PicoBlog

This article is pay-walled because it’s part of the ‘Young Royals’ character analysis series, which will be locked in its entirety . (If you’re interested in the free content, you’re always welcome to check out the metaphor series, which starts here.)

Please read Part 1 and Part 2 of the character analysis series before reading the post below. Nothing in this article will make any sense if you don’t read those two posts first.

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Okay, so, I teased you all a bit with Simon’s secret; I’ll admit it. But in my defence: The show did it first.

It teased us with Simon’s secret and even gave us the finger. I just spotted it and passed on the message. I wash my hands in innocence.

Obviously, I immediately set out in search of whatever could be hidden in Simon’s metaphorical ‘locker’, of whatever he keeps in that metaphorical ‘backpack’ of his: his emotional and psychological baggage. I scoured the subtext, and I think I’ve worked out what it is now…at least mostly.

Disclaimer: It’s not that I have any more knowledge of it than you do. I don’t work on this show; I just analyze it. So, nothing of what you’re going to read about Simon’s secret below is in any way, shape or form official or unofficial information I have somehow obtained. This is just me making inferences based on the way the subtext is structured. I could totally be wrong on this (but I don’t think I am).

There’s one half of his secret that I’m really, absolutely, utterly certain about, and that’s the half we’re going to talk about today. And then there’s one half that I’m somewhat more tentative about. (We will address that one in a later post.) 

But let’s back up a bit…

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, then you might have noticed that there’s something missing from these little weekly analysis posts: me.

That is a deliberate choice. 

It’s not because I’m trying to appear mysterious or anything. (I promise I’m not really that interesting as a person.) No, there’s actually a good reason for that that goes far beyond the fact that I don’t like my personal information, such as my age, my sexual orientation, the weird ethnic mosaic of my ancestry or my professional background, to swirl around in the vast terrifying vortex that is the internet. The more important reason is actually all tied up with the way I’m writing these articles.

You see, there are two different ways to approach a text. There’s a lot of controversy about what to call them, and different terms are used for them in different countries. Some may call these two approaches ‘analysis’ vs. ‘criticism’. Others may delineate the concepts as ‘criticism’ vs. ‘critique’, and yet others differentiate between ‘interpretation’ and ‘critical analysis’, etc. The literary theory traditions differ in that respect between different countries and different academic traditions although they all seem to instinctively agree on the fact that you can interact with texts in different ways and approach them towards different ends.

I like to call these two approaches: the ‘inside-out’ approach and the ‘outside-in’ approach, but those are just made-up terms I use to make them easier to understand and remember.

You’ve probably seen a lot of examples of ‘outside-in’ approaches already. The term describes a method in which one takes something from outside of the text and holds it up to the text like a measuring tape to see if it measures up and whether it fits the framework one is trying to apply to it.

Just to give you a few examples: 

Maybe you have a degree in psychology and are an expert in child and adolescent development, so you watch a show like ‘Young Royals’ with this in mind and then interpret the ‘text’ through the lens of your knowledge, trying to see where and how the emotional and psychological abuse Wilhelm has to endure at the hands of his family is influencing both his characterization and the plot. 

Or maybe you have a professional background, personal experience or just a personal interest in examining and addressing ethnic discrimination, so you try to understand and write about what experiences most likely shaped Simon, a child of an immigrant, in the country his mother migrated to.

Or maybe you have a hobby, an interest or a fascination for a particular historical period of time or a degree in constitutional or criminal law, so you interpret the ‘text’, using your knowledge from these areas to dissect what is going on in this fictional version of Sweden as it’s nearing a constitutional crisis or to understand what August has done and what will most likely happen to him because of it.

All of these are examples of what I like to call the ‘outside-in’ approach (and what is called ‘criticism’ and a number of other terms in proper literature-theory parlance). You know something because you like it or have studied it or are interested in it or have a degree in it or have personally experienced something because of who you are…And you take this knowledge like a measuring tape and hold it up to the text, trying to gauge at what points the text touches your measuring tape and how.

The ‘inside-out’ approach (which is what this blog is all about) is a different beast entirely: In it, you try (as best you can) to leave your personal baggage (whatever it may be) backstage in the cloakroom, and then go and dissect the text metaphor by metaphor, literary device by literary device, shot by shot, frame by frame…Obviously, all of us are always and at all times influenced by who we are; there’s no escaping it. You can’t totally switch that off. (And if a reader is reading between the lines carefully, then they can always glean something about the person who’s writing a text – even with my modest scribblings here, I’m sure.) But in this approach, you have to at least try to divest yourself of, well…yourself, as much as humanly possible. And while there is obviously no such thing as an objective experience of art, you have to think of the ‘inside-out’ approach as something that, essentially, isn’t an ‘experience’ at all. Think of it in this way: The ‘water’ metaphor and the ‘baggage’ metaphor and the ‘football’ metaphor on ‘Young Royals’ will always be there. They exist. Whether I, the writer of these here lines, am a little green martian or am sexually attracted to butterflies shouldn’t change the fact that these metaphors truly exist in the ‘text’ that is ‘Young Royals’. And a proper ‘inside-out’ analysis needs to spot them and pick up on them.

