Analysis Yet Again

Another week, another reason to drag my favorite two-word Henry James phrase into things, that quote being "remorseless analysis." (Narrowly beating out "extravagant umbrella", "hang fire", and "sacred rage"). And the reason today is that my mother tells me, daily, and the other people who live in our house confirm, daily, that what my problem is ("I have just one problem?" -- Hal Incandenza) is that I overanalyze everything. She rarely uses the word "remorseless", but there it is: the problem: overanalysis. Now, this may be a bit of killing to cure, but, as the fact that I can't get through an entire sentence here without a variety of embedded clauses and parentheses might have tipped you off, my first instinct is in most circumstances, indeed, to analyze things. But is it over-such? Can one overanalyze, and do I? Let us overanalyze.

When Strether, in the Ambassadors, invokes that beautiful phrase, he is sad; he is disappointed that his friend Waymarsh will never remorselessly analyze him. It's as though he is jealous that his powers of analysis -- which seem to be involuntary and, we learn throughout the novel, not terribly keen -- will never be turned on himself. A friend of mine once told me that she was disappointed after making a certain song the music that others heard while her phone was ringing; because she did that, she was the person she knew who heard the song the list. I myself often consider it a cruel trick of fate that, while everyone else sees it all the time they get to listen to me, I only see my perfectly straight hairline on the occasion that I visit a mirror. So maybe remorseless analysis is like that. But probably not -- it doesn't seem as though being the object of it is enviable (I mean really, think about it). Nor does it seem as though overanalysis is exposing some ugly truths through which the rest of the world slumbers, because it is, after all, not just called enoughanalysis.

Rather, I think that what my mother pinpoints when she calls overanalyzing my problem is that overanalysis is exactly what makes something into art; and art is exactly useless. I read a story this morning -- a deeply weird story -- by Nabokov, about a dragon, called The Dragon. It wonders what it be like if a dragon flew into a little town in Germany, and comes up with: it would get papered with advertisements for a tobacco company, it would be attacked by a circus performer dressed as a knight and in the service of a rival tobacco company, and as a result of this, flies up to his cave, embarrassed, and dies of shame. Which doesn't sound really wrong, as far as dragons in 1930s Germany go. And I don't mean to suggest here that my babbled observations with which I annoy my mother (or whomever's ear is the one closest to my right {which, I notice, is the side to which I most often darkly mutter snark}) is of a quality similar to a Nabokov short story, even a weird Nabokov short story. Rather, that same stream of muttering is something that, as a person who reads and probably reads too much, I have come to take for just the noise of the world; and, of course, the real world is much more often just quite. Just enoughanalyzed. I am subjecting my poor family to that roar that lies on the other side of silence.

Now, I don't super know what to do about this. It is probably the most insidious thing I have ever noticed about my career as a reader, and, luckily, it is not all that insidious. It is one of those lucky problems whose solution is the not talking about it. I tried to defend my constant, remorseless overanalysis to my mother by telling her that it was compulsory, and I don't really know which of the two of us was correct. But obviously, broadcasting whatever Deep Analysis I think of is not compulsory. It's just the fruit of reading too many stories that really work through what the tobacco companies would do to dragons.