'NORWEGIAN WOOD': SMOKE OR FIRE?

                        I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me

                        She showed me her room, isn’t it good Norwegian wood?

 

She asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere,

So I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair.

 

I sat on a rug, biding my time, drinking her wine

We talked until two, and then she said, “It’s time for bed.”

 

She told me she worked in the mornings and started to laugh,

I told her I didn’t and crawled off to sleep in the bath.

 

And, when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown

So I lit a fire, isn’t it good Norwegian wood? 

 

 

It is fascinating to follow Internet discussions of the meanings of pop songs.  Within a dozen or so opinions are all the issues, and schools of interpretation, that exist within professional literary criticism. A case in point is the meaning of ‘Norwegian Wood’: my favourite, by far, of all the Beatles songs.

            I had always assumed the lyrics to be pretty self-evident.  Read a few explanations, though, and the range of understanding is bewildering.  Since they conflict with one another, can they all be right?   No; or, at least, not equally so.

            With the statement, “This is what it means to me,” one cannot argue; any more than with the statement, “I like Coca Cola.”  One can, however, insist that This is what it means to me and This is what it means are two different things. Personal significance, after all, cannot apply when the document in question is a will, or the Highway Code, or a lottery ticket; and even with a poem or a song there must be some part of it that is agreed common property.

Ambiguity, for whatever reason, ensures that there may be more than one way of reading a text, but that is not to say that all readings are equally valid.  The exception is when lack of apparent meaning may be the whole point.  Life is devoid of meaning; so are values.  The lack of meaning is the meaning: in which case, whatever significance the work has for has for you is its significance.

That, however, is a desperate instance that does not invalidate the general principle that although there may be rival readings, some readings are better than others.

            Why?  Well consider semantic change. Words alter their meanings over time, creating accidental ambiguity.  ‘Punk’ did not mean in Elizabethan England what it meant in the 1980’s.  ‘Gay’ did not mean for Chaucer what it means for us.  To ignore the difference simply leads to misreading.  In this instance, it is valid – necessary, indeed - to go outside the poem for an etymological dictionary, in order to get back inside it later. 

             Sometimes, though, there is deliberate ambiguity on the part of the writer: meaning is given in coded form for personal or political reasons.   When Wilde calls for tolerance towards ‘fallen’ woman, he may be calling also for tolerance towards other forms of sexuality even more unacceptable to the Victorians.  When Revelation speaks of “Babylon” it may also mean Rome, but had to get itself past the Roman censors.  In each case, there is the surface meaning, and the hidden meaning.   In these instances, too, to go outside the poem – to historical context, or to biography: although it must always be remembered that the ‘I’ of fiction is often not the same person as the narrator – may be relevant and necessary.

            Asking the author directly is, however, less useful than might be supposed.  It may not always be possible, for a start. Chaucer is dead.  Ask one living author, and answers might be clear: I meant this, I did not mean that.  With another, you might get contradictory responses given to different people at different times that cancel each other out.  And, then again, the author’s own understanding of the work may not be reliable: he/she may have consciously written about one thing, but have subconsciously been occupied about another.  

All these issues and more arise with interpretations of ‘Norwegian Wood’. 

 

Let me start with three interpretations that seem to me to be wide of the mark, in decreasing order of wrongness.

            Number One.   The song is about seduction by an older woman.  Now I agree that no two people read the same book, because each reader brings to the text unique personal experience.  If, by analogy, words or tune remind you of an experience of your own, well and good: if the common denominator is no more than an encounter between two people.  But there is a difference between looking into a mirror – in which you are the temporary subject – and looking at a painting which contains fixed material to be interpreted and is about things other than you. 

            I reject Interpretation One on three counts.  Firstly, there is no evidence for, and plenty against, a consummated sexual encounter.  Secondly, seduction suggests innocence on the part of one partner: neither of the people in the song can be described as innocent.  Thirdly, there is nothing to suggest an older woman.  “Girl”, it is true, can in some contexts mean simply ‘female’.  “Bird”, however, especially in Sixties parlance, implies some one young.  The small flat and the scanty furniture suggest some one starting out on her own in life; not some one well established.

            A second interpretation is that the girl is a prostitute.  This, at least, does take account of “She once had me”: in the sense of being cheated.  It also accounts for the lack of furniture: all a prostitute needs is a bed. (Some one, here, is really trying hard to make sense of the words).  The narrator, anticipating free sex, finds that the girl wants to be paid.  Where is the evidence for this?  There is no reference to, or sense of, a financial transaction.  He wakes up to find she’s gone off to work.  But if she was a prostitute, wasn’t she working when she was with him?  And would she have been sitting around chatting when she had a living to earn at peak time?  And maybe the lack of furniture is because she’s a conventionally-employed girl who can’t yet afford to buy much?

