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Violence is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications. It can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, Shakespearean, Romantic, allegorical, transcendent. Violence in real life just is. If someone punches you in the nose in a supermarket parking lot, it’s simply aggression. It doesn’t contain meaning beyond the act itself. Violence in literature, though, while it is literal, is usually also something else. That same punch in the nose may be a metaphor.
Valid. Violence in literature definitely isn’t a spontaneous choice—for example, a punch in the face to a best friend likely means underlying tension and issues in the relationship.
The literal violence encodes a broader point about the essentially hostile or at least uncaring relationship we have with the universe. Our lives and deaths—the boy dies of blood loss and shock—are as nothing to the universe, of which the best that can be said is that it is indifferent, though it may be actively interested in our demise. The title of the poem is taken from Macbeth, “Out, out, brief candle,” suggesting the brevity not merely of a teenager’s life but of any human existence, particularly in cosmic terms. The smallness and fragility of our lives is met with the cold indifference
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That is an insanely cool message. I might read this for myself.
Let’s think about two categories of violence in literature: the specific injury that authors cause characters to visit on one another or on themselves, and the narrative violence that causes characters harm in general.
Sure. Different but the same. Different: no guilty party exists in the narrative (unless you count the author, who is present everywhere and nowhere). Same: does it really matter to the dead person? Or this: writers kill off characters for the same set of reasons—make action happen, cause plot complications, end plot complications, put other characters under stress.
Violence is everywhere in literature. We’d lose most of Shakespeare without it, and Homer and Ovid and Marlowe (both Christopher and Philip), much of Milton, Lawrence, Twain, Dickens, Frost, Tolkien, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Saul Bellow, and on and on. I guess Jane Austen wouldn’t be too much affected, but relying on her would leave our reading a little thin. It seems, then, that there’s no option for us but to accept it and figure out what it means.
Would the author of the book consider violence a necessary component of literature? As in, a good book should necessarily have violence? If a book is absent of violence, isn’t the author able to represent conflict in a different way?
Here’s the problem with symbols: people expect them to mean something. Not just any something, but one something in particular. Exactly. Maximum. You know what? It doesn’t work like that. Oh, sure, there are some symbols that work straightforwardly: a white flag means, I give up, don’t shoot. Or it means, We come in peace. See? Even in a fairly clear-cut case we can’t pin down a single meaning, although they’re pretty close. So some symbols do have a relatively limited range of meanings, but in general a symbol can’t be reduced to standing for only one thing.
This is precisely true. A symbol can have multiple meanings, or at the very least one meaning explained in many different ways. There’s no wrong answer really, unless it’s completely out of kilter.
If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory.
If there is ambiguity or a lack of clarity regarding that one-to-one correspondence between the emblem—the figurative construct—and the thing it represents, then the allegory fails because the message is blurred.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) is popular among many readers precisely because it’s relatively easy to figure out what it all means. Orwell is desperate for us to get the point, not a point. Revolutions inevitably fail, he tells us, because those who come to power are corrupted by it and reject the values and principles they initially embraced.
I see. So, sometimes an author wants one single takeaway rather than multiple and they try to make that clear.
If we want to figure out what a symbol might mean, we have to use a variety of tools on it: questions, experience, preexisting knowledge. What else is Forster doing with caves? What are other outcomes in the text, or uses of caves in general that we can recall? What else can we bring to bear on this cave that might yield up meaning? So here we go.
I have to ask what if an author genuinely didn’t mean for something to be a symbol and people interpret it that way? What if something that was meant to be irrelevant comes to be under scrutinisation? How do we know whether the author intended something to be a symbol? If we misinterpret something, is that at the fault of the reader or the author?
Every reader’s experience of every work is unique, largely because each person will emphasize various elements to differing degrees, and those differences will cause certain features of the text to become more or less pronounced. We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class, faith, social involvement, and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than
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Well said.
The other problem with symbols is that many readers expect them to be objects and images rather than events or actions. Action can also be symbolic.
The more you exercise the symbolic imagination, the better and quicker it works. We tend to give writers all the credit, but reading is also an event of the imagination; our creativity, our inventiveness, encounters those of the writer, and in that meeting we puzzle out what she means, what we understand her to mean, what uses we can put her writing to. Imagination isn’t fantasy.
Rather, a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another. So engage that other creative intelligence. Listen to your instincts. Pay attention to what you feel about the text. It probably means something.
Reading isn’t entirely a one way street—the reader uses their own imagination, creates their own assumptions, interprets things their own way. The author is there to supplement the foundation and material of those actions.
