章节：Introduction How’d He Do That?

Literature has its grammar, too.

Memory. Symbol. Pattern. These are the three items that, more than any other, separate the

professorial reader from the rest of the crowd.

Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

A related phenomenon in professorial reading is pattern recognition.

章节：1 Every Trip Is a Quest (Except When It’s Not)

We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered.

Once you figure out quests, the rest is easy.

章节：2 Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion

whenever people eat or drink

together, it’s communion.

literary versions of communion can interpret the word in quite a variety of ways.

eating with another is a way of saying, “I’m with you, I like you, we form a

community together.” And that is a form of communion.

writing a meal scene is so difficult, and so inherently uninteresting, that there really needs to be some compelling reason to include one in the story.

that reason has to do with how characters are getting along.

show something else as sex.

communion doesn’t need to be holy. Or even decent.

He discovers he has something in common with this stranger—eating as a fundamental element of life—that there is a bond between them.

If a well-run meal or snack portends good things for community and understanding, then the failed meal stands as a bad sign.

His main goal, though, is to draw us into that moment, to pull our chairs up to that table so that we are utterly convinced of the reality of the meal.

he wants to convey the sense of tension and conflict that has been running through the

evening—there are a host of us-against-them and you-against-me moments earlier and even during the meal—and this tension will stand at odds with the sharing of this sumptuous and, given the holiday, unifying meal.

we need to be part of that communion.

The thing we share is our death.

章节：3 Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires

Evil has had to do with sex since the serpent seduced Eve.

So vampirism isn’t about vampires?

there was so much the Victorians couldn’t write about directly, chiefly sex and sexuality, they found ways of transforming those taboo subjects and issues into other forms.

even today, when there are no limits on subject matter or treatment, writers still use ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and all manner of scary things to symbolize various aspects of our more common reality.

ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires.

Sometimes the really scary bloodsuckers are entirely human.

The essentials of the vampire story, as we discussed earlier: an older figure representing corrupt, outworn values; a young, preferably virginal female; a stripping away of her youth, energy, virtue; a continuance of the life force of the old male; the death or destruction of the young woman.

he deems the figure of the consuming spirit or vampiric personality a useful narrative vehicle.

the thin line between the ordinary and the monstrous.

That’s what this figure really comes down to, whether in Elizabethan, Victorian, or more modern incarnations: exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what we want. Denying someone else’s right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another. That’s pretty much what the vampire does, after all.

My guess is that as long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us.

章节：4 Now, Where Have I Seen Her Before?

the more connect-the-dot drawings you do, the more likely you are to recognize the design early on

there’s no such thing as a wholly original work of literature.

the mind flashes bits and pieces of childhood experiences, past reading, every movie the writer/creator has ever seen

stories grow out of other stories, poems out of other poems

we recognize elements from some prior text and begin drawing comparisons and parallels that may be fantastic, parodic, tragic, anything

Once that happens, our reading of the text changes from the reading governed by what’s overtly on the page.

This dialogue between old texts and new is always going on at one level or another. Critics speak of this dialogue as intertextuality, the ongoing interaction between poems or stories.

章节：5 When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare ...

at some very deep level he is ingrained in our psyches.

There is a kind of authority lent by something being almost universally known, where one has only to utter certain lines and people nod their heads in recognition.

when we recognize the interplay between these dramas, we become partners with the new dramatist in creating meaning.

Fugard relies on our awareness of the Shakespearean text as he constructs his play, and that reliance allows him to say more with fewer direct statements.

章节：8 It’s Greek to Me

myth is a body of story that matters.

what the artist is doing is reaching back for stories that matter to him and his community—for myth.

Greek and Roman myth is so much a part of the fabric of our consciousness, of our unconscious really, that we scarcely notice.

So that’s one way classical myth can work: overt subject matter for poems and paintings and operas and novels.

Walcott reminds us by this parallel of the potential for greatness that resides in all of us, no matter how humble our worldly circumstances.

the situations match up more closely than we might expect.

The need to protect one’s family: Hector. The need to maintain one’s dignity: Achilles. The determination to remain faithful and to have faith: Penelope. The struggle to return home: Odysseus. Homer gives us four great struggles of the human being: with nature, with the divine, with other humans, and with ourselves.

In our modern world, of course, parallels may be ironized, that is, turned on their head for purposes of irony

章节：9 It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow

weather is never just weather. It’s never just rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth, cold, and probably sleet, although the incidence of sleet in my reading is too rare to generalize.

