This calls for a dumb story: the other night I was sick, but our
son has in high spirits. We all lay on the floor watching The
Simpsons (if you don't know, you don't want to find out) after
dinner. At one point Homer, the father, was trying a vibrating
chair, switched to "high," and was transported in ecstasy. Our son
just saw cartoon visuals that meant Homer was happy, but we saw
(well, my wife didn't get it until I reminded her) cartoon
renderings of portions of the warp sequence late in the movie 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
Well, yes, the sequence *was* about how happy Homer was, but it
also wasn't. It wasn't really *about* 2001, the movie or the book,
but it sort of was, right? You just have to know enough to catch
the allusion/reference and get the joke.
Last night my wife was sick, I was recovering, and the kid wanted
to watch The Simpsons again. This time, the school principal at one
point climbed the bell tower and had a momentary attack of vertigo:
some looking-down-the-stairs shots surfaced as imitations and clear
references to Alfred Hitchcock's movie Vertigo. The kid, of course,
didn't get it.
Again, what each of us saw and what it was all about are different
things, and a limited kind of multiplicity of meanings exists.
Think of your favorite cultural allusions, metaphors, similes, and
all--every one of them has at least 2 meanings, and even these
change interpretation depending on the particular context. And the
more you know, the more complicated it can be, but it is no stranger
than the situation described below, which just happens to be from a
time & place we are artificially reconstructing in our memories and
understanding (get it--"artificial" & "memory"?), so it seems more
alien (I'm thinking of alterities, not science fiction; whatever
happened to alteritas as a paradigm, shades of Structure of
Scientific Revolutions!) than contemporary prime-time TV fluff.
Ever joke around with friends, using TV commercials you all know?
It's the same thing--you are using them in some context where the
advertisements are not what the context is "about" but where they
somehow illuminate some aspect of what is happening. And if you
have to explain this to someone who does not know the commercials
you know, that poor outsider will get as confused as you, and you
will probably have an equally hard time explaining how it's not
"about" the ad but sort of "is" the ad, etc. End of mindless rant.
Juris
[log in to unmask]
http://129.71.130.48/dept/english/lidaka/lidaka.html
West Virginia State College
>From: [log in to unmask]
>Date: 8/20/97 12:32:08PM
>To: Medieval-religion
>Subject: Multiple Interpretation - Mary
>
>I think that one of the most difficult things for me to wrap my
>modern
>brain around is the very notion of multiple, often paradoxical and
>even
>directly contradictory, interpretations of Biblical texts existing
>simultaneously for the medieval reader. That line A could be both
>about and
>not about subject B, that it could mean both C and D (and still
>mean a and
>b), and so on. To paraphrase a very helpful notion from Martin
>Irvine's
>"The Making of Textual Culture" - no text ever stood alone. The
>existence
>of one text necessarily meant the existence of a potentially
>endless series
>of other texts which gave the original context(s) and meaning(s).
>In that
>sense, what we view as a paradox or an impossible contradiction is
>simply a
>sign of our mental inflexibility compared to medieval readers.
>
>This little paragraph is a grammatical mess, but it may indicate
>just how
>hard it is for us (at least for me) to understand the complexity and
>layered nature of medieval reading habits.
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