Headed home from an evening in San Francisco, I stopped by City Lights Books to browse the shelves before the store closed for the night. The cover of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tail caught my eye, but when I picked it up, it was the pages that really grabbed my interest.
I don’t mean the content of the pages (at least not at first), I mean the pages themselves—they had a deckle edge, and I rushed to project a whole lot meaning onto the content of the book itself. How brilliant, I thought, to treat the object in this way—how profound!
I thought of how it reflected on the book as a recovered artifact, or as a banned book pieced back together by many hands. I thought of people reproducing it in secret and cutting pages roughly by hand. I felt the rough, uneven edge with my thumb, and I felt connected to this object.
After some research it became clear that this wasn’t the purpose of the deckle edge at all—I was simply holding the 40th anniversary edition published under the Vintage imprint of Penguin Random House. It was the same deckle edge that they apply to many anniversary editions, and apparently had nothing to do with the content of this book.
I started reading the book on the BART and was presented with another example of readers making their own assumptions. Atwood claims to have not named the protagonist anything other than Offred—readers had simply assumed her real name.
Some have deduced that Offred’s real name is June, since of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium, June is the only one that never appears again. That was not my original thought, but it fits, so readers are welcome to it.
It’s what I was referring to in I, Art when I claimed that the audience contributes the final leg of the journey in a piece of art. It’s easy to simply think that you were “wrong” once you discover that the creator had not intended what you had assumed; that I was wrong to assume the intent that I had. You’re not wrong, though—it’s just your contribution.
I love the copy of the book that I purchased because the form of the book connects me to the content of the book, even if that was unintentional on the part of the publisher. I romanticize it because it could only have happened with a physical book—there are no deckle edges on my Kindle books; no texture to rub my thumb against.
All art is interpreted by its audience. You should feel free to interpret how you wish, and to leave that mark on the work if it makes you feel more connected to it. You should expect that your own art will take a similar journey, and be open to the audience contributing their part.