Drowning is one of our deepest fears

the big eraser that destroys but also allows a brand-new start.

That dark and stormy evening (and I suspect that before general illumination by streetlight and neon all stormy evenings were pretty darned dark) has worlds of atmosphere and mood.

why does he bring rain into it?

First of all, as a plot device. The rain forces these men together in very uncomfortable (for the condemned man and the brother) circumstances.

Second, atmospherics. Rain can be

more mysterious, murkier, more isolating than most other weather conditions.

finally there is the democratic element. Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

One of the paradoxes of rain is how clean it is coming down and how much mud it can make when it lands.

you have to be careful what you wish for, or for that matter what you want cleansed.

章节：10 Never Stand Next to the Hero

nearly all literature is character-based.

No matter how large or small the actions, though, the most important thing that characters can do is change—grow, develop,

learn, mature, call it what you will.

in story and song, book and film, there is generally no more persuasive reason

for revenge, outrage, or prompting to action than the killing of the best friend (or his progeny). It really doesn’t pay to get too close to hero-types.

characters are

not people.

if it’s not in the text, it doesn’t exist. We can only read what is present in a novel, play, or film.

Characters are products of writers’ imaginations—and readers’ imaginations.

Two powerful forces come together to make a literary character.

The first, writerly, invention sketches out a figure, while the second, readerly, invention receives that figure and fills in the blank spaces.

The plot needs something to happen in order to move forward, so someone must be sacrificed.

literary works are not democracies.

the fictive world (I’m paraphrasing here) is divided up into round and flat characters. Round characters are what we could call three-dimensional, full of traits and strengths and weaknesses and contradictions, capable of change and growth. Flat characters, not so much. They lack full development in the narrative or drama, so they’re more two-dimensional, like cartoon cutouts.

we are all, each and every last one of us, the protagonist of our own story.

In fictive works, some characters are more equal than other characters. A lot more equal.

Even round characters are somewhat less than complete beings. They are merely simulacra, illusions meant to suggest fully formed humans.

Characters are created on something like a need-to-know basis. Their utility is all that matters.

plot is character in action; character is revealed and shaped by plot.

What happens to Gatsby must feel like the only outcome, given who Gatsby is and who Nick is and who Daisy is.

章节：Interlude Does He Mean That?

lateral thinking is what we’re really discussing: the way writers can keep their eye on the target, whether it be the plot of the play or the ending of the novel or

the argument of the poem, and at the same time bring in a great deal of at least tangentially related material.

章节：11... More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence

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.

Violence in literature, though, while it is literal, is usually also something else.

the essentially hostile or at least uncaring relationship we have with the universe.

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.

We sense greater weight or depth in works when there is something happening beyond the surface.

章节：12 Is That a Symbol?

what do you think it stands for, because that’s probably what it does. At least for you.

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.

If they can, it’s not symbolism, it’s allegory. Here’s how allegory works: things stand for other things on a one-for-one basis.

Allegories have one mission to accomplish—convey a certain message

Symbols, though, generally don’t work so neatly. The

thing referred to is likely not reducible to a single statement but will more probably involve a range of possible meanings and interpretations.

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.

The only thing we are sure of about the cave as symbol is that it keeps its secrets.

What the cave symbolizes will be determined to a large extent by how the individual

reader engages the text.

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.

Ask questions of the text: what’s the writer doing with this image, this object, this act; what possibilities are suggested by the movement of the narrative or the lyric; and most important, what does it feel like it’s doing?

a reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.

章节：13 It’s All Political

The political writing I personally dislike is programmatic, pushing a single cause or concern or party position, or it’s tied into a highly topical situation that doesn’t transfer well out of its own specific time and place.

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.

Nearly all writing is political on some level.

most works must engage with their own specific period in ways that can be called political.

writers tend to be men and women who are interested in the world around them. That world contains many things, and on the level of society, part of what it contains is the political reality of the time—power structures, relations among

classes, issues of justice and rights, interactions between the sexes and among various racial and ethnic constituencies.

That’s why political and social considerations often find their way onto the page in some guise, even when the result doesn’t look terribly “political.”

Knowing a little something about the social and political milieu out of which a writer creates can only help us understand her work, not because that milieu controls her thinking but because that is the world she engages when she sits down to write.

章节：14 Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too

The bottom line, I usually tell the class, is that Christ figures are where you find them, and as you find them.

