The Symbolic Significance of The Plague

The plague in Camus’ text may be interpreted to symbolize the absurd condition, a situation which Camus provides a clear explanation of in The Myth of Sisyphus. Because it can exist only in the human consciousness, the absurd condition is a condition that can either be confronted or evaded. In the form of an epidemic, however, the author is able to portray the absurd condition in such a way that it cannot be ignored. What the novel does therefore is to explore situations in which people are obliged to confront the condition of absurdity.

Camus’ philosophy of the absurd is written in the materialist tradition, in that it is rooted in physical reality. Anchored in material reality, the philosophy of materialism undertakes to explore how that reality can be made most rewarding to human beings. The drawback of this philosophy, it seems, is its dismissal of dimensions of existence other than the corporeal. The fact is that the recognition of a spiritual dimension of reality is often comforting: people derive a sense of order from the assumption that there is a system of morality that, even if intangible, governs the way the world works. Systems of morality function like a map in an unfamiliar place, providing a sense of direction and security. Religious and spiritual ideologies allow the believer to live ignoring the inevitability of physical death or else noticing it only in so far as remembering the need to live in the light of the moral norms laid down by a divine dispensation. Such systems also helped humankind impart meaning to suffering and ignore the manifest injustice of life in the hope of happiness in the afterlife. This in fact is what renders such ideologies very consoling sometimes. Deprived of the option of spirituality, one turns to reason, but reason cannot, in the end, explain everything.

Christian Delacampagne argues that the beginning of the twentieth century saw a radical shift in the orientation of philosophy, in that the focus on the metaphysical dimension was gradually replaced by a focus on the social and political dimensions of reality (62). There was a lot about the circumstances of the time that needed explaining. Paul Valery writes: “there are thousands of young artists and young writers who have been killed… there are the lost illusions of a European culture and the demonstrated inability of knowledge to save anything whatsoever; there is science, touched mortally in its ethical ambitions and as if dishonoured by the cruelty of its applications” (qtd. in Delacampagne 62).

The scale of violence that the world witnessed at the time may have proven sufficient to refute the assumption that God or a supreme being, as it were, exists. Epicurus recognizes such logic:

God either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to,
or neither wishes to nor can, or both wants to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak - and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful - which is equally foreign to god's nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them? (Inwood and Gerson 97)

As is distinctive of material philosophy, Camus’ thinking addressess the problem of human happiness and well-being that now has to be achieved without the option of falling back on spirituality, religion, or any other system of knowledge. How to make life fulfilling given the inevitability of death and the often incomprehensible nature of the world? Why not give in to suicide?

Camus’ philosophy agrees to the tradition of materialism in so far as it rejects blind adherence to spirituality or religion, but deviates from it in that his philosophy criticizes absolute reliance in reason. His idea of the absurd, as explained in The Myth of Sisyphus (1955), is founded on the discrepancy between man’s need for rationality and intelligibility from the world he inhabits and the world that, as it were, is indifferent: “the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought…(but) this world itself is not reasonable” (17-21). The old-fashioned question that asks why ‘bad’ things should happen to ‘good’ people comes from man’s need for rationalization from the universe that does not, really, operate with motives. The absurd is a consciousness that results when one recognizes the disjunction between one’s expectations of the world and what the world is capable of giving. Such disjunction necessarily occurs because there are things about life and the universe that the human subject cannot make sense of, the most significant of which is death – particularly because it figures in everybody’s reality. For Camus the mere existence of death that is universal, random, inevitable, arbitrary makes human hopes and activities meaningless. It seems that without the transcendence that spirituality gives death cannot be treated as trivial.

There are variations in the degree to which people allow themselves to be conscious of the absurd. Camus explains: “before encountering the absurd, the everyday man lives with aims, a concern for the future or for justification. … he acts as if he were free, even if all the facts make a point of contradicting that liberty…(b)ut after the absurd, everything is upset” (57). Those who are conscious of the absurd see a fundamental disjunction between man and the universe and have therefore lost all sense of meaning that exists independent of the perceiver. To the absurd consciousness, any attempt at rationalization, which may produce a sense of meaning, is recognized as a man-made construct. Camus describes the absurd consciousness as “an intelligence that knows its frontiers” (70), advocating that the absurd consciousness can exist only when the notion of the absurd itself is no longer questioned, when there is recognition and acceptance of the disjunction between man and the universe.

The presence of the epidemic in The Plague is discernible only through the symptoms in the bodies of the sick – the swollen glands, the fever and delirium. This quality of the plague is reminiscent of the attribute of the absurd consciousness that does not become apparent until the human subject recognizes it. However, because the symptoms of the disease are physical, the residents of Oran – even those who are not ‘sick’ -- are forced to acknowledge the presence of the epidemic. People who are yet to show symptoms of the disease are nevertheless confined to the town, obliged to live with the knowledge that the plague has contaminated their living space and that any one of them can, at any time, fall ill and die. The epidemic is present in such a way that it cannot be kept out from consciousness. The depiction of the absurd consciousness as an epidemic therefore allows Camus to examine people’s attitudes when they are forced to acknowledge the absurd condition. There is also an implication that everybody is susceptible to the absurd consciousness and that at times only active attempts to shut it out can keep such consciousness at bay.

Camus’ text suggests that the human mind rebels against having to acknowledge vulnerability to death, chance and uncertainty: rather than giving in to panic, some people and these are the fortunate, in Oran live with the hope of being reunited with their loved ones, so much so that “(t)he egoism of love (makes) them immune to general distress” (64). Others indulge themselves in recklessness, as if to overcome anxiety: “all stream out into the open, drug themselves with talking, start arguing or love-making” (102). The hope of surviving, resuming ordinary life, and being reunited with people they love sustain many residents during the quarantine period, including Rambert the journalist who repeatedly attempts to leave the city to be together with his partner.

Rieux’s asthma patient, an old draper, defends himself against the plague by immersing himself in the incessant activity of counting peas. The draper lives his days in his apartment and has virtually no ties to the outside world. His detachment from the public world is so total that he refuses even to adhere to the conventional notion of time; instead, he works out time by transferring peas at a regulated speed from one bowl to the other. “Every fifteen pans,” he said, “it’s feeding time. What could be simpler?” (99). His complete lack of involvement in public life protects him in a way – since occasions in the outside world seem to no longer affect him. The plague that cordons off the town and causes some sort of hiatus in people’s lives makes, in effect, no difference in the draper’s life, whose experience of time and reality is shaped exclusively by his pea-counting activity and is therefore in his control. The addiction to a completely meaningless activity which is self validated insulates the addict from the sense of panic and external crisis.

The town’s refusal to recognize their situation for what it is – living with consistent consciousness of death – seems to culminate in the audience’s reaction to a performance of Gluck’s Orpheus in the Municipal Theatre and Opera House. The performance itself allows the townspeople to momentarily put the plague out of their mind: “in the soft hum of well-mannered conversation (in the theatre) they regained the confidence denied them when they walked the dark streets of the town; evening dress was a sure charm against plague” (162). The audience enjoys the performance until the Third Act, when the actor playing Orpheus “(staggers) grotesquely to the footlights, his arms and legs splayed out under his antique robe, and (falls) down in the middle of the property sheepfold” (162). To Tarrou, watching the actor’s performance is like looking at “plague on the stage in the guise of a disarticulate mummer” (163). The actor’s presentation, particularly his articulation of anguish, reminds the audience of the plague that lurks outside the theater – the very thing that the audience comes to the theater to forget. The audience responds with denial and evasion; they leave the theater on seeing the actor’s performance on stage.

The audience’s response calls to mind the reaction of Prince Prospero, from Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, to the pestilence that devastates his country. He and a few courtiers fortify themselves against the plague by retreating into a castellated abbey. The abbey is buttressed in such a way that the occupants may be sure to keep the disease out. There is sufficient entertainment to keep them busy without being reminded of the disease that rages outside the abbey. When the Prince holds a masque several months after they retreat into the abbey, a figure appears that reminds everybody present of the pestilence: “(t)he figure (is) tall and gaunt and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave…(t)he mask which (conceals) the visage…(resembles) the countenance of a stiffened corpse…the mummer has gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death” (www.online-literature.com). Prospero wants the man executed, but nobody – either out of awe or reluctance – dares touching or approaching the man. Prospero himself then pursues the man with a dagger and ends up being killed. Surprised by Prospero’s sudden death, the guests try to get hold of the man, only to find the figure “untenanted by any tangible form” (www.online-literature.com).

Prospero, like the people in Oran, attempts to escape having to cope with the absurdity of living with the awareness of death. Poe’s story nevertheless suggests that the nature of absurdity is sometimes such that it forces itself on consciousness. “The Masque of Red Death” concretizes in the figure of Prospero the consciousness that is in flight – the way Camus does with his depiction of characters who try, at times desperately, to shut out the reality of the plague.

In Paneloux’s reaction to the plague, Camus’ text calls attention to the inadequacy of conventional religion. Paneloux’s interpretation of the epidemic as a form of punishment for sin seems inhumane: “(the) plague is the flail of God and the world His threshing-floor, and implacably He will thresh out His harvest until the wheat is separated from the chaff…(t)here will be more chaff than wheat, few chosen of the many called” (79). Such an explanation is callous and arrogant, almost, in its assumption that suffering has a positive value and that some lives are worth more than others. Commenting on Paneloux’s sermon, Rieux says, “Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth…but every country priest who visits his parishioners, and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed … (will) try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.” (106)

Paneloux is forced to reconsider his understanding of the plague after he witnesses the death of M. Othon’s child. The death of the child who cannot, in the priest’s mind, be an ‘evil-doer’, prompts him to reinterpret the plague as an ultimate test of faith: “…the love of God…demands total self-surrender … it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them“ (186). Even when he himself is sick with the plague, Paneloux refuses Rieux’s help, choosing to rely only on his religious faith. Paneloux’s life appears to be defined by his belief such that without it his life is bound to be meaningless, the way Rambert’s would be without the companionship of his lover. The difference is only that while Rambert’s wish for companionship is within reach, what Paneloux aspires to, even if it holds him up, is too abstract. Only faith and fear of the prospect of meaninglessness appears to have sustained Paneloux’s belief in religion despite its inadequacy to explain such a baffling phenomenon as the plague which results in random deaths.

