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February 8 - February 15, 2024
Nor is the issue always age. Happiness and dissatisfaction have their seasons.
For about as long as anyone’s been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings. Maybe it’s hard-wired into us that spring has to do with childhood and youth, summer with adulthood and romance and fulfillment and passion, autumn with decline and middle age and tiredness but also harvest, winter with old age and resentment and death. This pattern is so deeply ingrained in our cultural experience that we don’t even have to stop and think about it. Think about it we should, though, since once we know the pattern is in play, we can start looking at variation and nuance.
harvest, and not only of apples, is one element of autumn.
The seasons are always the same in literature and yet always different. What we learn, finally, as readers is that we don’t look for a shorthand in seasonal use—summer means x, winter y minus x—but a set of patterns that can be employed in a host of ways, some of them straightforward, others ironic or subversive. We know those patterns because they have been with us for so long.
there’s only one story.
I suppose what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human.
What happens, if the writer is good, is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading.
I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite unnerving to readers.
intertextuality.
Mikhail Bakhtin,
work interacts with other works. And those works with others. The result is a sort of World Wide Web of writing. Your novel may contain echoes or refutations of novels or poems you’ve never read.
archetype.
“Archetype” is a five-dollar word for “pattern,” or for the mythic original on which a pattern is based.
Don’t bother looking for the originals, though. You can’t find the archetype, just as you can’t find the pure myths.
What does matter is that there is this mythic level, the level on which archetype operates and from which we borrow the figure of, for instance, the dying-and-reviving man (or god) or the young boy who must undertake a long journey. Those stories—myth, archetype, religious narrative, the great body of literature—are always with us. Always in us. We can draw upon them, tap into them, add to them whenever we want.
Things have changed pretty dramatically in terms of equating scars or deformities with moral shortcomings or divine displeasure, but in literature we continue to understand physical imperfection in symbolic terms.
Are deformities and scars therefore always significant? Perhaps not. Perhaps sometimes a scar is simply a scar, a short leg or a hunchback merely that. But more often than not physical markings by their very nature call attention to themselves and signify some psychological or thematic point the writer wants to make.
something important must be at stake when blindness pops up in a story. Clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical.
when literal blindness, sight, darkness, and light are introduced into a story, it is nearly always the case that figurative seeing and blindness are at work. Here’s the caveat: seeing and blindness are generally at issue in many works, even where there is no hint of blindness on the part of windows, alleys, horses, speculations, or persons.
if you want your audience to know something important about your character (or the work at large), introduce it early, before you need it.
In literature there is no better, no more lyrical, no more perfectly metaphorical illness than heart disease.
the heart is also, and has been since ancient times, the symbolic repository of emotion.
The writer can use heart ailments as a kind of shorthand for the character, which is probably what happens most often, or he can use it as a social metaphor.
As a practical matter, then, we readers can play this two ways. If heart trouble shows up in a novel or play, we start looking for its signification, and we usually don’t have to hunt too hard. The other way around: if we see that characters have difficulties of the heart, we won’t be too surprised when emotional trouble becomes the physical ailment and the cardiac episode appears.
For Joyce, however, paralysis—physical, moral, social, spiritual, intellectual, political—informs his whole career.
Not all diseases are created equal.
what makes a prime literary disease?
It should be picturesque.
It should be mysterious in origin.
It should have strong symbolic or metaphorical possibilities.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, TB joined cancer in dominating the literary imagination regarding illness.
when a writer employs TB directly or indirectly, he’s making a statement about the victim of the disease.
the metaphorical possibilities a disease offers—generally
As an instance of individual suffering, bubonic plague is no bonus, but in terms of widespread, societal devastation, it’s a champion.
we want to get the most out of our reading, as far as is reasonable, we have to try to take the works as they were intended to be taken. The formula I generally offer is this: don’t read with your eyes. What I really mean is, don’t read only from your own fixed position in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and some.
Instead try to find a reading perspective that allows for sympathy with the historical moment of the story, that understands the text as having been written against its own social, historical, cultural, and personal background.
If you want to put pressure on a character to cause him to change or crumble, take him away from home, make him inhabit an alien world.
“last-chance-for-change” stories.
the point of the last-chance-for-change story, which is always the same: can this person be saved?
A lot of things in the world have more or less ready-made associations—or associations so long in use that they seem ready-made to us latecomers. Rivers? Change, flow, flood, or drought. Rocks? Stasis, resistance to change, permanence.
every work teaches us how to read it as we go along.
You know more than you think you do.
irony trumps everything.
That’s irony—take our expectations and upend them, make them work against us. You can pretty much do this with anything.
a sign that’s used in a way other than the intended one.
placed in a context where its conventional associations are upended.
Still, that expected meaning keeps hanging around, and since we experience this phantom meaning as an echo at the same time as the newly created, dominant meaning, all sorts of reverberations can be set off.
It’s kind of like the way jazz improvisation works.
What irony chiefly involves, then, is a deflection from expectation.
irony works because the audience understands something that eludes one or more of the characters.
