The Meaning of the Beatles’ Most Meaningless Song

When we take humanities courses, we are introduced to a plethora of intimidating primary texts. Due to their idiosyncratic and enigmatic nature, we are often alienated from their essence, which leads us to formulate a question at hand. Only after understanding the question can we begin to grasp the author’s profound answers. Annotations and scholarly articles light the way by demonstrating how to critically approach a text through analysis, explaining what the author is constructing and how he does it. They offer compelling interpretations, suggesting new ways to engage with the texts and their implications. The problem is that there are multitudes of interpretations, which contradicts our natural instinct to question which is the “correct” one. However, such instinct is unnecessary when one contemplates the philosophical issue referred to as the impasse of epistemology. Epistemology refers to the theory of knowledge, concerned with what we know and how we know. The impasse arises from the problem that theoretical reflection cannot devise a clear, indisputable process for reaching a correct interpretation. Two facets are responsible for such a result — the circularity of interpretation and the dependence on the identity of the interpreter.

The impasse of epistemology becomes evident in the most ambiguous texts that provide space for various interpretations. From observing how multiple details can be arranged in diverse ways, we can see how we have difficulty determining which details are most important. This is evident in the study of “I am the Walrus,” an eccentric number of the Beatles that is still notorious for its nonsensical lyrics. In John Lennon’s composition, we can contemplate how any guesses on the songwriter's intention can never confirm the correct interpretation.

“I am the Walrus” is a track composed by John Lennon from the raucously colorful Magical Mystery Tour album. What one notices immediately from the first listen is the fragmented and cryptic nature of the lyrics. The contents of the lines are disjointed to the point that one can only be befuddled at the overall meaning. There are numerous interpretations of the song. Dave Rybaczewski, the owner of the Beatles archive website, claims that it was Lennon pouring out his anger on his grief from the death of Epstein, the Beatles' manager, and making a point of not trying to carve it into coherent sense — to defy authorities, government, and ultimately rational meaning. Jessica Shelton argues that it was related to the hippie movement, satirizing how it was moving away from the original ideals they began with. The paradox is that it is endlessly analyzable to the point that it is analysis-proof. The song could easily be dismissed as a series of gibberish. That is the common consensus — that Lennon wrote the song to confound listeners who had been dissecting the Beatles' lyrics.

The first cause of the impasse, which is the inherent circularity of interpretation, arises from our need to project a sense of the whole to construe a text’s parts. For example, the interpretation that Lennon was expressing his anger and grief regarding Epstein's death incorporates the historical context of the song being recorded after the incident. The resulting analysis anchors around the line “I am crying,” which conveys grief towards Epstein’s death and hints at John's unstable mental state. With this frame, Rybaczewski analyzes all other negative emotions towards institutions, police, corporations, and officials as the manifestations of John’s emotionally unstable state after Epstein's death. The line, “like pigs from a gun see how they fly,” the word “pig” used to be slang for police, and the phrase "see how they fly" evokes an image of people escaping. Shelton offers another approach, of the song being John’s commentary on the hippie movement. He argues the line “expert, texpert choking smokers don't you think the joker laughs at you,” refers to the hedonistic hippies as “smokers” and the authority figures deriding such a situation as “joker.” Both analyses have selected a certain event — Epstein's death and the hippie movement — as the framework, affirming the need to set a particular hypothesis to reach an interpretation. To support this hypothesis, details have to be selectively picked or omitted, making the process of understanding oppressive. All the details “naturally” align themselves to support the conclusion, so there is rarely a reason to suspect the validity of the hypothesis itself. Both interpretations invent narratives to give structure and direction to a sequence of lines that might otherwise seem random and incoherent. The narrative prematurely imposes a sense of the whole in understanding particular details, which makes the evidence somewhat predetermined. These predetermined bits of evidence are used to justify the narrative again. Thus, the interpretations are, to a certain extent, shaped by circular reasoning between hypothesis and evidence.

Rybaczewski and Shelton's hypotheses are based on their more fundamental presuppositions about the Beatles and Lennon. In his work “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,” Richard Rorty claims that “different partners in a discussion may not see eye to eye because they are concerned about different problems. Such divergences occur because the interpreters have conflicting beliefs about what the object is and how best to engage it.” In this case, the central question would be about the interpreters’ opinions on the identity of John Lennon: Rybaczewski viewed him as a human who has lost his beloved partner, while Shelton saw him as a spokesman for anti-institutionalism and the leader of the hippie subculture. The divergence arises from how they chose different aspects to define Lennon, most likely based on the qualities that they admire about him. They see John Lennon differently because they bring their own presuppositions in evaluating him. To a devout Christian, John Lennon would be no more than a sacrilegious rockstar due to his controversial interview where he stated that the Beatles is “more popular than Jesus.” Interpretation brings each person’s take on what the relevant elements are. As a result, it ultimately depends on who is trying to impose an understanding.

Due to two problems — the circularity of interpretation and the dependence on the interpreter's identity — every interpretation of “I am the Walrus” is inherently contestable. The lyrics defy its readers’ attempts to create an absolute narrative through fragmentation. From this experience, listeners confront the fundamental limitation of interpretation and grasp that an act of understanding is a negotiation between multiple attempts to achieve a coherent narrative. We should remember that the scholarly interpretations, despite the fact that they are products of meticulous reasoning, are all contestable. There is always a space for discovery — a new perspective that will reveal more about ourselves. The message also resonates with the latter part of the great challenge of life Neil deGrasse Tyson posted on Twitter: “knowing enough to think you are right, but not knowing enough to know you are wrong. We are sometimes too absorbed in achieving certainty that we turn away from the most certain uncertainty — that there is no absolute certainty.”