Rieux’s attitude towards the plague is almost contrary to Paneloux’s. Rieux goes on offering medical assistance to plague victims despite having dealt with a massive amount of deaths. In one sense Rieux is fighting a losing war; his only justification, as he tells Tarrou, is that he has “never managed to get used to seeing people die” (107). While Paneloux tries to fit the plague into a preexisting theoretical system – conquering it, so to speak, with religious faith -- Rieux fights it instinctively on a material plane patiently doing what is reasonable hoping that it will eventually pay off, alleviating pain and extending life wherever possible but relentlessly placing public safety above private loyalties.

Rieux particularly recalls the figure of Don Juan, particularly as Camus delineates him in The Myth of Sisyphus. As Camus’ prototype of the ‘absurd man’, Don Juan courts a series of women only because courting and falling in love is heartening. He knows that he will love again as much as he has loved; he does not look for revelations, as it were, as he advances from one relationship to the next. If Don Juan’s life is fulfilling and happy, the reason seems to be that he does things for the sake of doing them, as much and as long as he can. This is not at all a foreign philosophy: so often happiness and contentment is about doing things for the sake of doing them -- like being in love or indulging in food which, in themselves, carry little meaning.

Of all the characters in The Plague, Rieux most approximates Camus’ idea of the ‘absurd man’: the individual who lives with an absurd consciousness and copes well with it, even though the absurd consciousness obliges individuals to admit limitations of their freedom in and understanding of the world. He is for that reason capable of living life for what it is, not aiming for more than what can realistically be obtained.

Camus’ text puts forwards human love and solidarity as more sustaining while dealing with the absurd condition than human reason, knowledge, or intellect. Rieux’s attempts to save lives are perpetually defeated but as he keeps on with his efforts, Rieux seems to have resigned himself to the fact that nothing, apart from a sense of assurance of the capacity of human love to impart meaning to life is likely to result from his work: “there lay certitude; there, in the daily round…(a)ll the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies (and) you (cannot) waste your time on it” (37). In the end it is belief in one’s ability to live, to love, and to sympathize with other human beings that can serve as an antidote, so to speak, against the absurdity of life.

The Plague is a narrative that, if subtly, criticizes ignorant complicity in social systems that are detrimental. The plague itself becomes symbolic of the harmful social system within which most people live without being aware of its capacity to cause harm.

In the process of writing The Plague in 1943, Camus wrote, “La Peste may be read … as a symbol of Nazi occupation (and incidentally the prefiguration of any totalitarian regime, no matter where)” (qtd. in Todd 168). In this text Camus seems to have communicated his objection to any system that carries ideologies to extremes and justifies any means to achieve its ends. Many such systems necessarily belittle the value of human lives. This is a concern that receives serious attention in the text, particularly in the story of Tarrou.

Tarrou is a humanist who pushes for the abolition of the death sentence. The ideal society for Tarrou is one that does not allow human life to be violated on any ground. He is firm in his belief, even as he acknowledges that, in consequence, he does not fit in with a society that often sacrifices human lives to the ideological interests of the state: “I know I have no place in the world of today; once I’d definitely refused to kill, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end” (207). When fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, Tarrou is told that a few deaths are always necessary for the creation of a new world in which murder will no longer happen. Tarrou reconciles himself to this view until he witnesses directly an execution by a firing squad and recognizes that executions are far more gruesome than is usually described. Since then, it has been Tarrou’s principle to avoid being involved in anything that supports the death penalty and to avoid, through lack of action, being unknowingly made accomplice to any act of murder.

When Tarrou remarks that he has had plague already (201), he means that he is more aware of the reality of his surroundings than the average inhabitant of Oran is. Tarrou recognizes murder for what it is -- the taking of life -- rather than an abstract part of an ideological progress. Tarrou’s sickness concerns his state of mind more than his physical self. To Tarrou the plague is present within everybody, in the form of ignorant complicity to the social system that attributes little value to human life. The figurative plague, like the real epidemic, is pervasive in society, such that “those (like him) who want to get the plague out of their systems, feels such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free” (207).

Camus’ text reveals the ‘sick’ to be those who prefer superficial order to the reality that is sometimes problematic. In Oran, the sick are often people in the position of authority. There is a delay in setting up the necessary measures to prevent the plague from spreading because the Prefect in Oran requires Rieux to be absolutely certain that his patients’ symptoms are indications of plague before putting such measures in place: “I shall need your professional declaration that the epidemic is one of plague” (45). The police officer who manages to prevent Cottard from going through with his suicide attempt threatens to put him in jail for “troubling the peace of others” (31). Rather than being concerned about what drives Cottard to suicide, the officer is more interested in maintaining public order – even if only superficially. The officer’s attitude is consistent with the delineation of Oran as a town that is keen on regularity and order. The town’s attitude towards the plague later on echoes the authorities’ approach to Cottard’s case in their reluctance to recognize and address indications of trouble.

Tarrou is critical of the role that language occupies in creating superficial realities. He remarks, “all our troubles spring from the failure to use clear-cut language” (206). People’s ignorance of the true reality makes them reluctant to oppose the system that Tarrou knows legalizes murder in order to progress: “…a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead…a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination” (35). Tarrou is concerned about the politicization of language where language is used to manipulate. Orwell in his essay “Politics and the English Language” discusses similar concern. Political language, Orwell writes, functions in such a way that “the concrete melts into the abstract” (www.orwell.ru). It makes use of turns of phrases that are needed to “name things without calling up mental pictures of them” so that it may “(defend) the indefensible” (www.orwell.ru).

In the text, Grand is described as a character whose “difficulty in finding his words (has) come to be the bane of his life”(41). Due to his difficulty with words, Grand never asks for a raise in salary even though this has been promised to him. He drives his wife away because he cannot tell her that he loves her: “a time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me – only I couldn’t” (70). Throughout the text Grand attempts to write a book that he never finishes because he feels he cannot come up with an opening sentence that can satisfactorily evoke the scene he wishes to convey. He struggles to communicate “the exact tempo of (a horse’s trotting)” and the precise atmosphere of a May morning (96). Camus says of Grand’s character that he imagines the story of a victim of the French Revolutionary Terror who cannot write more than one sentence of a book about it, because he feels he cannot match the reality (qtd. in Todd 160). The story of Grand, the “funny little man” (34), appears humorous on the surface, but it demonstrates very persistently the text’s argument that language is often inadequate to describe reality. This inadequacy must consequently become a point of concern if the reality to be described were to demarcate truth from falsity.

If language as an instrument that shapes and gives expression to reality fails to provide a genuine picture, one can only rely, as Tarrou suggests, on constant awareness -- such that people know precisely what they support and what they help to legalize. Awareness is the only cure for the plague that to Tarrou manifests as apathy and indifference.

…The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. ... the most incorrigible vice (is) that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness. (110)


Works Cited

Camus, Albert. “An Absurd Reasoning”. The Myth of Sisyphus. Trans. Justin O’Brien.
New York: Vintage, 1991. 3-66.

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Trns. Stuart Gilbert. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

Camus, Albert. "Rebellion and the Novel". The Rebel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
224-233.

Delacampagne, Christian. “The Birth of Modernity”. A History of Philosophy in the
Twentieth Century. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. Baltimore: JHU Press, 2001. 1-12.

Epicurus. The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia. Trans. Inwood, Brad
and L.P. Gerson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language”. George Orwell Library. 24 July 2004.
Secker and Warburg, London. 2 April 2009.


Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Masque of the Red Death”. EServer Books. 2004.
EServer. 5 April 2009.


Severson, Marilyn S. “The Plague”. Masterpieces of French Literature. Wesport: Greenwood Press, 2004. 19-35.

Solomon, Robert C. “Fighting Death Together: Camus’ The Plague”. Dark Feelings, Grim
Thoughts. New York: OUP, 2006. 114-130.

Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus: A Life. Trans. Benjamin Ivry. New York: Vintage, 1998.

(essay on Modernism)

This essay discusses in brief British Modernism and Modernist trends in literary works. The discussion on literary works will examine only a few aspects of Modernism and will not be a comprehensive assessment.

To understand Modernism – British Modernism, in particular – it is helpful to revisit the last decade of the nineteenth century. Science had the authority previously held by religious institutions. The tone of the period was of rationality and reason. In “Modern Mind”, McFarlane confirms that “the nineteenth century (was) a positivist universe“ (74). The society was “a whole which is not an accumulation of self-willed individuals but an ordered organization ruled by general and definable laws and within which the chief and indisputable agency was reason.” (74) Positivism, McFarlane wrote, “(governed) the field of social philosophy, naturalism in the field of literature.” (73)
In literature, naturalism seeks to replicate everyday reality. Positivism presumes truth to be based on sense experience. Since the only phenomena that can be understood are those that pertain to the senses, reality was consequently limited to physical reality. Governed by such reasoning, the society cannot admit the possibility of yet unattained knowledge. If it is not yet known, it is not worth knowing. The approach to social sciences and liberal arts was scientific in the sense that only physically observable facts can be true. This way of thinking must have proven particularly harmful in the period following World War I.