            The third clutch of interpretations sees the need to go outside the words to find the meaning.  In an interview, John Lennon said the song was abut an affair he was having, which he wrote about in a coded way to keep it secret from his wife.  On another occasion, however, Lennon said the encounter failed because the girl was a lesbian; so much for an author as a source of clarification.  Paul McCartney apparently asked John what he would have done if a girl had turned him down like that, and John replied he would have torched her flat.

            Then there is the title.  The original, reportedly, was to have been ‘Knowing She Would’ which – because Brian Epstein would have disapproved – was then changed.   If so, the song must have changed as well, because she wouldn’t.  And it’s not unusual for a poem, song or novel title to change half a dozen times in the process of composition, irrespective of the fustiness of your manager. 

There remains the meaning of Norwegian Wood: substance, not song.   Some see it as the pine cladding popular on walls in the 60’s; others as cheap pine furniture. The words fit either meaning equally well.  Others, however, see it as a code for marijuana.  What all these lines of interpretation have in common is that authority lies outside the text, not within it.

Interpretations Four, Five, Six, Seven and Eight. run parallel until the last verse.  Boy meets girl and is invited back to her flat.  He gets his hopes up, only to have them dashed, and crawls off to the bath in humiliation.  In the morning, finding her gone to work, he lights a fire. 

Interpretation Four.  This means he lights a fire in the grate, and sits down in front of it, drinking a cup of tea.  It cannot mean he sets fire to the flat because there is no record that John Lennon was convicted of arson (note “I” = Lennon).  Besides, John Lennon wouldn’t have done that sort of thing.  Who says; although irrelevant, anyway?  I have come across plenty of affirmations that John Lennon was a genius, but very few that he was a nice person.  And even if “I” is not John (the possibility is recognised) no one would be so cruel as to burn down a poor girl’s flat, especially since it would endanger the neighbours.

 Really?   In March 2009 there was the hideous story of a Scottish teenager who did exactly that.  Or rather, he set fire to the girl herself, and then fled.  It was the inhabitant of a neighbouring apartment, alerted by the smoke, who broke down the door and discovered the dying, petrol-doused and still-burning victim.  

Interpretation Five.  It cannot mean setting fire to the flat because the sitar music is so plaintive and beautiful.

True, but a deliberate mismatch between form and content is a very powerful source of irony.  Think of The Godfather, in which there are juxtaposed scenes of an infant baptism and multiple murders: one of the deaths being that of the baby’s father. 

Interpretation Six.  Depressed and needing consolation, the narrator lights a fire, but the ‘fire’ is a joint.  At least this has the virtue of taking account of the last line: it’s good quality marijuana.  But if that’s true, then what about the Norwegian wood in the first verse?  Does it mean the walls or furniture are made of marijuana?

The other problem is that there is very little evidence, apart from the assertions of the interpreter, that ‘Norwegian wood’ ever was a code for cannabis.  The reasoning seems to be something like this.  John Lennon took drugs. ‘Lucy in the Sky’ is about drugs; therefore this must also be about drugs.  But you can’t set fire to LSD; so this must be about pot.  QED.  Or non-QED.

Interpretation Seven.  The narrator smokes a joint and, because of his altered consciousness, then sets fire to the flat.  That seems to me to be a very good reading, but Number Eight – that he simply sets fire to her flat in revenge – seems to me to be even better, and the one that arises naturally from the text.

My own reading.  There is no reason to suppose that the ‘I’ is John Lennon.  The idea for the song may have arisen from an extra-marital affair, but there is no need to accept the song as autobiography: in the creative process, what starts as personal experience may rapidly be modified by imagination; just as something that never actually happened may easily be imagined. 

            The narrator starts with a typical male boast about having ‘had’ a girl sexually.  Honesty then corrects him:  actually she ‘had’ – ie: cheated – me.  This is not a stretching of the text when we consider that the song appeared within the album Rubber Soul.  We are in an area of puns and double meanings. 

            Predatory young urban man encounters teasing young urban woman, and is invited back to her sparsely-furnished flat.   He likes the look of the room, however, because he has expectations of a sexual result.

            I find no reason not to take “drinking her wine” literally.  Views that see it as ‘drinking in the richness of her personality’ seem to be seduced by the sitar music, and unwilling to confront the sheer coldness – nastiness, even - of the depicted relationship. 

            After a protracted period of teasing, the girl finally mentions “bed”.  For her, however, that means going to sleep, and on her own, because she has to go to work in the morning.  The narrator ignominiously “crawls off” – if that isn’t an image of defeat, I don’t know what is – to sleep in the bath. In the morning, finding her gone, he sets fire to her flat before he leaves, in revenge for his humiliation.  What was good Norwegian wood because it looked nice is now good for another reason: because it makes such effective firewood. 

            The plangent tones of the sitar are unquestionably at odds with the cynicism of the words; recalling, perhaps, a former era of greater tenderness, and highlighting its passing.  But whatever one makes of the sentiments that the lyrics express, as a record of the hard-edged impersonality of 60’s sexual encounters, they could hardly be bettered.