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Maureen i have been thinking about this question... "If the halo around the girl meant that she was (or could have been) Mary, what does it mean to you? What is its significance to the story as a whole? I am not looking here for how it could infleuence one's way of looking at literature, but rather ***how it matters to the story with respect to the meaning it conveys***." ..specifically, what value is there in looking for symbols and cultural references and 'reading between the lines' of fiction? i am wondering about this now that the question has been posed? it is something that i kind of 'do for a living', if you will, but does it serve a purpose? how does it matter to the story? Chandra Maureen, Thanks for understanding my question. I had also added when I posed that question that when readers look for symbols and their meanings are they acting on their own, or are they looking for something they have been told to look for by some guru. If a person does not know ANYTHING about Ganesha, would he recognise Ganesha if he sees him in his dreams? Would he rather think that he had an impossibly strange dream? The chances are that he would not know that Ganesha had visited him! For example, if I did not know that Mary has a halo around her head, I would not compare the girl to Mary when I read that the light cast a kind of halo around the girl's head. In other words, unless we know what we have to look for, the chances are we do not even recognise its presence, let alone understand its meaning. To put it very concisely, interpretation of symbols, as I see it, leads to two things (1) appreciation of one's own intelligence / knowledge, and (2) appreciation of the intelligence/background knowledge of the writer. Both are valid reasons. May be this is the purpose that is served (as answer to your question). But even if the reader is not able to interpret symbols, he/she can still appreciate and admire a work, perhaps because of the feelings expressed(as long as they touch the reader), the flow of the story, the style of writing, the combination of words used, etc, etc. Does interpretation of the symbols matter to the story? I doubt that it would. Because the way I interpret some symbols may be totally different from the way you or somebody else would interpret. A story like Araby can be read on different levels, each valid and having its own value. Each level of reading leads to its own kind of enjoyment. zarqa javed >...specifically, what value is there in looking for symbols and cultural references and 'reading between the lines' of fiction? i am wondering about this now that the question has been posed? it is something that i kind of 'do for a living', if you will, but does it >serve a purpose? how does it matter to the story? Wow, I never thought about it this way before. I just know that I derive A LOT of satisfaction from knowing what's between the lines. It adds to the dimensionality of the work to see those layers and layers beneath the words. It doesn't matter to the story per se...I mean the story is always going to be there, inviolate on our shelves, regardless of the wrangling we do with it. But *working through* a story instills it with a three-dimensional life that lives on and churns around in our minds. The story becomes alive in our minds (I'm not saying REAL but somehow animate and interactive) and the more we read the more meanings we can garner from it. Plus like all experience, reading builds up over time so that everything we read after a story will in some ways be informed by that story (eg seeing Joyce in Rushdie) I don't know, looking for symbols and cultural motives is just down right fun for me...I guess, it tweaks the scientist in me, the archeologist digging up one alternate reality after another....and unlike science nothing we come up with is written in stone...there is always more room for interpretation, more stuff to dig up. very provocative question! Chandra Joyce group! I have just returned from attending a very interesting talk in Zürich on "The Mandalas". Martin Brauen who is the curator, at the Ethnological Museum of the University of Zürich, for Tibet and Himalayas, and the author of the book "The Mandala, Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism" gave the talk. During the talk he quoted the following saying from Kalu Rinpoche, a tibetan monk. As it reminded me immediately of the discussion that has been going on here about the symbolism in Araby, I thought of sharing the quotation with you. Kalu Rinpoche said: "Any one of these various cosmologies is completely valid for the beings whose karmic projections cause them to experience their universe in that way. There is a cerain relativity inthe way one experiences the world. This means that all the possible experiences of every being in the six realms of existence ... are based upon karmic inclinations and degrees of individual development. Thus, on a relative level any cosmology is valid. on an ultimate level, no cosmology is absolultely true. It cannot be universally valid, given the different conventional situations of beings." What has this saying to do with Araby? The connection is the recognition and interpretation of symbols in Araby. For me a rusty bicycle pump would have been a rusty bicycle pump, and nothing else. For others it meant something else! ;-D .. And it has also to do with the question (as Maureen had reminded yesterday), I had asked on Monday, "What do these interpretations have to do with the story?" |
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