章节：15 Flights of Fancy

Culturally and literarily, we have toyed with the idea of flight since earliest times.

In general, flying is freedom, we might say, freedom not only from specific circumstances but from those more general burdens that tie us down.

García Márquez plays on our notions of wings and flight to explore the situation’s ironic possibilities.

the act of falling from vast heights and surviving is as miraculous, and as symbolically meaningful, as the act of flight itself.

the antidote to limitations and shackles is freedom.

Indeed, often in literature the freeing of the spirit is seen in terms of flight.

章节：16 It’s All About Sex ...

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.

章节：17... Except Sex

describing two human beings engaging in the most intimate of shared acts is very nearly the least rewarding enterprise a writer can undertake.

most of the time when writers deal with sex, they avoid writing about the act itself.

The further truth is that even when they write

about sex, they’re really writing about something else.

If they write about sex and mean strictly sex, we have a word for that. Pornography.

He carries not a woman but an entire constellation of possibilities into the bedroom. What

chance does his sexual performance have?

the sex is on one level symbolic action claiming for the individual freedom from convention and for the writer freedom from censorship.

You just know that these scenes mean something more than what’s going on in them. It’s true in life as well, where sex can be pleasure, sacrifice, submission, rebellion, resignation, supplication,

domination, enlightenment, the whole works.

章节：18 If She Comes Up, It’s Baptism

The thing about baptism is, you have to be ready to receive it.

Baptism can mean a host of things, of which rebirth is only one.

baptism is a sort of reenactment on a very small scale of that drowning and

restoration of life

The rebirths/baptisms have a lot of common threads, but every drowning is serving its own purpose: character revelation, thematic development of violence or failure or guilt, plot complication or denouement.

章节：19 Geography Matters ...

In a sense, every story or poem is a

vacation, and every writer has to ask, every time, Where is this one taking place?

What, in other words, does geography mean to a work of literature?

Geography: hills, etc. Stuff: economics, politics, history.

So what’s geography? Rivers, hills, valleys, buttes, steppes, glaciers, swamps, mountains, prairies, chasms, seas, islands, people. In poetry and fiction, it may be mostly people.

Literary geography is typically about humans inhabiting spaces, and at the same time the spaces inhabiting humans.

Geography is setting, but it’s also (or can be) psychology, attitude, finance, industry—anything that place can forge in the people who live there.

Actually, the scariest thing Poe could do to us is to put a perfectly normal human specimen in that setting, where no one could remain safe. And that’s one thing landscape and place—geography—can do for a story.

Geography can also define or even develop character.

the real target is the physical village—as place, as center of mystery and threat, as alien environment, as generic home of potential

enemies and uncertain friends.

employ geography as a metaphor for the psyche—when his characters go south, they are really digging deep into their subconscious, delving into that region of darkest fears and desires.

whether it’s Italy or Greece or Africa or Malaysia or Vietnam, when writers send characters south, it’s so they can run amok.

It’s place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism.

章节：20... So Does Season

the speaker is seriously feeling his age here and making us feel it, too, with those boughs shaking in the cold winds, those last faded leaves still hanging, if barely, in the canopy, those empty limbs

that formerly were so full of life and song.

A few other writers have also had something to say about the seasons in connection with the human experience.

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.

we can start looking at variation and nuance.

Every writer can make these modifications in his or her use of the seasons, and the variation produced keeps seasonal symbolism fresh and interesting.

We read the seasons in them almost without being conscious of the many associations we bring to that reading.

章节：Interlude One Story

there’s only one story.

What’s it about?

That’s probably the best question you’ll ever ask, and I apologize for responding with a really lame answer: I don’t know.

It’s about everything that anyone wants to write about

I suppose what the one story, the ur-story, is about is ourselves, about what it means to be human

what our poets and storytellers do for us—drag a rock up to the fire, have a seat, listen to this one—is explain us-and-the-world, or us-in-the-world.

The basic premise of intertextuality is really pretty simple: everything’s connected.

The result is a sort of World Wide Web of writing.

“Archetype” is a five-dollar word for “pattern,” or for the mythic original on which a pattern is based.

It’s like this: somewhere back in myth, something—a story component, let’s call it—comes into being.

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.