The war was the first to happen on such a massive scale, and this was difficult to comprehend even with the assistance of reason. Science, which was thought of as having brought about development, was proven to be as insufficient as religion. It is also inevitable that subject citizens rethought the relationship between individuals and the nation. The war was, after all, a clash between nations. How far were individuals implicated? Could this be validated? These are difficult questions to answer, particularly if one insists on employing the method of scientific enquiry prevalent in the period preceding the First World War. If scientific reasoning – that moves from collecting physical data to the formulation of theory / hypothesis – was insufficient, philosophical thinking must have proven heartening. Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ, carrying his philosophy of transvaluation, was published in 1888. Transvaluation contrasts, among other things, the Western society and its Christian traditions with the tenets of Buddhism and life in early Greek civilization. There is, in the explication of Buddhist philosophy and Greek civilization, an emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual. While the proposition for individual subjectivity might constitute a life option in the period before the Great War, in the time following, the idea was likely to have proven appealing. External order, as the War demonstrated, had disintegrated. Individuals needed now to turn to themselves for order.

The development of technology in communication made it possible for ideas – new ideas, such as those of Nietzsche’s – to travel far and fast. McFarlane admits “Nietzsche was almost unknown before May 1888, when he was made the subject of a series of lectures in Copenhagen by…Georg Brandes. …(T)he word spread…to Germany’s avant-garde and then to Europe at large.” He says further that “(Nietzsche’s) ruthless questioning of the nineteenth’s century’s idees recus, his total repudiation of traditional morality…won a response from the generations of the fin-de-siecle and the First World War which gave him a uniquely influential role in the Modernist period.” (78)
It is this, really – the need to re-establish order in individual scales (merely because external order was so unsteady and unrealiable) – that characterizes the works of art later considered to belong to the tradition of Modernism. When individuals turn to themselves to create individual order, they take in the chaos and mess of external reality, rearrange and restructure them, and give them individual significance. This individual significance constitutes an internal essence – of an individual’s experience of life – that replaces the external order. One agrees then with McFarlane when he concludes “…the defining thing in the Modernist mode is not so much that things fall apart but that they fall together…In Modernism, the center is seen exerting not a centrifugal but a centripetal force; and the consequence is not disintegration but (as it were) superintegration.” (92)

Fletcher and McFarlane mention ambiguity as characteristic of Modernist drama in “Modernist Drama: Origins and Patterns”. Ambiguity is present as one of the thematic concerns, but it is also evident in the form and presentation of the plays. This characteristic corresponds to the claim for subjectivity discussed earlier. If individuals seek for order inwardly, there is no central, absolute, external order. Consequently, the standard for morals and meaning(s) of life, if any, is ambiguous. In its complexity, Modernist drama is a reflection and a comment on, this condition.

Fletcher’s essay quotes the episode in Waiting for Godot in which Estragon, having loosened the rope from his trousers to hang himself, has his trousers pooled around his ankles. He never manages to hang himself; the rope snaps. This is an event that is neither comedic nor tragic. The situation is ambiguous; one may laugh, one may take pity. Martin Esslin would later describe the situation as absurd – presumably a characteristic Modernist situation – in which there is emphasis in the uncertainty of things and where any interpretation is subjective at best.

“Tradition and Individual Talent” is Eliot’s attempt to clarify the orientation of Modernist poetry. He speaks of literature as a tradition that is compromised whenever a new work is introduced into the canon. “Art never improves,” he writes, “but…the material of art is never quite the same.” (39) Certainly writing from different time periods and locations, every poet has unique, particular concerns to be introduced into their poetry. Yet differences in concerns do not mean that poetry of a particular period or location is better than others; if the chain of tradition is readjusted with the introduction of new works, than a new work of art can only be measured in value based on how it responds to the existing canon. After all, “the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.” (40) It is only in the reinterpretation of the past on the basis of contemporary tendencies will the poet be able to realize his “contemporaneity.”

Modernist poetry has often been defined against the form of its predecessors. The definition of Modernist poetry as not being written in the ‘traditional’ verse from and to have ceased to employ an extravagant diction and subject matter is to set Modernist poetry in contrast to poetry of earlier times. Hough discusses the Modernist tendency to utilize the lyric form. The lyric form – in contrast to the epic form, for instance, which speaks of collective morals – explores the inner dialogues of the poet. This tendency corresponds too with the earlier discussion on the emphasis on subjectivity in the beginning of the Twentieth century.

Yeats’ The Circus Animals’ Desertion is an example of Modernist poetry. In the poem, the speaker speaks of having written two plays with protagonists from the Irish mythology – Oisin and Cathleen nee Houlihan. He confesses to have found parallels between the myths and his life experiences. What the poem discusses then is the rewriting of already existing myths with a contemporary perspective. In this way, contemporary perspectives are elucidated in a familiar context. The poem is at once public and personal: the epic element of the mythology belongs to the public, but there is a personal significance that the speaker gathers from these mythological tales so that he is able to weave his stories into them. The poem is a part of Yeats’ socio-cultural context, but is also a response to an already existing cannon – the one Eliot speaks of. The Circus’ Animals Desertion is also a lyric poem where it derives private meaning from mythological tales.

Of the Modernist novel, Woolf writes, “the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it: life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

Life is not solid; it is made so by one’s acquisition of and insistence on routines that systematize time into meaningful sections. If fiction is structured to mirror this systematization then (to Woolf) the writer has fallen into the trap of considering as real what is really the illusion of life. This kind of fiction resembles, rather than explains, life. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway shows characters inferring other people’s personality, motives and intentions from their speeches, their acts, and what have been said about them by other characters. The ‘real’ person can never be known, because s/he is the total of everything that s/he says, does, thinks and feels. While this is something that will never be fully known to anyone – not even to the person himself. The book carries only descriptions of feelings that exist and go away, things that strike one as ridiculous when they happen (when the first thing clarissa remembers about Peter are remarks on cabbages), or when a particular event results in a sudden understanding (the moment Clarissa thinks of Septimus’ death). Life as described in a Modernist novel is never wholly comic or tragic (similar to the way it is represented in the Modernist drama), never fully governed by a particular purpose. The stream of consciousness replaces the chronological plot, which is seen as a human device. Plot, like daily routines, is the creation of human imagination to apprehend the chaos of real life, structuring it into tidiness.

To return to the earlier idea of subjectivity as characteristic of Modernism or Modernist tendencies, what really makes human beings distinct from each other is the internal processess of the mind. There are, for every individual, a public and a private self. The public self is of course one that is publicly shared, the self that one has chosen to present to the world. The private self incorporates desires, motives, and reasonings that are known only to the self, unknown to anybody else. In insisting to place emphasis on the processess of human mind in the writing of fiction, Woolf chooses to call attention to human subjectivity. It is this, the insistence on human subjectivity, that most illustrates the works of the Modernists.



Works Cited:

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. 37-43.

McFarlane, James and John Fletcher. “Modernist Drama: Origins and Patterns.” Modernism: 1890 – 1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. Penguin: London, 1976. 499 – 513.

McFarlane, James. “The Mind of Modernism.” Modernism: 1890-1930. Ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane. London: Penguin, 1976.

Woolf, Virginia. “Chapter 13: Modern Fiction.” Modern Fiction. London: Harvest, 2002

Make it Up, Make it Out: The Significance of the Title “What is Worth Knowing?”

Human beings exist as private entities as well as members of a social community. The poems that editors Dharwadker and Ramanujan compile under the subheading “What is Worth Knowing” are intersections of these two aspects of human experiences. They describe experiences that are recognized by the individual as important. The poems are written in subjective viewpoints, which allow for reconciliation between public and private identities. Things are worth knowing when they grant the individual a space in the public context. This essay will work to show how this rationale is worked out in the poems for study, referencing to a few for illustrations.

Sujata Bhatt’s poem, whose title is adopted as a subheading for the collection of poems, lists world events and personal familiarities. The poem is striking for the apparent disconnectedness in the information listed. Why put together a body of facts if nothing coherent results out of it? How, for example, must one relate the fact that “Spain has decided to help NATO” with the fact that “Spring is supposed to begin on the 21st of March”? (102)
Human beings do cocoon themselves in private, individual worlds, despite living in a common world. Individual worlds are built on personal ideologies, convictions, and experiences. Ten people will tell ten different stories about a city. Each will have an exclusive map, a specific geography. Characters in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography recognize Karachi this way, so that the public geography of official street names is substituted by corner teashops and places made memorable through experience.

The world of places, social norms and occurrences is no less than an unfamiliar map. Navigating through it, one eventually constructs one’s own map – made up of places of personal significance and memories. A private map is always distinct from a public one, even if the two overlap. In a public map, descriptions are prosaic and functional. The private map is created out of the necessity to remember – the necessity to preserve bits of the self that are left behind in experiences, places and memory as one travels, as one grows up.

Official street names are, in private maps, converted into the street where one receives a first kiss or the street where lives an extremely vicious dog. The communal turmeric too can be a touch more specific when featured in private maps: for the speaker in Bhatt’s poem turmeric is, along with chili powder, a disinfectant (99). Turmeric is, from this perspective, more than a variety of spice on the shelf of a shop. Who is to argue?

What is noteworthy about private maps is that they convert the general into specifics. Things mean so much more in private maps – and for exclusive reasons. Perspectives are like coloured spectacles that determine the colour of one’s view. The colour of the spectacles decides the colour of the things one sees. Everyone has a distinct interpretation of the world. In the process of interpretation, one creates an individual recess – a comprehensible space where everything is pared down into intelligible terms. A mind map, as it were.
Poems, perhaps all writings, are mind maps. They retell familiar stories in distinct terms. They draw on metaphors that are particular to individual minds and maps, bringing personal touches to collective experiences.

