How to Read Literature Like a Professor Chapter 16 - Interlude

Chapter 16

It’s All About Sex

The author goes into the prevalence of sexual symbolism in literature. In earlier times, stories of knights roaming the land with their phallic-shaped lances to prove their status and position in society were extremely common. The author credits Sigmund Freud for the present prevalence of sexual symbolism as well as the awareness of such symbolism among lay readers. The discussion of sex and its antecedent matters was at certain times considered taboo or was censored, and so authors used symbols to convey sexual relations. He cites the example of Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence in which two men fight nude in the mud while the closeness of their relationship is remarked upon. Authors may deliberately choose to refer subtly to sex to create a more intense effect that doesn’t shock the reader with a description of sexual acts.

Chapter 17

Except Sex

It is quite difficult to write about sex in an engaging manner, which is why many authors choose not to do it directly. However, those that do choose to write explicit scenes almost always do so to convey a deeper meaning. The author then discusses the love scene from The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. In the book, this act is described to last ninety seconds as the character of the woman represents a lifestyle unfettered by victorian values and thus renders the man unable to perform sexually. The author discusses the literature that deals with versions of sexual perversion such as Lolita by Vladimir Nakobov and A clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Both of which rarely allude to any explicit sexual interactions and he argues that A clockwork Orange focuses more heavily on violence than sex. Other authors like Angela Carter have references to explicit sex in their books but they are seldom about sex alone and rather have other embedded meanings.

Chapter 18

If She comes up, It's Baptism

The author mentions the numerous time's characters have died from drowning and states that an immersion in water followed by emergence is generally used to represent a symbolic baptism. It is interpreted as a form of birth. Toni Morrison applies the symbol in both the Song of Solomon and Beloved. In the first, the milkman is exposed to water three times which represents the Christian baptism as the subject is immersed in water three times in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The other has several allusions to baptism and focuses on water’s power to create new life.

The author reminds us that there are no absolutes and so getting wet certainly does not always allude to baptism. The reader may pick up on the meaning by looking for details that indicate a renewal or new birth has taken place. Drowning is also a popular symbol that signifies the middle passage in African American Literature.

Chapter 19

Location Matters

The author discusses the relevance of the physical setting in a work of literature. Traditionally, traveling south generally indicates a descent into darkness and towards human places while the opposite direction signifies ascent into brightness and inhuman places. English novels often featured characters traveling to India and Africa, which generally indicated moral deterioration or complications. Oftentimes, the physical setting serves as a metaphor for a character’s internal condition. The author highlights how certain kinds of landscapes have specific meanings that are observed in a particular literary tradition like the Prairies in American and the Bogs in Irish Literature. However, he concludes that places generally only have a possible set of meanings depending upon the context of the story.

Chapter 20

So Does Season

The author discusses the prevalence of seasons as symbols with generally agreed-upon associations. He gives the example of William Shakespeare and Henry James for their use of seasonal imagery to convey a deeper meaning. Shakespeare’s sonnet 73 describes the aging of an old man like the turn of the seasons from fall to winter. On the other hand, Henry James uses seasonal names to indicate the nature of the characters for example Winterbourne and Daisy miller. Seasons have been widely used to represent similar ideas throughout literature and have so led to the creation of stylistic parallels in literature written ages apart. In addition to seasons, seasonal events like the harvest can be used to indicate events in the lives of the characters. He continues to explain that although there are several parallel meanings of seasons in literature, yet differences can emerge as different seasons have disparate significance in certain cultures. He cites the example of spring, which was the season of comedy for those of Ancient Greece, but signifies the resurrection of Christ for Christians.

Interlude

One Story

The author returns to his prior claim that there only actually is one story, he explains that the story isn’t necessarily about one thing but it rather represents everything. He explains that most writers are familiar with the notion that no work of literature is ever completely original, and even argues that a completely alien work would be a strange experience for the reader. He encourages writers to exercise willful amnesia as they go about trying to create their text so as not to create stories that aren’t directly lifted from the literature they have read.

He then explains the concept of intertextuality, one developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian scholar who proposed that all literature was interconnected just like a very large web. Although some authors have come out against this concept, the evidence from the texts produced and the knowledge of the author’s lives keeps the idea relevant. He also expounds on the Archetype which is a concept that can be represented in a character or an idea that can be identified through pattern recognition. He concludes that just as it is impossible to find the original archetype similarly there isn’t truly one story but rather a big story that is around us all the time.

Analysis

Sigmund Freud's ideas and theories have found a lot more resonance in literature than psychology, and this could be because psychoanalysis can sometimes seem too fantastical or far-fetched. Besides the influence of Sigmund Freud, the prevalence of sexual references in literature is also due to the nearly unchanging character of sexual relations since time immemorial. While several authors were forced to disguise sexual themes in other symbols due to censorship, many writers have done so out of choice. Foster explains that this is mostly because of the challenge involved in writing an engaging explicit sex scene that adds value to the text. This difficulty can either be caused by the feeling of awkwardness and embarrassment that many people experience with explicit descriptions of sex. Others have argued that sex is a unique experience that is almost impossible to articulate and so fails to ever be described in the right manner. Foster also makes an interesting assertion when discussing the significance of sexual acts described in a text, as he suggests that sex is almost always indicative of something else. This view is directly oppositional to the one followed by Freudians since they assert that most symbols generally allude to sex.

Foster explains that analyzing the significance of a geographical location is quite similar to understanding the role of weather and seasons. In all of these cases, the reader needs to look for similarities between the character's inner emotions and the physical manifestation of the environment, season, or weather. Foster demonstrates that a piece of literature can be seen to be composed of different parts much like a machine, wherein physical locations can function as characters and actions or events can act as symbols. However, unlike the weather, locations tend to have a greater range of meanings associated with them, since they are so large and complex.