As yet, literary culture hasn’t put as much effort into understanding the literary orgasm in all its degrees and manifestations as we have in trying to probe its sexual equivalent. Walking into a newsagent’s, you might be tempted into thinking that the generative organs held the exclusive franchise on moments of heightened nervous stimulation. There’s no ‘ten-step program to improve your shelf life’ screaming out from practically every publication on display, no advice for those who want to spice up their literary encounters. Yet culture can contribute as much if not more to our spiritual make-up, to our intellectual well-being and sense of self as a satisfying sexual relationship. And it’s not as messy.
The slipperiness of meaning is only part of the problem here; the tools we have at our disposal are a tad on the primitive side, which doesn’t help. Sure we know plenty about the mechanics and the circumstances of writing - scholars have identified and labelled every last element of grammar and syntax that writers use in their compositions; dictionaries provide us with exhaustive and exhausting listings of the definitions of individual words; there’s a huge number of biographies, histories, journals and memoirs we can use to better understand the writer and his milieu. But the deficiencies in our understanding lie not in the availability of context or even literary taxonomy, but a way of examining what mixes these ingredients together to produce meaning. It’s not so much what literature means where we fall down, but our appreciation of how it means it. What holds literature together. Without that knowledge, we’re merely scratching the surface of the subject, unable to account for why we love it.
Granted, it’s often difficult to explain a love for anything, but it’s one of the contentions of this book that we’re not as far down the road with literature as we should be.
Regrettably, the act of reading doesn’t yet have a developed ‘-ology’ to help us.
The closest we come is this mongrel discipline called ‘literary criticism’, which isn’t a science or even an organized body of consensual knowledge. Rather it is a collection of disparate opinions and impressions expressed with varying degrees of confidence and insight that doesn’t possess much sense of coherence. In fact, as we noted right at the start of this book, it’s in one hell of a mess and needs a radical overhauling if anyone wants to take it seriously ever again. You don’t necessarily have to possess a qualification to be a literary critic - you simply have to have views about literature (and that, of course, goes for me too). So while this is potentially advantageous in that anyone can join in the debate, we have tended to confuse conviction with ability, and it’s often the emptiest vessels that have rung the loudest. Or else we’ve allowed ourselves to be hypnotized by polysyllables, or approaches that have promised (but usually failed to deliver) a ‘scientific’ alternative to the polite impressionism that passed for criticism until the 1940’s. So there’s no shortage of ‘-isms’ - just any that transcend theory and are actually useful for the general reader.
That’s not to completely dismiss some excellent work that’s been done in this field, however. For example, the pioneering critic I. A. Richards famously discerned four different facets of meaning: "sense" (what meaning means), "feeling" (the reader's response towards that meaning), "tone" (the author's attitude toward the reader), and "intention" (the effect of the other three, whether conscious or not). It’s a perfectly workable system, and these ideas are still influential over 80 years since their formulation. You’ll find a few of them echoed in this book, and they’re still widely taught in universities. Or you can read practically anything by critics like Frank Kermode, John Carey, Harold Bloom, Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks or TS Eliot and come away enlightened about one corner or other of the study of meaning. But it’s all rather piecemeal, and few (OK, practically none) of them pitch their arguments outside the walls of academia, or at best, the extremely well-read.
The most obvious result is that works of lit crit rarely trouble the bestseller lists (at the time of writing, the highest-placed title makes a distinctly unimpressive 503, 840th in the Amazon rankings), and they aren’t the first port of call for fans of literature who want to know more about it.
In my experience even the good ones are too personal or impressionistic to strike a chord, too highfalutin’ for their conclusions to be generally applied or even understood, or else too dry to be engaging. I’ve never seen the word ‘orgasm’ in any of them, certainly not in the context of the act of reading.
Not only is fun missing from the agenda, it’s rare to find a writer who doesn’t straitjacket meaning in his desire to sell you his opinions. Like it or not, criticism tends to work at the objective end of meaning, its major currency being explanation rather than suggestion. And this often builds inappropriate structures within the text, which can seriously interfere with its capacity to resonate with the reader.
So until a) our critical approach can take in both emotion and cerebration, and b) can reconcile the desire to explain while at the same time acknowledging textual richness, our interpretations are likely to remain, at best, partial readings, and we won’t get as much out as literature as we should. Hence this book - these are its twin ambitions. Modest, aren’t they?
