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"Meaning" is a difficult issue, and what I have to say here only
scratches the surface of a complex and contested area. How do we know what a
work of literature is 'supposed'; to mean, or what its 'real' meaning is? There
are several ways to approach this:
The author
Does a work of literature mean what the author 'intended' it to mean, and if
so, how can we tell? If all the evidence we have is the text itself, we can
only speculate on what the priorities and ideas of the author were from our
set of interpretive practices and values (how we read literature and how we
see the world). We can expand this:
- by reading other works by the same author,
- by knowing more and more about what sort of meanings seem to be common
to works in that particular tradition, time and genre,
- by knowing how the author and other writers and readers of that time
read texts -- what their interpretive practices were (as reading and
writing must be part of the same set of activities), and
- by knowing what the cultural values and symbols of the time were.
Any person or text can only 'mean' within a set of preexisting, socially
supported ideas, symbols, images, ways of thinking and values. In a sense
there is no such thing as a 'personal' meaning; although we have different
experiences in our lives and different temperaments and interests, we will
interpret the world according to social norms and cultural meanings -- there's
no other way to do it.
We may have as evidence for meaning what the author said or wrote about the
work, but this is not always reliable. Authorial intention is complicated not
only by the fact that an author's ways of meaning and of using literary
conventions are cultural, but by the facts that
- the author's work may very well have taken her in directions she did not
originally foresee and have developed meanings which she did not intend
and indeed may not recognize (our historical records are full of authors
attesting to this),
- the works may embody cultural or symbolic meanings which are not fully
clear to the author herself and may emerge only through historical or
other cultural pespective, and
- persons may not be conscious of all of the motives that attend their
work.
The Text
Does the meaning exist 'in' the text? There is an argument that the formal
properties of the text--the grammar, the language, the uses of image and so
forth--contain and produce the meaning, so that any educated (competent)
reader will inevitably come to essentially the same interpretation as any
other. Of course, it becomes almost impossible to know whether the same
interpretations are arrived at because the formal properties securely encode
the meaning, or because all of the 'competent' readers were taught to read the
formal properties of texts in roughly the same way. As a text is in a sense
only ink-marks on a page, and as all meanings are culturally created and
transferred, the argument that the meaning is 'in' the text is not a
particularly persuasive one.
The meaning might be more likely to be in the conventions of meaning, the
traditions, the cultural codes which have been handed down, so that insofar as
we and other readers (and the author) might be said to agree on the meaning of
the text, that agreement would be created by common traditions and conventions
of usage, practice and interpretation. In different time periods, with
different cultural perspectives (including class, gender, ethnicity, belief
and world-view), or with different purposes for reading no matter what the
distance in time or cultural situation, competent readers can arrive at
different readings of texts. As on the one hand a text is an historical
document, a material fact, and as on the other meaning is inevitably cultural
and contextual, the question of whether the text 'really means' what it means
to a particular reader, group or tradition can be a difficult and complex one.
The Reader
Does the meaning then exist in the reader's response, her processing or
reception of the text? In a sense this is inescapable: meaning exists only
insofar as it means to someone, and art is composed in order to evoke sets of
responses in the reader (there is no other reason for it to exist, or for it
to have patterns or aesthetic qualities, or for it to use symbols or have
cultural codes). But this leads us to three essential issues.
- Meaning is 'social', that is, language and conventions work only as
shared meaning, and our way of viewing the world can exist only as shared
or sharable. When we read a text, we are participating in social, or
cultural, meaning. Response is not merely an individual thing, but is part
of culture and history.
- Meaning is contextual; change the context, you often change the meaning.
- Texts constructed as literature, or 'art', have their own codes and
practices, and the more we know of them, the more we can 'decode' the
text, that is, understand it - consequently, there is in regard to the
question of meaning the matter of reader competency, as it is called, the
experience and knowledge of decoding literary texts.
Your professor might insist on your having and practicing competency in
reading by insisting that any interpretation you have (a) be rooted in
(authorized by) the text itself and (b) be responsible to everything in the
text -- that is, that your interpretation of any line or action be in the
context of the whole of the work. But you may have to learn other competencies
too. For instance in reading Mulk Raj Anand's The Untouchables you
might have to learn what the social structure of India was like, what
traditions of writing about and/or by Untouchables were in effect in India in
the early 1930's, what political, cultural, and personal influences Mulk Raj
Anand was guided by in constructing the imaginative world of this short novel;
you might have to learn, in reading John Donne's poems, about, for instance,
the 'platonic' (really, Florentine Neo-Plotinian) theory of love. As another
kind of competency, you might have to practice reading certain kinds of
literature, whose methods seem alien to you or particularly difficult for you,
so that you can understand how that kind of literature works.
You may see that this idea that meaning requires competency in reading can
bring us back, as meanings are cultural and as art is artifact, to different
conventions and ways of reading and writing, and to the historically situated
understandings of the section on the Author, above; at the least, 'meaning'
requires a negotiation between cultural meanings across time, culture, gender,
class. As readers you have in fact acquired a good deal of competency already;
you are about to acquire more. The point of this brief essay is that 'meaning'
is a phenomenon that is not easily ascribed or located, that it is historical,
social, and derived from the traditions of reading and thinking and
understanding the world that you are educated about and socialized in.
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© 1997, 2000 John Lye.
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