Pritam’s poem speaks of an impulse that provokes the creation of a poem – an impulse for something new, something unknown, like the feel of a male touch to a virgin. The process is exciting, since the poet – like the virgin – does not know what to expect: “…one part of her body burns, (a)nother melts…”. Yet when the speaker confesses the poem that results is “like pieces of a drawn-out scream” (102), her tone is one of pain. The process of creation is packed and provoked by unfamiliar sensations, but it’s over before one can acquire enough familiarity to comprehend it. When it’s over, the experience is something the poet can do nothing about but to let go. It is as if the poet exists only as a medium and has no control over the experience or how she feels about it (“…as if some injustice had been committed…”). The poem that results is deformed: it does record the experience of the poet, but it is one that is yet to mature in the poet’s mind.

Sahay’s “Our Hindi” sees Hindi in the image of a widower’s new wife. The figure of the widower’s new wife – indulged, loved, secure – echoes the poem’s thought about the position of Hindi. The last stanza of the poem spells out the conditions necessary for the language’s survival:

“…our Hindi is a married woman she’s faithful she’s happy
she wants to die before her husband dies
everything’s okay but first her husband must survive her
for how else can she have her wish” (106)

The husband is the speaker of the language – one who keeps the language inside the house. “Everything a woman needs is in the house”, the poem says. Language derives its life force from usage, from the way it is put to use to describe domestic trivialities: the “untended garden”, the “soiled pillows” and “crumpled clothes”, the “five kilograms of gold in the inner room”. The identical domestic works that a wife tends to. Language dies when there is nobody left who speaks it. If her husband survives her, Hindi will not die.

Pattanshetti writes of a woman as a negative on a film. The poem emphasizes memory’s persistence. The speaker recognizes that memory doesn’t let go of things and people one once had strong feelings for. However one meddles with the negative, one eventually “(rubs) the chemicals of desire” (107), rendering clearer and clearer the picture of the woman.
Chaudhari’s “The Naming of Things” furnishes couplets of what the speaker considers parallels. Each couplet is posited as parallels by virtue of a shared quality or feature. This couplet, for example, suggests that something that stirs in the breeze is synonymous to a leaf: “If it doesn’t stir in the breeze, why call it a leaf?” (107). The speaker, almost like Adam, assigns names to objects in his world. In the process of naming, he lays down parameters that are particular to his world: hands, for instance, are meant to give assistance (“If it refuses to give, don’t call it a hand” (108)). The speaker’s world is governed by private parameters, so that to be relevant in it one has to keep to these parameters.

“Still Life” argues “(t)here’s not a single arrow in time’s bow” (114). Living things exist in the flux of time. They appear solid in the way human beings choose to capture (to ‘freeze’) them – in memory, pictures, paintings and such keepsakes. In time’s framework, everything is fluid, constantly changing. This perspective negates familiar thoughts of the world as a solid entity.
Metaphors bridge the public and the personal worlds. In the use of metaphors, writers reinvent familiar facts and occurrences. It is an act of persuasion to see things from their perspective. One’s private world is filled by personal metaphors, like the private map that recreates common geography.

Further, a person’s perspective organizes the chaos of his experience. In Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar”, to place a jar upon a hill in Tennessee is to command the wilderness, so that it’s “no longer wild”. The jar, in its capacity to structure the wilderness and dominate the landscape, resembles the authority of man’s imagination (or perspective) that functions to glean an exclusive pattern out of the disarray of reality. Man’s imagination is an essential authority because reality doesn’t carry promise of order. Imagination and perspective become tools to create a semblance of order.

In “The Yellow River”, Sen undermines the potency of the Great Wall. The Wall was built to protect the Chinese Empire from anticipated external attacks. The poem suggests that the wall does protect the city; it “(blocks) everything” (109), but its construction overlooks an unforeseen attack – from the Yellow River. The river has existed all along, and is hazardous only at random. If it “sweeps away village after village”, it doesn’t do so by design. Yet it is the lack of purpose that renders it overlooked. There is, presumably, a clear concept of ‘enemy’ that provokes the building of the Wall. The construction of the Wall is meant to produce a sense of security, the feeling of being protected. The poem highlights the fact that the perspective that defines the concept does not see the River as an enemy. Acquainted with the destruction brought about by the River, one knows the Wall is only a semblance of order, but if deprived of the knowledge of the River’s activity, the Empire’s sense of security would remain intact.

Kolatkar’s “The Alphabet” contains a set of words. The last line of each stanza persuades readers that each word – like the objects represented by these words – “have places of their own” and “won’t interfere with each other”. It helps to quote one stanza for illustration:

“pajamas pineapple rabbit and ram
sacrifice seal spoon and sugarcane
won’t interfere with each other” (116)

Arranged in such a manner, the words may or may not appear as an intelligible sentence. The reader’s perspective decides that. The sequence of words can be read together as a sentence and understood as a statement that each of the word listed in the first two lines does not have anything to do with another word. The alternative is to read each word in the first two lines as completely isolated entities, each completely disconnected to any other word in the sequence.
The last two stanzas of the poem are written in such a way to contradict the statement made in the last line of the first live stanzas. The author combines words from the first five stanzas, positioning them to create comprehensible sentences. These are the last two stanzas:

“the mother won’t put her baby on the compost heap
the brahmin won’t season the duck with garlic
the yacht won’t hit the watermelon and sink

unless the ostrich eats the baby’s frock
the warrior won’t shoot an arrow into ganesh’s belly
and if the ram doesn’t knock down the old man

why would he need to smash the cup on the tombstone” (116)

The statements in the penultimate stanza are legible and logical; the statements in the last – including the final line – are legible, but not logical. The penultimate stanza appears logical because one can make sense of the statements in it by connecting them to the norms of the real world. The codes in which the regular world functions specify that any mother in her right mind, in ordinary circumstances, will not put her baby on a compost heap. A Brahmin, by definition, will not season any duck with anything. The yacht won’t sink just because it hits a watermelon.
The statements in the last stanza are legible. They are grammatically, syntactically correct – even lexically legible. Of course the ostrich has the capacity to eat a baby’s frock. Of course it is possible that a warrior shoots an arrow into ganesh’s belly. A ram can knock down an old man, and the old man can smash a cup on any tombstone for whatever reason.

The statements in the penultimate stanza, when contrasted with the ones in the stanza that follows, appear as ‘truths’, if only for the fact that the events described in the penultimate stanza sound more familiar than the ones that follow. The events illustrated in the last stanza are not completely implausible; they do, however, sound bizarre.
Is ‘truth’, then, nothing more than a construct derived from a person’s degree of familiarity? Kolatkar’s poem seems to persuade readers that it is. Truth is true only so far as one believes in it.

Imagination that creates perspective for the individual is necessary to reduce the chaos of reality into comprehensible units. Yet imagination, for its individuality, lacks collective authority. In order to interpret the world and exist as an individual in the collective, one must believe in the authority of one’s imagination. Truth, in this sense, is what one imagines to be true. What is described in the poems are significant because they matter to their writers. What is worth knowing eludes specifications. What is worth knowing: truth is always relative to one’s convictions.

Works Cited:

Bhatt, Sujata. “What is Worth Knowing?” The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 99.

Chaudhari, Bahinabai. “The Naming of Things”. Trans. Philip Engblom and Jayant Karve. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.107-109.

Kolatkar, Arun. “The Alphabet”. Trans. Vinay Dharwadker. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 116.

Paniker, Ayyappa K. “The Itch”. Trans. Ayyappa Paniker. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.111.

Pattanshetti, Siddhalinga. “Woman”. Trans. A.K. Ramanujan. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.107.

Pritam, Amrita. “The Creative Process”. Trans. Amrita Pritam and Arlene Zide. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 102.

Rajeevan, Savithri. “A Pair of Glasses”. Trans. Ayyappa Paniker and Arlene Zide. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 103.

Sahay, Raghuvir. “Our Hindi”. Trans. Vinay Dharwadker. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.105.

Sen, Nabaneeta Dev. “The Yellow River”. Trans. Nabaneeta Dev Sen. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 109.

Shahryar. “Still Life”. Trans. David Paul Douglas and Gopi Chand Narang. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994.115.

Thanker, Labhshankar. “Poem”. Trans. Sitanshu Yashashchandra. The Oxford Anthology of Modern Poetry. Ed. Dharwadker, Vinay and A.K. Ramanujan. New Delhi: OUP, 1994. 99.

Shamsie, Kamila. Kartography. Orlando: Harcourt, 2002.

Stevens, Wallace. “Anecdote of the Jar.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1957. 76.

(response essay to Attia Hossain's Sunlight in a Broken Column)

Sunlight on a Broken Column is a close account of the dynamics of a relatively small community of people. Laila, the narrator, revisits her childhood home and tells her story as she recalls various events from her past. To the readers, the narrative appears as having been constructed out of memory. The narrative that results is subjective, but is also one that illustrates the overlapping of individual and national realities.

Sunlight on a Broken Column provides glimpses of a community that simultaneously anticipates and is apprehensive about changes. Once caught in the middle of a communal riot that has been growing more frequent in the face of necessary independence, Asad witnesses an old man being knifed. Laila, recounting the episode, speaks of a “desperate mob whose cruelty (is) the twisted sum of each individual’s fear” (78). In the event of a riot where two communal groups are pitted against each other, individual identities are obliterated and substituted by communal ones. Such a landscape, as the story of the old man suggests, exhausts any possibility of moderation.