There are four parts: in the first, we’ll look at the Big Themes that have dominated the study of meaning over the last three-thousand or so years; the second will examine how recreational readers (i.e. you and I) interact with meaning; the third, what writers understand by meaning and how that understanding influences what and how they write; and the last will consider how successfully lit crit interfaces (or doesn’t) with meaning, and how it can better help us enjoy our reading. In short, it’ll deal with the ways meaning gets into a work of literature, what it does when it’s there, and how we extract it, without letting too much daylight in on the magic that is creativity.
The study of How Literature Works and what it means dates back, in the West at least, about 2,500 years to writers like Hesiod and Pindar in Ancient Greece, who drop the odd literary apercu into their work (usually slagging off other poets), and to philosophers like Xenophanes and Heraclitus, both of whom nit-pick their way through Homer. Heraclitus, in particular took issue with the way we understand language and literature, complaining that we don’t pay enough attention to their meaning. And that much of what passes for literature is philosophically unsustainable. So no change there then. In fact, we’ve been going round in circles ever since, so this section’s going to concern itself with a handful of those Big Themes that just won’t go away.
Before we dive into the discussion, however, it might be an idea to anchor our observations in some solid ground. Let me introduce you to the Meaning Line.
MEANING------------------SIGNIFICANCE
It won’t have escaped your notice that this is a rather simple binary model, owing to the fact it’s currently empty. But, trust me, it’ll expand and develop as the argument progresses. All we need to do for now is define the terms that lie at either end of it, and their relationship to one another. Basically, they’re both aspects of how meaning is ordered within a text.
By ‘significance’, I’ll be referring (as consistently as humanly possible) to textual content that exists in a kind of suspended state. It’s meaning that conveys a portentousness that can’t be defined, rationalized or explained in any structured way, and that is irreducible by logic. It’s almost like a hunch, or a sixth sense that you know exists, but you don’t know what it is or why you’re experiencing it.
This quality of suspension can indicate either of two things: first, that there isn’t enough tangible explanation for the rational part of the brain to work on; second, that there’s too much varied or conflicting data which cannot be prioritized or ordered into sense.
Just because this significance remains frustratingly vague doesn’t necessarily diminish its power or its potential impact - in fact, its very refusal to be reduced to an explanation can render it all the more, well . . . significant. By virtue of its imprecision, it retains an air of attraction and even fascination. Indeed, it lies at the root of the literary orgasm we looked at earlier.
Which brings us to ‘Meaning’ at the other end of our line. Meaning is a rather easier proposition to describe; it’s a more crystallized version of significance, a quantity that can be either partially or completely explained. That explanation can range from being a direct correspondence void of any ambiguity (This means That and no questions asked), to being the vaguest hypothesis or suggestion of what is meant (This could mean That. Perhaps. If that’s OK with you). The absolute extreme of meaning would be something completely unequivocal like an imperative (STOP!!!!) - something it’s impossible to interpret in any other way other than that which is intended.
So what we’ve created is, for now, is like a clothes line we can peg our ideas on. It’ll turn out to be a useful visual mnemonic when things start getting a bit abstract, providing us with a spectrum of possibilities to work within.
But, I hear you say, why choose to work with this particular pair of opposing qualities? Because, quite simply, that’s the trajectory literary criticism has taken from its earliest manifestations, travelling all the way from meaning, where the journey started back in Ancient Greece, to the most meaningless form of significance, which it reached in France in the 1950’s or so when the Deconstructionists came along.
So, conceptually, we’ve travelled all the way from the extreme left of the line to the extreme right. And all points in between. Let me explain.
When WB Yeats asserted that it’s only through the clash of opposites that any progress can be made, he was echoing what had been going on in philosophy for many centuries. Opposing qualities such as objectivity and subjectivity, art and life, soul and body were often paired up, more often than not for the sake of argument. Take Manichaean dualism, for instance - the dichotomy between good and evil. Likewise that between the heart and the brain, Yin and Yang. No matter how contingent the relationship between the two opposing qualities, it does have the desired effect of establishing a set of parameters inside which a debate can take place.
Footnote:
1. For seasoned students of meaning, this scheme may sound familiar: in his book Validity in Interpretation, E. D. Hirsch distinguished "meaning," the discovery of the author's intentions, from "significance," any imaginable subsidiary meanings, not necessarily intended by the author but construed by an audience. It’s a neat distinction, but I’m not saying that. Instead, I’m proposing that meaning and significance are different principle for ordering meaning - and either party can do this ordering.