章节：21 Marked for Greatness

First, the obvious but nonetheless necessary observation: in real life, when people have any physical mark or imperfection, it means nothing thematically,

metaphorically, or spiritually.

but in literature we continue to understand physical imperfection in symbolic terms.

physical markings by their very nature call attention to themselves and signify some psychological or thematic point the writer wants to make

章节：22 He’s Blind for a Reason, You Know

There are a lot of things that have to happen when a writer introduces a blind character into a story, and even more in a play.

Clearly the author wants to emphasize other levels of sight and blindness beyond the physical. Moreover, such references are usually quite pervasive in a work where insight and blindness are at issue.

The challenging thing about literature is finding answers, but equally important is recognizing

what questions need to be asked, and if we pay attention, the text usually tells us.

What it does, though, is set up a pattern of reference and suggestion as the young boy watches, hides, peeks, and gazes his way through a story that is alternately bathed in light and lost in shadow.

A truly great story or play, as “Araby” and Oedipus Rex are, makes demands on us as readers; in a sense it

teaches us how to read it. We feel that there’s something more going on in the story—a richness, a resonance, a depth—than we picked up at first, so we return to it to find those elements that account for that sensation.

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.

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.

章节：23 It’s Never Just Heart Disease ... And Rarely Just Illness

In literature there is no better, no more lyrical, no more perfectly metaphorical illness than heart disease.

More commonly, though, heart trouble takes the form of heart disease.

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.

Their choice of illness is quite telling: each of them elects to employ a fragile

heart as a device to deceive the respective spouse, to be able to construct an elaborate personal fiction based on heart disease, to announce to the world that he or she suffers from a “bad heart.”

Every age has its special disease. The Romantics and Victorians had consumption; we have AIDS.

That’s what happens when works get reenvisioned: we learn something about the age that produced the original as well as about our own.

章节：24 Don’t Read with Your Eyes

On the other hand, a too rigid insistence on the fictive world corresponding on all points to the world we know can be terribly limiting not only to our enjoyment but to our understanding of literary works.

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.

also need to acknowledge here that there is a different model of professional reading,

deconstruction, that pushes skepticism and doubt to its extreme, questioning nearly everything in the story or poem at hand, to deconstruct the work and show how the author is not really in charge of his materials. The goal of these deconstructive readings is to demonstrate how the work is controlled and reduced by the values and prejudices of its own time.

Too much acceptance of the author’s viewpoint can lead to difficulties.

What I would suggest is that we see Shylock’s villainy in the context of the difficult and complex situation Shakespeare creates for him, see if he makes sense as an individual and not merely as a type or representative of a hated group, see if the play works independently of whatever bigotry might lie behind it or if it requires that bigotry to function as art. For me, if it must rely on hatred i […]

章节：25 It’s My Symbol and I’ll Cry If I Want To

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.

One of the things we’ve been talking about in this book is how we can build a sort of literary database of imagery and its uses: rain, check; shared meals, check; quests, check; and so on. What that database relies upon, naturally, is repetition.

The point is, we have, as writers, artists, and readers, a common pool of figurative data built up

over centuries of use in a host of situations and for a multiplicity of purposes—a store of images, symbols, similes, and metaphors that we not only can access but do, almost automatically.

This warehouse of implications, as it were, permits texts to mean more than one thing simultaneously.

Let’s be clear, just so no one runs off the rails: these implications are invariably secondary. The primary meaning of the text is the story it is telling, the surface discussion (landscape description,

action, argument, and so on).

The gyres embody opposing historical or philosophical or spiritual forces, so they’re a little like Hegel’s or Marx’s dialectic, in which opposing forces clash together to create a new reality. Except that dialectics don’t spin or whirl.

Singular systems don’t get general discussions.

every work teaches us how to read it as we go along.

every page of a literary work is part of an education in reading.

humans are very good at entering these “private” realms, at inferring meanings, at judging the implications of texts—in other words, we’re good at reading.

章节：26 Is He Serious? And Other Ironies

That’s irony—take our expectations and upend them, make them work against us.

What is a sign? It’s something that signifies a message.

The signifier, in other words, while being fairly stable itself, doesn’t have to be used in the planned way. Its meaning can be deflected from the expected meaning.

Mysteries, like

irony, make great use of deflection.

irony doesn’t work for everyone. Because of the multivocal nature of irony—we hear those multiple voices simultaneously—readers who are inclined toward univocal utterances simply may not register that multiplicity.

We must remember: irony trumps everything. In other words, every chapter in this book goes out the window when irony comes in the door.