As a result they lack a subject embracing them together [as predicates] into a unity . . .” This disparity of signs hinders the immediate solution as to which whole they all belong to.
In veiling the whole, the riddle forces us to rearrange the signs of a given object, thus showing the possibility of diversity, the possibility to combine the previously irreconcilable in new semantic arrangements.
Herewith we have a shrewd, clever, witty and expansive essay on the riddles and riddle poems in (mostly) Western literature from The Book of Exeter to Harry Potter and J. R. R. Tolkien and Emily Dickinson. It’s partly a highly suggestive ***ft essay and partly an informal history of ideas, also a refreshing sort of literary criticism, the kind that takes a long and inquisitive look at the words on the page.
Julie Larios is a friend, an esteemed colleague in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults Program and a gifted poet whose work has already graced these pages more than once (here and here). It is always a huge pleasure to have her back.
dg
—–
I’m not much of a “main highway” kind of person when it comes to thinking about the ***ft of writing. I go down lots of sides streets, I let my mind wander. Sometimes even a side street feels too wide. And I’ve been thinking lately about a small alley named “Riddles,” a deceptive short cut (sometimes filled with broken bottles and garbage cans) between one street and the next. I have the feeling deception is important. “Most felicitous sayings rely…on a capacity to deceive beforehand…” said Aristotle. “We have even more obviously learned something,” he said, “ if things are the opposite of what we thought they were, and the mind seems to say to itself, ‘How true. I was mistaken.’”
Riddles are all about questioning our own grasp of the world by questioning the nature of things, casting a new light – thereby casting new shadows – and I believe that thinking in riddle-mode can help us be better writers. After all, don’t riddles follow the pattern of all great works of literature by asking large questions of us like “Who am I?” and “Are things what they appear to be?” and – perhaps the most important question of all – “When is a door not a door?” Ah, yes, one of the great questions of Western literature. It has survived the test of time, as has its existential answer – “When it’s ajar.”
I remember the first time I heard this riddle, I was in Mrs. Frizzy’s second-grade class at Booksin Elementary, standing outside the cafeteria in the lunch line. A boy named Dickie, who was in line in front of me, turned and asked, “When is a door not a door?”
I repeated the riddle out loud. “When is a door not a door?”
Dickie waited as I turned the riddle over and over in my head. Well, I thought, maybe it’s not a door if it’s like a –what do you call it? – one of those swinging things you see in the movies; cowboys push through them when they walk into an old-time saloon, like Gary Cooper did in High Noon, or maybe John Wayne in something?You know, not a door but like shutters on hinges. I didn’t say that, because it didn’t seem to me like Dickie was waiting for that particular answer. So I repeated the riddle with more emphasis.
“When is a door not a door?”
Dickie looked annoyed, so I gave him what he was waiting for: “I don’t know.”
“When it’s ajar,” Dickie said.
“What?” I asked, which is actually a good question the first time you hear a riddle like that.
“When it’s ajar,” Dickie said.
“A jar?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Dickie, snickering.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“When it’s ajar,” Dickie repeated.
“What do you mean, when it’s a jar?” I asked.
“Ajar,” Dickie said.
I said nothing.
“Ajar,” Dickie said again.
“Oh,” I said, as if I understood. And that was that.
I think it was my father who explained the answer to me. I bet my mother groaned, but my father probably thought it was funny, and I was left at 7
Hegel wrote in his Lectures on Fine Art that “the riddle belongs to conscious symbolism.” What is the riddle’s answer? It is derivation of meaning. According to Hegel, the riddle consists of “individual traits of character and properties drawn from the otherwise known external world and, as in nature and in externality generally, lying there scattered outside one another, they are associated together in a disparate and therefore striking way. As a result they lack a subject embracing them together [as predicates] into a unity . . .” This disparity of signs hinders the immediate solution as to which whole they all belong to.
In veiling the whole, the riddle forces us to rearrange the signs of a given object, thus showing the possibility of diversity, the possibility to combine the previously irreconcilable in new semantic arrangements.
Herewith we have a shrewd, clever, witty and expansive essay on the riddles and riddle poems in (mostly) Western literature from The Book of Exeter to Harry Potter and J. R. R. Tolkien and Emily Dickinson. It’s partly a highly suggestive ***ft essay and partly an informal history of ideas, also a refreshing sort of literary criticism, the kind that takes a long and inquisitive look at the words on the page.
Julie Larios is a friend, an esteemed colleague in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults Program and a gifted poet whose work has already graced these pages more than once (here and here). It is always a huge pleasure to have her back.
dg
—–
I’m not much of a “main highway” kind of person when it comes to thinking about the ***ft of writing. I go down lots of sides streets, I let my mind wander. Sometimes even a side street feels too wide. And I’ve been thinking lately about a small alley named “Riddles,” a deceptive short cut (sometimes filled with broken bottles and garbage cans) between one street and the next. I have the feeling deception is important. “Most felicitous sayings rely…on a capacity to deceive beforehand…” said Aristotle. “We have even more obviously learned something,” he said, “ if things are the opposite of what we thought they were, and the mind seems to say to itself, ‘How true. I was mistaken.’”
Riddles are all about questioning our own grasp of the world by questioning the nature of things, casting a new light – thereby casting new shadows – and I believe that thinking in riddle-mode can help us be better writers. After all, don’t riddles follow the pattern of all great works of literature by asking large questions of us like “Who am I?” and “Are things what they appear to be?” and – perhaps the most important question of all – “When is a door not a door?” Ah, yes, one of the great questions of Western literature. It has survived the test of time, as has its existential answer – “When it’s ajar.”
I remember the first time I heard this riddle, I was in Mrs. Frizzy’s second-grade class at Booksin Elementary, standing outside the cafeteria in the lunch line. A boy named Dickie, who was in line in front of me, turned and asked, “When is a door not a door?”
I repeated the riddle out loud. “When is a door not a door?”
Dickie waited as I turned the riddle over and over in my head. Well, I thought, maybe it’s not a door if it’s like a –what do you call it? – one of those swinging things you see in the movies; cowboys push through them when they walk into an old-time saloon, like Gary Cooper did in High Noon, or maybe John Wayne in something?You know, not a door but like shutters on hinges. I didn’t say that, because it didn’t seem to me like Dickie was waiting for that particular answer. So I repeated the riddle with more emphasis.
“When is a door not a door?”
Dickie looked annoyed, so I gave him what he was waiting for: “I don’t know.”
“When it’s ajar,” Dickie said.
“What?” I asked, which is actually a good question the first time you hear a riddle like that.
“When it’s ajar,” Dickie said.
“A jar?” I asked.
“Yeah,” said Dickie, snickering.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“When it’s ajar,” Dickie repeated.
“What do you mean, when it’s a jar?” I asked.
“Ajar,” Dickie said.
I said nothing.
“Ajar,” Dickie said again.
“Oh,” I said, as if I understood. And that was that.
I think it was my father who explained the answer to me. I bet my mother groaned, but my father probably thought it was funny, and I was left at 7