While not as brutal, the small world of Laila and her acquaintances has its own vocabulary of violence. Sita, fearing social censure, shrinks from the possibility of having an open relationship with Kemal.

“He asked you to marry him. You chose to refuse.”
“Could I do otherwise? I, Sita, loved him, Kemal, and still do. Two individual human beings. But it would have been the daughter of my father and mother marrying the son of his parents, with
different backgrounds and different religions, two small cogs in a huge social machine.
…I’m not a saint, Laila. I’m not a martyr. I react to criticism and hatred even if I do not show it.
Let me keep my love intact. I cannot expose it to the judgment of others like a criminal waiting
for their verdict.” (Hosain 215-216)

Laila’s little community is not as crude in its expressions of segregation as they are articulated in the riot. Echoing the violence in the riot however, the terms of violence in Laila’s immediate community is anchored in the need for self-preservation. Presumably Laila is right to identify fear as the motivation of the rioting mobs. In this case, the formation of a communal identity is almost like an anticipatory gesture against the possibility of being delineated as an unremarkable minority. Should things take such a turn, the emphasis on difference is suddenly critical. If nothing else, an emphasis on difference works as a pretext for violence and confrontation.

Pressured by uncertain changes that Independence may bring about, individuals seek out assurances of security in a commonality of (aspects of) identity. As different communal identities are formed, differences are sharpened, often leaving no space for expressions of liberalism. In a community that has been coerced into playing up differences, the relationship of Sita and Kemal is an offense. Such a relationship translates into a blurring of differences and, if circuitously, lowers the potency of communal resistance.

In like manner, the relationships between Saleem, Ranjit, Joan and Laila are almost affronts. In the inevitable segregations that the events of Independence and Partition entail, such relationships must occupy recesses that do not belong in standardized compartments. They are the little narratives that are subservient to the more prominent narratives of the nation that document Independence and Partition.

Besides being Laila’s story, Sunlight on a Broken Column is also a story of a family. As a storyteller, Laila remembers and recollects occurrences that demarcate important moments in her household. For the narrating voice, memory is a mechanism that selects life episodes in order to create a personal narrative. Laila’s narrative is distinct from the narrative of national history because of this selective process. Events of Independence, Partition and the occurrences surrounding it are recounted through dialogues and interactions that take place in Laila’s circle of family and friends.

“We Taluqdars have ancient rights and privileges, given by a special charter, which we have to
safeguard. “
“What do those privileges amount to today?” Saleem said with a touch of derision. “They were
given by the British as the price of loyalty, and as people become more politically educated they
must question such rights. They must fight them.”
…”They cannot take what belongs to us. The land is ours,” protested Aunt Saira. It was as simple as that to her. (Hosain 231-232)

As the prospect of Independence grows more certain, Laila’s family faces the possibility of losing their land. Under the new Government of independent India, the family’s land will be considered public property. Saleem, not an advocate of the feudal way of thinking, appreciates this new policy.

On the other hand there are uncle Hamid and his wife who are a part of a generation that grows up with the assurance that they are a part of a tradition that allows them ‘ancient rights’ and privileges that come with an inherited social position. Independence will require them to give up the prerogatives they have grown accustomed to. The matter is complicated with the fact that, over the years, the family has taken to bring in its income from the land that is about to be taken away from them. In the stories of Kemal, Sita, and Saleem and his parents, the national narrative of Independence is shown to consist of many, at times conflicting, personal narratives.

When Laila returns to the Ashiana that now belongs to another family, she remembers the months immediately before Partition. Saleem, convinced that Pakistan offers him better security and prospects, decides to relocate to Karachi. Kemal chooses to remain in India. The decision to stay and remain is largely motivated by individual fears and beliefs. “I had learned too well the futility of arguments which involved beliefs,” Laila remarks (Hosain 288). Aside from individual convictions, there really is not much else to rely on when one is faced with limited alternatives and uncertain consequences. One understands, then, that often, individual choices and stories are tied to the stories of the nation.

As a selective tool, memory is partial and subjective. It recalls things that it most identifies with. Laila’s story consequently does not offer a record of Partition, but of the splitting up of her family in the Ashiana. When there are narratives like Sunlight on a Broken Column, any attempt to pin down an event like Partition as the narrative of the nation will seem an oversimplification. As narratives move away from the public, they complicate the idea of national histories. A narrative like Hosain’s suggests that national histories are nothing less than a congeries of individual memories that endlessly work to create personal narratives out of experiences of the past.

(response essay to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own)

Woolf’s primary interest in A Room of One’s Own concerns the position of women in the tradition of writing. Woolf reads literature as cultural output of a society. Considered so, the production of literature is shaped by the cultural dynamics of a society.


Woolf identifies patriarchy as a socially dominant collective outlook that has shaped the production and character of literature for over three centuries. Patriarchal values have, over time, become the yardstick against which other stances are measured. The process by which these values are put forward as fundamental can be recognized only with an insight that allows one to see their conditionality.


Women's suffrage provides Woolf with such insight. The suffrage was the first instance where patriarchy’s authority is challenged. In its demand for equal rights for women, the suffrage – if indirectly – questions the basis of patriarchal control. The reasonable assumption is that men are capable of things that women are not – things that are crucial to their superior position. The fact is that, until the time Woolf was writing, men and women have never functioned on equal grounds. The occupations and social roles of men and women have always been designated as different. If women have never been allowed to do things that men do, how is one to know whether women are less capable than men are? The suffragette logic argues that women equal men in their capacity for active participation in public and political life – that they can do more than to manage domestic affairs. Its very logic recognizes patriarchal domination as a construct.


In reading literature as a society’s cultural product, Woolf identifies in the concerns, tones and themes of individual texts social attitudes, particularly with regards to gender roles. In the work of Bronte and a certain Professor X, for instance, Woolf recognizes a tone of anger. A Room of One’s Own clarifies that the social condition in which these works are produced can well account for the presentation of arguments in them. Bronte, writing in the nineteenth century, was dissatisfied with the way women were conditioned, yet – given the social framework in her time – could do little about the fact, and this dissatisfaction found its way into her book. The professor, writing his work following the occurrence of suffrage, is angry in defense of patriarchy whose authority, in the early twentieth century, was in question.


Woolf’s work helps to clarify that, throughout three centuries and as a consequence of events like World War I and women’s suffrage, social attitudes with regards to gender relations have developed in such a way that there is excessive emphasis on the distinction between the sexes. Woolf argues that this emphasis in social attitude is carried over into literature. One writes either as a man or a woman – with qualities and interests that are taken to characterize each gender identity, so that there is in the writing an emphasis on sex-consciousness: “(p)erhaps to think…of one sex as distinct from the other is a effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind…” (100). Woolf further asserts that the best writing (the kind she terms ‘incandescent’) is free of sex-consciousness – “(i)t is when (the two sexes in the mind fuses) that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties” (102).


Woolf’s perspective recognizes the binary mode of thinking about gender as a corollary of social events. She also perceives the effects this way of thinking has on literature. It is important that Woolf is distant from the events she discusses in A Room of One’s Own (the women’s suffrage originated in the late nineteenth century and the First World War was over at least a decade before the book was published). The distance allows her a measure of objectivity. It is difficult – almost impossible – to be objective about a particular event when one is involved in the event. The writers that Woolf discusses belong to a time when the binary mode of thinking about gender relations is customary. They lack, as a result, the objectivity to see the defects of their perspective and the effects that that perspective bears on the writing they produce.
Through the analogy of a room Woolf communicates women’s need for autonomy – in private and economic terms – if they were to write fiction that is not sex-conscious. Any form of dependency on men relegates women to a subordinate position, which means that women’s experience is conditioned by their dependency. Dependency requires one to give up at least a portion of one’s freedom. Woolf’s concern does not predominantly lie with limitations of freedom, but with how these limitations affect the character of fiction written by women. This is Woolf’s arguments with regards to the matter: “(one will be required to) sacrifice a hair of the head of (one’s) vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand.” (110) Relationship of dependence involves feelings of deference, of being indebted to – which in turn require one to curb one’s opinions and ideas. The writing of fiction is affected by this requirement for moderation: the tone of resentment that Woolf identifies in Jane Eyre, for example, is recompense for the need to exercise restraint.


Gender identity is only one aspect of human identity. Motivated by sex-consciousness, any writing is likely to be limited and narrow in perspective in the sense that it describes human experience only in terms of gender. Sex-consciousness becomes a sort of worldview that governs one’s interpretation of the world and, in turn, one’s perspective in writing. Such perspective holds back writers: it incapacitates the possibility of describing human experiences in their true quality, unadulterated by a gendered perspective. Writers, Woolf opines, should be able to “(t)hink of things in themselves” (115) – which is to say that writers must be able to interpret the world and their experiences as human beings, not as beings of particular sexes. Human interpretations of the world (as opposed to gendered ones) promise fuller and more rounded perspectives, but these require a mind that is not controlled by sex-consciousness - what Woolf terms the androgynous mind.


To allow women rooms of their own is a matter that also concerns men’s position in society and, by extension, their perspective as writers. They will no longer define themselves in terms of women’s dependency. In such circumstances, men and women as writers will “see human beings not…in their relation to each other but in relation to reality.” (117) Their writing will, consequently, cease to be sex-conscious.


The creation of ‘incandescent’ literature requires a society that is liberal in its thinking.

