How to Appreciate a Literary Text, Part-II

Hello Friends...

Sure, we all are doing well... Be careful, we must stay fit and shouldn't fall ill getting our studies affected. We shall eat and drink healthy, exercise regularly, and won't avoid our domestic and social responsibilities. And whatever time we get for ourselves at the end of the day, we must study hard for most of the time, so that we learn to think... and learn. We simply cannot afford to stop thinking, for we are learners, and we are the chosen ones who got the scope to learn...

Let's learn to think first...

Understanding a Literary Text

Here we meet again to continue discussing a very basic query, - how to appreciate a literary text, be it for some academic reason, or for some non-academic pursuit like leisure-reading and all. This is the second part of the series, and here we will be discussing how the setting of a text helps towards the process of dissemination of meaning. If you intend to look for a discussion only on setting, you are already in the right place. But if you feel interested to participate in the previous discussion dealing with characters, or if you feel like attending the entire series, you better start from the beginning.

In order to get a good grasp over the entire process, here we would try to continue to discuss and comprehend how meaning is communicated through any literary text. After all, all texts get composed to share some meaning. Appreciation of any text, therefore, demands a thorough dissemination of all the possible meanings conveyed through the text,- direct or indirect, intentional or even unintentional.

So, as we have intended, this discussion is going to help young learners to pick up the necessary skills to appreciate any literary text. Besides, it's also going to help aspiring young authors to learn how to edit and compose their write-ups in a more enticing way,- for once we learn how a literary text conveys meaning, we are free to use our skill the way we want to, - be it like a reader, or as an author.

The Literal Meaning And the Underlying Meaning beneath the Literal/Surface Meaning

Whenever we go through a text, we come across the literal meaning immediately. Who might have faced a challenge to make out the meaning of a menu card at some restaurant, right? But in a literary text, we might actually have a wide range of meanings underneath the literal, or the surface meaning of the text. The main challenge of a reader is to decode these underlying meanings underneath the literal meaning of a text. These underlying layers of meanings are mostly hinted through various elements of a literary composition indirectly, for it has now long been the solemn tradition of an author not to tell directly but to hint at the intended meanings subtly.

The Responsibility of The Readers

So, it has now been the responsibility of reader to search for the underlying meanings in a text. And in the quest, a reader might very well discover not only the meanings intended by the author, but also some hidden nuances about the author her/himself which s/he never intended to share but leaked. It might be something that even the author her/himself was unaware of.

Different Elements of a Literary Text

Now it's time to check the different elements of a literary text out in order to understand how these might give us some insight into decoding the meaning conveyed. In the first part of the series, we started with the characters, and now we are going to continue with the setting...

Setting

Metamorphosis of Narcissus by Salvador Dali, Courtesy: Widewalls

Time And Place: the Limits

In order to comprehend a literary composition, we cannot avoid identifying the setting in terms of time and place from the text to understand it quite well. Both time and place are variables in a text that define its course. Whenever any, or both of these two elements get/s changed, they may bring in an entire shift so as to create a completely new text with a different meaning altogether. And this is what many people actually attempt to do as they rebuild their own texts based upon some earlier texts. 

Context (Time And Place) Decides the Text

Do you remember Roald Dahl's Little Red Riding Hood And The Wolf (1982)? Do you feel that this text might have been possible for Charles Perrault to come up with when he composed the first written version of the ancient fairy tale in 1697? I don't feel so. European civilisation underwent a lot in between, and the shift in time results into the different points of view presented in the two different texts drawing the storyline from the same ancient fairy tale. We can neither just judge the characters in the text, nor the characters behind the text, free from being under the influences of their time periods and jump to conclude about the meaning the text convey.

Reconstruction of Shakespearian texts has been quite a popular literary trend throughout the globe for centuries, particularly in the cinematic world. They adapt, adopt, and adept the original texts to tell their own stories from different time zones and periods. How do they do so? They actually fit the old story line to their own context, in terms of both time and place, and get to tell their own story in their very own flavour. You may choose to watch the movies that you would like to watch to understand the impact of time and space upon the meaning of a text itself by carefully considering this list of cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare. 

However, sometimes we might get so different a story in the process that we might not even get to identify the original story behind. You might wonder why, but there are articles where they do present the 1994 Disney movie The Lion King as a reconstruction of Hamlet for elementary similarities. Would you care to explain how they actually relate the two texts that apparently are so different?

Many among us has somehow managed to permanently associate the identity of the ever exploited colonised people with the African communities. Have you ever got any context to think otherwise? Without a good deal of knowledge about the history of Nigeria, Biafra: A People Betrayed by Kurt Vonnegut might actually seem to be a piece of imaginary fiction, diluting the socio-political worth and significance of the text.

Setting: Its Function

Determining The Socio-Cultural Demands

Function of the setting is so important because it determines the socio-cultural demands upon the characters who roll the ball of action. Hamlet turns out to be so singular in his own country thanks to his long stays abroad where he grew in different socio-cultural values perhaps. Historical demands of the male-dominated old time when the world used to be divided into the binary world of only good and bad, gifted us the old story of Red Riding Hood where we get the same old repetition of the damsels in distress waiting to be rescued by their prince charmers from the evil villains; whereas the changed scenario of the modern time demanded not just a different, but also more complicated and grey Little Red Riding Hood from Roald Dahl instead of the plain, simple black and white earlier version.

Ways the characters are related with the setting, are therefore, integral to our understanding of a text. Failing to understand the socio-cultural differences between S. Sen and his wife Kalyani in A Bride for the Sahib/ The Wog by Khushwant Singh would simply ruin our attempts to appreciate the story. Why both the characters, despite belonging to 'Bengali' ICS/IAS families stood out against each other so violently is the key to get the intended meaning of the text. And it would be impossible to grasp without a thorough understanding of the characters in relation to their cultural configurations.

Determining the Mood

Ways the setting in a text determines the mood and atmosphere of a narrative is quite worthy of discussing. Have you ever watched, or been a connoisseur of period movies? If you have watched the movie Pride And Prejudice (2005), you certainly now know how the society used to function and how people used to live during the late 18th and early 19th century in British countryside. The moment you get to see the characters dancing, or eyeing for a partner, or getting desperate to marry off the eligible daughters, you get to engage yourself to the tune of the time. That's how the atmosphere create the mood in the narrative and engage the readers in ways appropriate. In spite of criticising the characters harsh, we get to identify the characters coming from different times and places, and therefore learn about their different perspectives as well.

A Brief Note before Calling It a Day

Adding Our Own Context into the Process

Hope this discussion has helped you to grasp the very basic concept of setting to make you feel more confident to deal with a text. The more we continue to read and deal with texts getting engaged in analysing the settings, the better would be our skills to appreciate the meaning of the texts. And, at the same time, it would be very much like an experienced reader if we manage to compare the setting of the text, the context of the author, and our own context. That way, the dissemination of meaning would be the most dynamic one, I can assure you. That's how we define the readers' response to a text. The very moment we bring in our own context into the reading of the text, we start interacting with the text and create our own.

The entire series (of which this is the second part) is certainly going to be a very basic guideline series to read and appreciate a literary text. And you may find a lot of questions flocking into your mind that are not answered here. Please feel free to ask me about your doubts and confusions. Guided by your questions, with time, it will be updated and edited to make it more useful for you.