Concerning politics in literary texts, here’s what I think: I hate “political” writing—novels, plays, poems. They don’t travel well, don’t age well, and generally aren’t much good in their own time and place, however sincere they may be.
I honestly agree with these points. Although this section about political writings makes me think about U.S. history and how some of the political writings at the time really did influence the success of a goal. For example, in the Gilded Age, muckrakers exposed the horrible working conditions and child labor occurring during the time period, shedding light on the era’s issues.
I love “political” writing. Writing that engages the realities of its world—that thinks about human problems, including those in the social and political realm, that addresses the rights of persons and the wrongs of those in power—can be not only interesting but hugely compelling.
I thought the other just said they hated political writing.
I love “political” writing. Writing that engages the realities of its world—that thinks about human problems, including those in the social and political realm, that addresses the rights of persons and the wrongs of those in power—can be not only interesting but hugely compelling.
I thought the other just said they hated political writing.
Nearly all writing is political on some level.
Is that really true? I find that somewhat hard to believe.
Or here’s someone whose stories you may not have thought of as inevitably political: Edgar Allan Poe.
In both of these tales Poe offers criticism of the European class system, which privileges the unworthy and the unhealthy, where the entire atmosphere is corrupt and decaying, where the results are madness and death.
I never thought Edgar Allan Poe’s stories political. That’s very interesting. The one he wrote in which a man hears the beating heart of his murder victim is one of my personal favorites of Poe.
So is every literary work political? I can’t go that far. Some of my more political colleagues may tell you yes, that every work is either part of the social problem or part of the solution (they’ll give it to you with rather more subtlety than that, but that’s the gist). I do think, though, that most works must engage with their own specific period in ways that can be called political.
How can you tell if a work is political? I think the author answers this question by stating certain conditions need to be met. What if those conditions are met unintentionally? For example, the author criticises a social construct without meaning to be political but the readers interpret the literary work to be political anyway. How do we avoid doing that?
Woolf handles all of this so subtly that we may not think of it as political, but it is. It always—or almost always—is.
I’m not so sure I agree with this point. I’m sure some authors try to steer clear of political debate entirely.
THIS MAY SURPRISE SOME OF YOU, but we live in a Christian culture. What I mean is that since the preponderance of cultural influences has come down to us from European early settlers, and since those early settlers inflicted their values on the “benighted” cultures they encountered (“benighted,” from the Old English, meaning “anyone darker than myself”), those inflicted values have gained ascendancy.
Oh European settlers definitely tried to overturn “benighted” cultures. For example, the Spanish settlers tried to integrate Native Americans into Christianity through a system of slavery called the encomienda system.
We have to bring our imaginations to bear on a story if we are to see all its possibilities; otherwise it’s just about somebody who did something.
Pretty amazing when you consider that the author may have been dead for a thousand years, yet we can still have this kind of exchange, this dialogue, with her. At the same time, this doesn’t indicate the story can mean anything we want it to, since that would be a case of our imagination not bothering with that of the author and just inventing whatever it wants to see in the text. That’s not reading, that’s writing. But that’s another matter, and one we’ll discuss elsewhere.
I mentioned earlier that reading is a two-way street and this solidifies it. Having an “exchange” with the author can entail the author providing an action, idea, or symbol in which the reader interprets and forms a conclusion off of. But forming conclusions that don’t really make sense pertaining to the story isn’t reading, it’s writing since you’re making your own ideas.
Why, you might ask, are there Christ figures? As with most other cases we’ve looked at where the work engages some prior text, the short answer is that probably the writer wants to make a certain point. Perhaps the parallel deepens our sense of the character’s sacrifice if we see it as somehow similar to the greatest sacrifice we know of. Maybe it has to do with redemption, or hope, or miracle.
One of my favorite shows is called Death Note. There’s a scene where the antagonist, L, washes Light’s feet, the protagonist. It is a reference to when Jesus washed Judas’s feet before his betrayal. The scene highlighted how L was about to be cruelly betrayed by Light.
But count on it, the writer is up to something. How do we know what he’s up to? That’s another job for imagination.
This references the two-way street of reading, I’m sure.
What does it mean to say that someone who remains physically earthbound has been able to fly? It’s spiritual, we might conclude.
It’s really pretty straightforward: flight is freedom.
Reminds me of the idea of a bird trapped in a cage; when they’re in the cage, they can’t fly. When they’ve been released, they soar.
Nevertheless, the act of falling from vast heights and surviving is as miraculous, and as symbolically meaningful, as the act of flight itself. As thrilled as we are by the prospect of flying, we are also frightened at the prospect of falling, and anything that seems to defy the inevitability of a plummeting demise sets our imaginations working overtime.