(response essay -- poststructuralism)

Central to structuralist thought is the notion of a system with an underlying structure responsible for its workings. Theoretically, the structure keeps the system intact and running. As a system, an educational institution, for example, functions by a set of rules. The members of the institution must comply with specified rules; their actions are consequently limited by these rules. The rules that regulate a system turn out a set of possible phenomena. To contain potential phenomena, the underlying structure of a system conceptually creates an area, which resembles that limited by the parameter of a circle. Whatever constitutes the system’s underlying structure sits in the center of that circle, playing hub. Such a representation of a system presupposes the center (the underlying structure) to be fixed and stable. The center needs to be, in order to allow for and control activities in the area surrounding it. The key to structuralist thought is this presupposition. As long as the conjecture of a stable center is maintained, the structuralist is at ease.

When Derrida in “Structure, Sign and Play” questions the assumed stability of the center of the structuralist’s circle, he inevitably challenges the validity of the structuralist’s idea of a system. What really keeps the center in place – the substance the center contains or the system’s consensus? The field of physics is an instance of the structuralist’s model of a system. The center of the system is in this case fixed, since the center must necessarily derive from realistic, observable facts. Studies and hypotheses in the system are based on the theory of physics, which is formulated on account of natural occurrences. In the case of human sciences, the ‘center’ is more conceptual. One may assume poetics to be the underlying structure of the study (or system) of Literature, but poetics is a theoretical construct. Its subsistence is not as irrefutable as that of natural occurrences. For its continuation, poetics rely on the consent of those involved in the study of Literature. Should questions on its authority arise, the center is at risk of being dislodged – if not without difficulty. If the center’s authority relies on the system’s consensus, an instance of dissent can prove damaging. According to Derrida, the center of any system always ‘escapes structurality’. In any system of religious belief, the idea of God constitutes the center. The idea of God is a part of the system in that it regulates the system, yet to maintain its central position (its authority), it cannot be regulated by the system. The center of the system is at once inside and outside the system, like the authority in a capitalist system of society.

The recognition of the paradox provokes the ‘rupture’ that Derrida speaks of in the beginning of the essay. The paradox itself can be recognized only when the underlying structure of a system is challenged. If students of an educational institution never challenge the institution’s policies, they either believe that the rules serve a creditable purpose or they know that cases of disagreement result in distasteful consequences. Either way, it’s compliance. The instance of ‘decentering’ happens when dissent occurs within a system. An act of dissent should naturally follow the recognition of a system as a construct. To perform an act of dissent is to therefore de-construct a system. If the center of a system has been recognized as arbitrary, an instance of deconstruction is not likely to entail reconstruction of the center. In the absence of policies (embodied by the center of the system), dissent ceases to be dissent. An instance of decentering produces, therefore, a liberated arena where multiplicity of perspectives is possible.
As Foucault portrays it, the link between narrative (before poststructuralism) and capitalist ideology is the assumption of a central authority. To place an author’s intention at the center of his writing is to comply with the theory that a text contains an essential truth that only the author is privy to. This of course contrasts with the poststructuralist policy of ‘differance’: if there is such a thing as an essential truth within a text, it cannot possibly turn out interpretations other than those that allegedly support the author’s policies.

Analogous to the capitalist society, the text – viewed in this manner – becomes a closed, totalitarian system. The metaphorical death of the author approximates an act of dissent in a capitalist system, where an authoritarian power is recognized as a construct and challenged. Orwell’s pigs don’t have a place in the new system.
Meanwhile, the image of the negative and the figure of the castrato from “Sarrasine” in “The Death of the Author” assist in pointing up the quality of ‘differance’ that poststructuralism believes is latent in every text.

To clarify the analogy of the negative, it helps to return to semiotics. Writing, like an object (as opposed to a ‘sign’), is essentially neutral. The process of sign-making happens when neutral objects are associated with familiar systems of conventions: the object is supplied with connotations, therefore converted into a sign. A parallel process happens with writing: in the reading process, the reader rewrites the writing. The reader introduces her beliefs into the writing, so that what comes out of the process of reading is a text already imbued with intentions. Each interpretation of ‘neutral writing’ (interpretations convert writing into ‘text’) acquires its significance on account of its difference from other interpretations. The ‘negative’ has the latent potential to turn out various interpretations, but in itself, the negative is neutral.
The figure of the castrato from Balzac’s “Sarrasine” helps to illustrate disunity of the text. In the story, at the point where La Zambinella speaks (her) sentence: “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling…”, there is no indication whatsoever that Zambinella is, in fact, not a woman. Following Sarrasine’s discovery of Zambinella’s identity, the sentence acquires rather cynical connotation. Crucially, the connotation is deferred up to the point where Zambinella’s identity is exposed. If spoken by a woman, the sentence is hardly unusual. The context in which the sentence is spoken decides its connotation. In the same way, connotational meanings of a text (subtexts) depend on the context in which the text is read. It is clear then, that the text cannot be a closed unit: the text is always read in the present (although in different temporal contexts), and it therefore has to always allow space for ‘deferred subtexts’.

In a structural textual analysis, the play of semiotics is significant because the idea of an underlying structure is really what makes semiotics possible in the first place. The conversion of an object into a sign involves an individual’s investment of her socio-cultural experience onto the object. The structuralist engages in the process of analysis and anticipates certain images in a text to be perceived as signs because she trusts in certain collective cultural conventions, which act as an underlying structure in a system where the text and the readers are brought together. When there is an assumption of an underlying structure, there is already a perimeter of possible readings. The text is a united whole that contains these readings.

The poststructuralist, on the other hand, distrusts the theory of an underlying structure. Conventions cannot be underlying structures because their mutability has been recognized. For the poststructuralist, the text is also an arena that contains multiple readings, but it is not a united whole because there are always possibilities of deferred subtexts. The poststructuralist textual analysis will, therefore, seek to show textual disunity.

Here is Kolatkar’s “Chaitanya”:

sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya

he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods

The structuralist interpretation of the poem will read: “The stones in Jejuri possess connotation of holiness owing to conventions – as outlined, for example, in the Shilpasastras - and perception. Chaitanya, predictably conversant in the conventions, imply that, as the stones acquire the connotation of holiness, they can be given the qualities of a grape. Consequently, the grape seeds will quite effortlessly acquire godlike quality. The poem illustrates a little too clearly how conventions shape individual perception and how, conversely, collective perceptions grant conventions authority.

The question that the poem asks is: if it is impossible to believe that stones are grapes and grape seeds are gods, why is it possible to believe that stones are gods? One must cling stubbornly to one’s copy of the sastras and insist that while the later statement is inscribed in it, the former is not. But one must, finally concede to the fact that it is one’s willingness to believe (one’s faith, in other words) that validates statements in the sastras. For that reason, if the transformations that the poem proposes appear preposterous (how must a man spit out gods?), the poem has then succeeded in destabilizing the notion of absolute authority assigned to conventions.

The poststructuralist, on the other hand, will concentrate on the crucial paradox the poem carries – that in the process of undermining the authority of conventions, the poem must acknowledge that very authority. It is the old atheist’s argument – that in order to challenge the existence of God, one must necessarily concede to it. Beginning with this argument, it is impossible to point at any ‘essence’ in “Chaitanya”: it is neither the non-existence of conventional authority nor the existence of it. The poem must incorporate both notions in order to make sense. In the hunt for essence, one finds only a state of aporia, where conflicting notions lead to an impasse. In accentuating textual disunity, a deconstructionist reading of a text seeks to point out the nonexistence of textual essence.


Works Cited:

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. 146-150.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longman, 1988. 89-103.

Kolatkar, Arun. “Chaitanya.” The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets. Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. New Delhi: OUP, 1992. 66.

(response essay -- semiotics)

Man’s experience of life is inextricable from man’s capacity to make meanings out of situations and things they encounter. Objects and events have a bearing upon a person’s life because they mean something to him. The production of meaning is essentially a process of sign-making: people typically interpret things by (unconsciously) relating them to familiar systems of conventions. Semiotics studies this process; it looks at the ways meaning is produced in the system of sign-making.

The Saussurean sign is the total that results from the relationship between the signifier and the signified. The model excludes reference to objects that exist in the real world. In the Saussurean model, the signifier is the form that sign exists in, while the signified is the concept in the mind that a signifier evokes. The relationship between the signifier and the signified is referred to as ‘signification’. The signifier and the signified of a sign are interdependent: a sign must have a signified and a signifier to function. A sign is then a combination of a signifier with a particular signified. The same signifier can stand for a variety of signifieds. An arrow painted on a road sign alongside a name of a place signifies the direction one should follow to reach the place, while the arrow next to the address bar in an Internet browser indicates that one should click on it to continue. In the same way, a number of signifiers can stand for a particular concept (signified). Black and white, for example, are both colours that can signify mourning.

Saussure's idea of meaning was distinctively differential: he emphasized the differences between signs. He did not define signs in terms of some 'essential' or intrinsic nature. If one signifier can stand for different concepts, similarly a particular concept can be signified by a variety of signifiers, it follows that the relationship between a signifier and a signified (a signification) is arbitrary. A chess piece, for example, does not have much value in a domino game. This is because the domino game works within a framework (a system) that differs from the framework of a game of chess. The chess piece is a signifier. In a chess game, it matters whether a chess piece is a Bishop, a King, or a Queen. In a domino game, a Bishop and a King will share an identical signified as signifiers: they do not matter. Moreover, when the idea of a system is brought in, in addition to being differential, meaning is also relational. The meaning or the value of a sign (the chess piece) depends on the system (the game) in which it is located. This may suggest that, in the manner that langue pre-exists parole, the signified precedes the signifier. The signified, however, does not make possible the production of signs. To return to the idea stated earlier in the essay: people interpret things by (unconsciously) relating them to familiar systems of conventions. Signs are produced when people assign meaning to passive objects; it is the systems of conventions that make possible the production of signs.