If, as a kid at school, you were ever tortured by your literature teacher demanding you write endless essays about some poem, play or novel and were then specifically reminded by them to write a ‘text-immanent interpretation’ instead of a ‘text-external interpretation’, then please know that these are just two other terms used for the two approaches I’ve described above. And my approach on this blog falls squarely into the category labelled ‘text-immanent interpretation’ (even though I hope the posts on this blog aren’t as mind-numbingly boring as the hours you probably slaved away writing these essays at school because I’m really trying to make this a fun experience for you and stay away from all the overly academic language).

If you wanted to summarize all of this by means of a nice example, you could explain it like this: 

The ‘outside-in’ approach takes, say, the film ‘Titanic’ and looks at how the class system of the 1910s is reflected in the different classes of passengers aboard the ship and their respective treatment (ideological criticism) or examines the subtle way the oppression of the Irish by the English is alluded to in the film (ethnic criticism) or investigates the way women’s roles are explored by the film and then challenged by the main character (gender criticism), etc.

The ‘inside-out’ approach will happily ignore most of that and look at the way the ‘heart’ metaphor of the diamond around Kate Winslet’s neck interacts with the ‘water’ metaphor, and why (metaphorically speaking) the two main characters just have to have sex in an automobile of all places…and then go off the deep end about shot sizes, camera angles, the rules of shot composition and other cinematic rules.

I’m exaggerating a little bit, of course. There’s obviously a lot of overlap between these two approaches.

Someone working ‘outside-in’ and looking at a text through, say, a gender-criticism lens will on occasion spot a metaphor, as well, and utilize it to bolster a claim they’ve made in their interpretation of the text.

And someone working ‘inside-out’ (like yours truly) will on occasion mention something political or ideological in nature when a metaphor absolutely demands it (there’s no talking about Wilhelm’s gagged mouth in episode one without mentioning how appallingly he is being treated because of his sexual identity, for example).

But generally, these two approaches are separate entities, and it’s usually good to know what you’re dealing with before you start to read one or even write one yourself.

The reason for that is that they both have advantages and drawbacks that are very specific to each of them. Both approaches are absolutely valid ways of interacting with a text, but they both come with specific risks, and it’s good to know about those, so you know what you’re getting yourself into.

While an ‘outside-in’ approach (or criticism or ‘text-external interpretation’ or whatever you might want to call it) can be very enlightening, and, as a reader, you can learn a lot about topics that aren’t part of your own professional or personal background, this approach poses a certain risk: As a writer, you can inadvertently put things into the text you’re interpreting – things that just aren’t there. So, instead of letting the text tell you things, you start to tell the text things. You might have a certain outlook on life, a certain political conviction or some personal hangup or hobbyhorse, and it can be difficult to switch that off, so you see it in everything you read or consume – even where it might not be present or only present to a certain extent. That’s the one major danger that comes with this particular approach (and it’s one of the reasons why I’m not trying it out on this blog here; the other one being that there is already a lot of it out there, and I don’t feel I could truly add anything substantial or interesting to it).

The ‘inside-out’ approach comes with risks of its own as well, though. So, it’s not like this approach makes you somehow immune to dumb writing choices (far from it!). One of the major risks is the following scenario: You find something in the subtext (through a metaphor or other literary device) that you don’t like. And because you don’t like it, you don’t want it to be true for your beloved main character, so you…make the whole thing disappear. You ignore it like a dusty corner in your house, hoping it’ll just go away if you look at other parts of the subtext for a while and only come back to it later. You might even consider omitting that particular thing that you’ve found forever. Nobody wants to deal with things that they dislike, so this seems like the sensible choice, right?

This is what happened to me with Simon’s secret once I stumbled upon it. I disliked it, so I tried to keep it away from this blog. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized that looking at Simon without knowing this one thing about him means not knowing him as a character at all, so I’ll try to make up for my earlier (wrong) decision to cut out this integral part of his characterization, and we’ll start to dissect the whole complex of issues called ‘Simon’s secret’ right now.

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