His understanding of flight is purely symbolic, yet his need for escape is no less real for that. In order for him to become a creator, his spirit must soar; he must be free.
Indeed, often in literature the freeing of the spirit is seen in terms of flight.
These flights of fancy allow us, as readers, to take off, to let our imaginations take flight. We can sail off with characters, freed of the limitations of our tuition payments and mortgage rates; we can soar into interpretation and speculation.
Suddenly we discover that sex doesn’t have to look like sex: other objects and activities can stand in for sexual organs and sex acts, which is good, since those organs and acts can only be arranged in so many ways and are not inevitably decorous.
When the author says objects and activities can stand in for sexual organs and sex acts does he mean metaphorically? Like in an earlier chapter where he explained how noisily and suggestively sharing a dinner with someone hinted at such an act?
Perhaps he can no longer use his lance, so he sends the young man. It isn’t wanton or wild sex, but it’s still sex.
see. So it’s unlikely that her sexual issues will present themselves in terms of sexual organs and acts; much more likely they’ll look like . . . a bowl and some keys.
This chapter taught me that explicit sex in literature isn’t necessary to convey the notions and connotations that come with its illustration. Metaphors and symbols are able to stand in as innuendos of the activity, whether to be more appropriate or to simply have more of an impact than what explicit, written sex would convey.
To tell the truth, most writing that deals directly with sex makes you wish for the good old days of the billowing curtain and the gently lapping waves.
Why is that? Is it because it is somewhat difficult to write? Or that it’s hard to accurately convey a message or meaning of some sort when people are so distracted by the actions themselves?
The truth is that most of the time when writers deal with sex, they avoid writing about the act itself. There are a lot of scenes that jump from the first button being undone to a postcoital cigarette (metaphorically, that is) or that cut from the unbuttoning to another scene entirely. The further truth is that even when they write about sex, they’re really writing about something else.
I would maintain this is not from trepidation on the writer’s part (it’s hard to find any evidence of Durrell being inhibited about much of anything) but from his sense that in novels so overheated by passion, the sexiest thing he can do is show everything but the lovemaking itself.
The “sexiest” thing he can do is avoid writing about sex? I’m lost here.
For one thing, as many potential readers already know, Alex narrates in a patois he calls Nadsat, a mix of English and slang words, many of them of Slavic origin. The effect of this linguistic mode is to describe things in such alien ways that the acts themselves seem alien as well.
As a woman and a minor entertainer, she has comparatively little control, and as an illegitimate orphan whose father refuses to recognize her and her twin, Nora, she has even less. Taking some form of control once in a while therefore becomes all the more essential.
This actually reminds me of the Handmaid’s Tale. The narrator takes any opportunity of power, whether that’s using “face cream” (melted butter) or taking a drag from a cigarette.
It’s true in life as well, where sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication, domination, enlightenment, the whole works.
Sometimes even good literary sex is about something else.
When the author says “about something else” what exactly do they mean? Does the sex between two characters demonstrate a characteristic of their relationship some way?
Symbolically, that’s the same pattern we see in baptism: death and rebirth through the medium of water. He’s thrown into the water, where his old identity dies with his older brother. The self who bobs to the surface and clings to the sailboat is a new being. He goes out an insecure, awkward younger brother and comes back an only child, facing a world that knows him as that kid brother, as his old self.
Wow. The entire metric and standard he was measuring his self worth by was his brother, and with that gone, he and those around him aren’t able to “estimate” his worth anymore. And the river symbolises that as a kind of “baptism” and rebirth. That’s cool.
And here’s the thing he discovers: being born is painful. And that goes whether you’re born or reborn.
He’s still after gold, and characters who seek gold aren’t ready for change.
Is the author implying characters who strive to attain riches aren’t going to experience change?
So when writers baptize a character they mean death, rebirth, new identity? Generally, yes. But we need to be a little careful here. Baptism can mean a host of things, of which rebirth is only one.
“Always” and “never” aren’t good words in literary studies.
I’ve heard this somewhere before, but yeah, fair point.
Like baptism, drowning has plenty to tell us in a story. So when your character goes underwater, you have to hold your breath. Just, you know, till you see her come back up.
From this chapter I learned a character’s submersion in water can mean a couple things, one of those being a rebirth (in which the character is transformed when they exit the water, having undergone some change while in it).
LET’S GO ON VACATION. You say okay and then ask your first question, which is . . . Who’s paying? Which month? Can we get time off? No. None of those. Where? That’s the one.
Haha that’s accurate.