To interpret things by relating them to familiar systems of conventions is the classic way of thinking. Interpretation is then a process of signification. The previous paragraph has discussed the arbitrariness of signs. Divested of meaning, an object is passive and neutral; to assign meaning to and convert an object into a sign is, in a way, to allocate connotative meanings to the object. In literary texts, semiotics function largely in this connotational aspect. It is of real value that words – like objects in themselves (divested of meaning) – are neutral. The inherently neutral quality of words makes it possible to assign limitless number of connotations (signifieds) to them. This quality will also be significant when one enters into discussions on Deconstruction.

Any occasion of interpretation or meaning production involves the creation of signs. A film like Bend It Like Beckham, for example, trusts almost completely in its audience’s capacity for sign-making. The primary code is one of identity – cultural and gender. The audience must recognise the intended signs in the film in order to appreciate the conflicts in it, and to finally respond to their resolution. In the meantime, do recall the perfect tagline: “Who wants to cook Aloo Gobi when you can bend a ball like Beckham?”

The creation of any work of art involves, on the part of the creator, certain assumptions with regards to the audience’s regulative matrix (in this case, the regulative matrix is the set of socio-cultural conventions which will enable the audience to respond to the film). The audience is expected to recognize the assumptions that accompany a family of Indian immigrant living in Britain – of their place in the society, their need to adapt and to retain their cultural heritage at the same time. The audience must also, to a degree, be able to appreciate the complexity of the relationships between the children and their parents (of both families – the Bhamras and the Paxtons) that are affected by ideas of cultural identity and notions of propriety.
Within the codes of sports, masculine (gender) identity, and Britain’s mainstream culture, Beckham is an obvious sign. Then there is Jess Bhamra, who gradually acquires the function of a sign.

The film provides scenes of day-to-day activities in the Bhamra household; this helps to locate Jess within a specific system that is the family and, in a larger milieu, people who share a similar cultural identity with the family. To the framework outside this system, Jess becomes more or less a sign, which signifies the system. When the two signs (Jess and Beckham) are contrasted (the act of contrasting is a part of the syntagmatic structure of the film), each becomes heavily loaded with connotations. The audience understands that what one is the other is not (to emphasize the arbitrariness of signification, one should say, rather: what one is, the other cannot be). What Beckham is, Jess Bhamra cannot be – and vice versa. This opposition is of course what creates the main conflict in the movie. The intended meaning of the movie is constructed out of this opposition too. One knows, so far, that Jess and Beckham, as signs, are opposites: each carries a set of connotational values that are conflicting. When Jess gives up aloo gobi and takes up soccer, the conventions that are responsible for the construction of each sign is modified. In the process of modification, the film communicates its meaning: bend the rules, get what you want.

As far as literature is concerned, in the process of interpretation, the reader brings into the act of reading her knowledge of the world. In Linguistics Poetics, Culler speaks of texts as having been written in such a way that they are not immediately intelligible. Texts need to be transformed into more straightforward statements for comprehension. The transformation is in fact the process of interpretations. This is the process of naturalization, during which the reader makes known whatever is initially unknown in the text. Her socio-cultural knowledge should supply information that is needed for familiarity with the particularities of the poem. The process of naturalization is similar in manner to the convention of significance that Culler proposes. While it is conventional that all readers involve their socio-cultural knowledge in the act of reading, the nature of that knowledge varies between readers. Any interpretation of the text is therefore arbitrary. It is the reader who, assisted by her social or cultural conventions, invests meaning in objects, ideas or images in the poem, making signs out of them. It is the reader who reads the text as a sign. Considered in this manner, the readers are producers, rather than consumers, of meaning.
Consider this poem:

Listen to the song of the reed flute,
It sings of separation.
Torn from the leaf-layered, wind-voiced
Banks of the pond,
It is joined to sorrow and joy
By a slender sound.
Who, asked Rumi, can understand
The Reed’s longing to return?
Let its raw lips rest then;
Let all words be brief then.
And I, O Believers, cried Rumi
(Having lost the man he loved),
I who am not of the East
Nor of the West, un-Christian,
Not Muslim or Jew, neither
Born of Adam nor Eve,
What can I love but the world itself,
What can I kiss but flesh?
Let my raw lips rest then.
Let all words be brief.


Khair’s “Rumi and the Reed” locates Rumi and Sufism in the present day context. Examined in the context of Sufism, the contemporary assumption of categorical identity is absurd. Sufism, of which Rumi is a practitioner, believes that the essence of Being is unmanifested, yet is present in and indivisible from all things. It follows that all beings come from a single source. All beings, therefore, share one essential identity. The concept of categorical identity cannot figure in Sufism. On the contrary, in the contemporary context where identity is categorical, Rumi is inevitably rootless. Rumi belongs to all categories of identity since all categories, for a Sufi, is one. The contemporary context cannot admit this anomalous contingency: one must belong; one must be a part of a category. The poem is founded on the contrast between the concept of identity as derived from the belief of Sufism and the way identity is perceived in the contemporary world.

The reader interprets a poem through a set of signs. Rumi, the East/ the West, Christian / Muslim / Jew, and Adam / Eve are present as signs in the poem. Rumi is a sign that acquires meaning within the code of Sufism. Knowledge of Sufism enables the reader to invest meaning in Rumi and to thereby make out the connotation Rumi has to the basic belief of Sufism, that the essence of Being is present in and indivisible from all things. The rest of the signs acquire their meaning within the code of identity, as it is understood in the contemporary context. The reader needs to be able to grasp the connotation that the contrast between East and West suggests. The situation of the world in the present day suggests a sharp distinction between an Eastern and Western cultural identity. There are sets of values associated with each, and the reader must work under the assumption that Eastern and Western values are firmly not interchangeable.

The reader is required to understand the criticality that the concept of identity has acquired in the present world. There is suggested, for example, a sense of potential violence when one category of identity is contrasted with another – particularly religious identity. This is however a connotation that the concept of identity has adopted in the contemporary context. In order to interpret the poem completely, the reader needs to be able to comprehend the nuances of meaning – the connotative meanings – that each sign carries. This is possible only when the codes of Sufism, and of identity in the contemporary context, are a part of the reader’s regulative matrix.

In order to account for the production of meaning, there needs to be a paradigmatic analysis of the poem. The ‘reed flute’ is chosen out of the paradigm of musical instruments. Since a poem must cohere, the reader may conclude that the reed flute is chosen because it’s particular to the Persian culture, which is the origin of Sufism. Having identified the connotation of Sufism that Rumi carries, the reader understands that one of the several ideas the poem operates by is the doctrine of Sufism – that all beings share an essential identity. This recognition assists in converting the reed flute that sings of separation into a metaphor. The reed flute that sings of separation comes to emphasize the longing the human self must feel as a result of the self’s secession from its pool of essence. The choice of ‘reed’ (from the paradigm of other plants, for example) enables the author to suggest to the readers the sense of being plucked from a life-giving source (the pond), while at the same time permitting him to hint at the Persian connection.

The reader can therefore conclude that to introduce the categorization of identity is nothing less than the act of plucking reeds from their banks in the pond, causing the longing the return in the subjects being plucked (the reed and the human self).
The syntagmatic analysis of the poem must focus on the manner in which the signs are combined. At the point where Rumi says he is “not of the East nor of the West, un-Christian, not Muslim or Jew, neither born of Adam nor Eve”, what is implied is Rumi’s rootlessness. The categories exist. The reader, assisted by her cultural conventions, presumes that any human being must position himself within any of these categories. The positioning of East / West, Christian / Jew / Muslim, Adam /Eve, is such that it entails that one must either be a part of this or that. There are no interstices. But the reader’s knowledge (through the earlier act of signification) that the poem operates – among others – by the doctrine of Sufism, causes the signs which function within the code of identity to turn out an ironical effect. Sufism believes that all beings share an essential identity. The reader understands that instead of failing to belong, Rumi belongs everywhere. The syntagmatic structure brings out a sense of irony in the poem. In the apparent emphasis of his rootlessness, Rumi is extremely rooted. A semiotic analysis will also look at suppositions that an author, in creating a text, takes for granted. What accounts for this, if one returns to semiotics, is the assumption that authors and readers operate in certain similar codes.

“Rumi and the Reed” operates under the assumption that all readers share identical understanding of the concept of identity, and that they are familiar with the idea of Sufism. The reader arrives at her interpretation through the process of signification, and syntagmatic and paradigmatic analyses of the poem.

(response essay -- structuralism and semiotics)

Structuralism points to the application of linguistic theory – the Saussurian concepts of langue and parole – to the study of a range of objects and activities outside language. Parole refers to individual speech acts, while langue is the system of speech that makes possible the production of parole. To study literature on the basis of structuralism, it seems necessary to begin with the assumption that literature is an institution. In an institution, langue acts in the same way a system of rules does: it makes possible a set of potential behaviours. In the Institution of Literature, literary conventions are the rules that make possible the production of literary texts and textual interpretations. Literary conventions act in the place of langue, while individual piece of writing occupies the place of parole. What follows is the hypothesis that readers and authors, being members of the same institution, operate in identical codes. This in turn accounts for the possibility of information transfer, which occurs in the processes of writing and reading. If langue, in regulating individual paroles, is the grammar of a language, in the Institution of Literature, literary conventions are the grammars of poetics, where poetics is the principle of literature.

