Department of English Brock University
The Problem of Meaning in
Literature
A brief introduction for my Year 1 students by Professor John
Lye
Copyright 1996 by John Lye. See origianl webpage at:
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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:
* that meaning is what is intended by the author ;
* that meaning is created by and contained in the text itself
;
* that meaning is created by the reader.
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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:
1. by reading other works by the same author,
2. by knowing more and more about what sort of meanings seem
to
be common to works in that particular tradition, time and
genre,
3. 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
4. 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
1. 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),
2. 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
3. persons may not be conscious of all of the motives that
attend their work.
For an expanded consideration of meaning and the author, see
my
page The concept of the death of the author and the study of
contemporary theory
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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.
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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.
1. 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.
2. Meaning is contextual; change the context, you often
change
the meaning.
3. 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.
(I have a brief page on various Reader Response positions
which
you might like to look at.)
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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