In a textual analysis, the structuralist concerns herself with the process that leads to the production of meaning. The structuralist believes that the process of reading that leads to interpretation is controlled by certain regulations. If a particular reader’s interpretation is legible to others, it follows that the reading conventions that particular reader follows are familiar to other readers. These conventions, if identified, may be formulated as the ‘langue’ for reading in order to arrive at meaning. They may be put down as a system that regulates the process of interpretation, one that pre-exists individual interpretations. The problem, as Culler points out in “Literary Competence”, is the fact that most readers – while they follow particular conventions in the act of reading – are unconscious of doing so. In order to formulate conventions, one needs to be conscious of the manner in which they take place in the process of reading and interpretation, so that they can be detected and explicitly put down. What the structuralist seeks to do in a textual analysis is to trace the production of meaning in order to arrive at the conventions a reader follows in the process of interpretation.

As far as structuralism is concerned therefore, the aim of literary criticism is the idea of demystification. If the structuralist succeeds in formulating reading conventions to guide readers to the production of meaning, the assumption that there is an ideal reader is inevitable. But while the conventions operate on that assumption, the skill required to be one can be acquired, since the conventions are explicitly set down. Literature is therefore not mystifying and to be grasped only by a privileged handful, but is available to all. However, even with the formulation of conventions, there will not be one ‘correct’ interpretation of literary texts. Culler specifies three possible conventions: the conventions of significance, metaphorical coherence, and thematic unity. All readers must work by the convention of significance (that is, by bringing their socio-cultural knowledge into the process of interpretation, in order to get themselves acquainted with the text), but the nature of signification will vary, since the nature of the readers’ socio-cultural knowledge varies. There will instead be a set of plausible interpretations, which is made possible by the formulated conventions of reading.

In Bishop’s “The Fish”, the fish is a victor. So much so, in fact, that when the captor conceives its worth, she has to let it go. The fish is far too valuable to justify a death that, if received in the captor’s hands, is too commonplace. The act of letting go is the consequence of being overwhelmed.

The process of interpretation begins with the reader’s identification with the particularities of the poem. The action described – that of capturing a fish – is conventional. The physical description of the fish is conventional; it is an average fish that anybody would be familiar with. However, when the captor looks at five pieces of fish-lines hooked to the fish’s mouth and sees medals, the reader knows that the fish carries a connotative meaning. The reader’s cultural knowledge will tell her that medals carry the connotation of having won something, of triumph. The fish, provided with medals, has won something. It is logical to assume that, since the medals are five old hooks attached to its mouth, the fish has triumphed over these.

One may also arrive at this reading with the assistance of semiotics. To analyse the poem on the basis of semiotics, one needs to look at where, in text, meanings are invested. Which elements in the poem are converted into signs in order to assist interpretation of the entire poem? Medals are invested with meaning; they become a sign, a symbol of triumph. The five hooks consequently become a sign too, a symbol of triumph specifically for the fish. The readers’ familiarity with medals is the regulative matrix that determines the reading of the medals where the fish is concerned.

Further, a reader’s regulative matrix may be affected by other texts she is familiar with. Acquaintance with Santiago’s marlin or Hughes’ pike may determine the location where meaning is invested within Bishop’s “The Fish.” Hughes’ pike is monumental in its willingness and capacity to kill. The captor, who has the pikes kept behind glass, has witnessed their power, which is evident in their competence to kill. The captor has to concede that the pikes are “a hundred feet long in their world.” Santiago’s marlin is an unwilling victim. On the event of its death, it has earned the respect of its captor on such a scale that Santiago fights to defend the marlin’s carcass from being eaten by sharks. Such a sequel, if allowed to happen without a fight, will have marred the carcass’ value.

If these readings act as a regulative matrix in the interpretation of Bishop’s poem, it is Bishop’s fish that will be transformed into a sign. The connotative qualities of Hughes’ pike and Santiago’s marlin – that of being monumental, honorable and precious – will come to be associated with Bishop’s fish, turning the fish itself into a symbol that stands for these qualities. This is an instance of intertextuality, as is an example of the consequence of semiotics on textual analyses.

The syntagmatic structure of the poem too contributes to the production of meaning. The comparison between the five hooks and medals create a metaphor between them. The metaphor is created on the basis of the principle of combination. The particular combination of medals and hooks that are attached to the fish results in the connotation of triumph that is associated with the fish.

Now one needs to place the fish, the victor, alongside the captor. The captor, as the text suggests, has caught the fish rather easily. The fish, on the other hand, has survived and carries with it the marks of survival. The medals allow for connotations of triumph and power. The medals have transformed something ordinary into something extraordinary. In a similar manner, the oil around the rusted engine is transformed into rainbow. The act of letting go is the consequence of being overwhelmed.

Literary structuralism is inevitably linked to semiotics, particularly to the Saussurian concept of the sign. The Saussurian model makes use of the ideas of the signified and the signifier. A sign refers to whatever object or idea that has been invested with meaning, so that it stands for something else. The signifier is the sound image or written model of the represented object or idea. The signified is the concept or mental image that is evoked in the mind of the listener or the speaker when she comes across a particular signifier. Given the fact that a sign becomes one only if invested with meaning, the sign in necessarily arbitrary. The red light, divested of meaning, is only a red light. It is only because of social conventions that the red light, in the context of traffic, carries a value as a command for all vehicles to stop moving. Social conventions invest meaning on the red light, converting into a sign. It follows, then, that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, because other than social conventions, there is nothing inherent to account for the representation of a signified by a particular signifier. What also follows from the concept of arbitrariness is the differential quality of the sign: a sign is designated its particular signified only on the basis of its perceived difference from other signs.

In Linguistics Poetics, Culler speaks of texts as having been written in such a way that they are not immediately intelligible. Texts need to be transformed into more straightforward statements for comprehension. The transformation is in fact the process of interpretations. The Saussurian model of the sign may help with the process.

In the process of interpretation, the reader brings into the act of reading her knowledge of the world. This is the process of naturalization, during which the reader makes known whatever is initially unknown in the text. Her socio-cultural knowledge should supply information that is needed for familiarity with the particularities of the poem. The process of naturalization is similar in manner to the convention of significance that Culler proposes. While it is conventional that all readers involve their socio-cultural knowledge in the act of reading, the nature of that knowledge varies between readers. Any interpretation of the text is therefore arbitrary. It is the reader who, assisted by her social or cultural conventions, invests meaning in objects, ideas or images in the poem, making signs out of them. It is the reader who reads the text as a sign. Considered in this manner, the readers are producers, rather than consumers, of meaning.
Consider this poem:

sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya

he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods

An interpretation of the poem may read like this: “In Jejuri, where stones, by virtue of faith or perception, can be made holy, they can also be converted into grapes. Chaitanya pops into his mouth a grape that is a stone that is a god. He spits out seeds of grape, which, inevitably, are gods. What emerges as holy in the poem are not the grapes or stones, or even gods, but the transformative power of perception, which also speaks significantly of the power of faith.”

Regulated by her cultural knowledge, the reader will first familiarize herself with the ideas of Jejuri, Chaitanya, and the stones. The stones, understood in the context of Jejuri, become invested with meaning. The reader’s cultural conventions are responsible for the investing of meaning; they construct the reader’s regulative matrix. For a reader, the regulative matrix acts like the Saussurian ‘langue’: it is a network of relations that allow an individual to produce meaning from observations. Having been supplied with meaning, the stones become a sign. It is a symbol that stands for something else – the concept of holiness, perhaps God. The naturalization process is done. Recuperation, by which the elements of the poem are integrated into one thematic unity, begins here. The poem demands that the stones are seen as grapes. At this stage, the reader is aware of the connotation of holiness the stones have acquired in the context of Jejuri. Whatever force is responsible for having transformed the stones into holy objects must now transform them into grapes. The force may be recognized as the force of faith or perception. The stones are now grapes, but also gods – from the earlier association the reader derives from the Jejuri setting. In this understanding, when Chaitanya spits out seeds of grapes, he must also spit out gods. The force that has catered to the earlier two transformations now caters to the third - from grape seeds to gods. This is how one arrives at the reading that what is holy in the poem is perception.

The arbitrary nature and differential quality of the sign in the Saussurian model is also true of the symbols in literary texts. One may, for example, consider the image of the river (which, having been invested with meaning by the context of the literary work of which it is a part, becomes a symbol) in The Mill in the Floss and Huckleberry Finn. The River Floss has a destructive quality; the Mississippi is liberating. Neither quality is inherent to rivers. To speak of the river as a sign is to speak about its connotative meaning, and this connotative meaning is relational. If cultural conventions account for the differential quality of the Saussurian model of the sign in the real world, literary contexts account for the differential quality of literary symbols. As signs, the meaning of literary symbols is relational.

Because of social conventions, signs normally become so fixed in meaning that their arbitrariness is overlooked. If readers are producers of meaning, in cases where the majority of readers share similar conventions, an image or figure in a text is given – by common consent – a specific connotation. The figure of Adam, for example, has come to denote the particular quality of innocence. The figure originates in the Bible, but one encounters another Adam in the works of Walt Whitman. In 19th century America, when Whitman was writing, (assumed) innocence is a desirable quality. It may have been a conscious attempt on the author’s part to recreate the figure of Adam. Whitman may have focussed heavily on the quality of innocence that, without having it spelt out, the figure in his work stirs up – in the readers’ mind – the figure of Adam. Nevertheless, the American Adam is created; the quality associated with the original Adam becomes the quality of the American Adam. Looking at the process from the readers’ perspective, it is the reader who, being familiar with the figure of the biblical Adam, reads the connotations of the biblical Adam into the works of Whitman, creating thereby the American Adam out of Whitman’s works. This is an example of intertextuality. The readers’ activity of sign-making in literary texts may lead to the creation of new texts, which, in turn, draw from associative meanings of previously produced signs.