Books: September 2003 Archives

Yesterday, when I was out driving, I was passed by a big white tractor-trailer. The only decoration on the truck was on its rear doors: a name and a picture of a penguin. I thought, "oh, this truck must be one of a fleet of refrigerated trucks."

Was this a semiotic moment? Would semiotics concern itself with how I came to this conclusion -- the study of the way I, in one glance, made the metonymic association penguin + cold + truck (- brand name) = one of a fleet of refrigerated trucks? Would semiotics concern itself with the guy who chose the picture of the penguin, with my brain seeing the picture making the association, or with the cultural associations that the truck owner and I share (the associations of penguins and cold)? Or is semiotics all of the above?

What if I had missed the point and thought that the truck was full of penguins? Would semiotics examine how and why I missed the point of the picture?

I gave in to book lust again yesterday. Hambet had fallen asleep on my lap and resisted my efforts to put him to bed, so I spent a little time surfing around the 'net with a sleeping baby on my lap. I had been thinking about a book I thoroughly enjoyed as a pre-teen and thought I'd see if I could find a copy. I remembered the title, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, but couldn't remember the author.

Googling the title alone was not much help, but adding a few words from the book itself helped. I tried "Elizabeth "Elizabeth" + aunt + Scotland and finally found a good hit in a Scottish tourism site that referred to the book and its author, Eileen Dunlop.

The book is hard to describe, but it's a real page-turner. (And I liked it for more than just the obvious reason!) It's a time-travel fantasy, in which a modern-day Elizabeth finds herself spending the summer at a Scottish castle with her aunt. Her aunt is a historian who has been spending several years researching the history of the great noble family that once lived at the castle. Elizabeth had once been close to her aunt, but recently her aunt has grown distant and cold.

The summer has a dismal start. Elizabeth is bored and unhappy, until she comes across an antique mirror stuck in the back of her bureau. She finds that the mirror has the power to transport her back to the castle as it was in the 18th century. Elizabeth finds herself living that life as another Elizabeth, the daughter of the lord of the castle.

Modern-day Elizabeth finds this spooky, but fun. As the summer wears on and her aunt grows more and more difficult to live with, Modern-day Elizabeth finds herself spending more and more time in Past Elizabeth's life. She is immersed in past Elizabeth's world -- in past Elizabeth's family, her studies, her accomplishments -- and that past world becomes more compelling to her than her own modern-day world. And the beckoning of the mirror grows almost irresistible.

The pacing and momentum in this book is just incredible -- it's been almost twenty years since the last time I saw a copy, and I still remember my heart pounding as I tore through the last chapters. I'm looking forward to reading it through an adult's eyes, especially reflecting on Elizabeth's immersion in the past compared to modern-day forms of escapist fantasy (especially in media such as computer games.)

Alas, this book is out of print -- truly there is no justice under the sun. I was astonished to find used copies going between $44 to almost $100! I finally found one for a much more reasonable price, and it's on the way. I'm so looking forward to this.

This book has also been published under the title Robinsheugh. Libraries might have a copy. Mine does not, and I was not willing to wait for inter-library loan.

Poor Erik and Steven! Erik has been posting on semiotics (parts i, ii, iii, music) and I have been hanging out in the comments boxes, sniveling "I don't get it! I don't understaaaaaaaaaaand!" Erik and Steven have been patiently explaining semiotics to me, but to no avail. Every time I think I have a grip on the concept, it slips away from me.

Part of my problem is that I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the lingo. I guess I am a very concrete thinker; I don't like using words unless I have a really tight grip on what they mean. (Pansy says, kyeah! Just ask her about my dogged attempts to learn the correct usage of certain slang words.) This is an obstacle when I go up against a totally new topic with a very specific (and very abstract) vocabulary -- even the clearest authors (like Erik and Steven) must sometimes use those new words to express themselves precisely.

(I still suspect there are more than a few of people out there throwing the word "semiotics" around without really knowing what it means, just aping their professors and stringing it together with a bunch of other buzzwords.)

But maybe I really do, at some level, understand what the semiotic approach is, and I'm just trying too hard. I've started dipping into this on-line book, Semiotics for Beginners; parts of it are beginning to make sense, particularly when they illustrate a semiotic approach by examining advertisements. This section has a good (and funny) example at the end of the page, involving cigarette ads. This section has another example (the tomato sauce ad.)

In college, I was once assigned to select a print ad and analyze the ad's use of metaphor and metonymy to make its pitch. I chose a pantyhose ad, in which the speaker told a little story about going to the supermarket looking for out-of-season peaches and instead coming back with a pair of the pantyhose. The peaches were a metaphor for the stockings: luxurious, but not too extravagant (the metaphor wouldn't have worked with diamonds, for example) and pleasing to the touch (the metaphor wouldn't have worked with kiwi fruit or pineapples, either.) So was I taking a semiotic approach to this ad without even realizing it? I think ads are interesting to analyze -- they're not too difficult (it's not like wading into Finnegan's Wake, for instance) and I think it's easy to avoid reading too much into them. You know that everything in that ad is there for a reason -- the admen spend big bucks getting those things just so, and they're not going to throw in any red herrings or Babylonian dog references to distract you from the product (unless they throw them in to appeal to your sense of vanity at being in on the joke. Which itself is probably some kind of semiotic topic involving the use of irony and metalanguage, or some such thing.)

Maybe I would understand more if I saw more good examples of the semiotic approach in action -- for example, a sound semiotic analysis of a movie (preferably an easy one, and one that I've actually seen.)

Erik and Steven discuss the dangers of getting carried away with semiotics; in their police report, Erik's semioticians discuss keeping in mind both the author's intent and the reader's intent. That reassures me a great deal. I suppose I am a very conservative reader. I think critics should keep close to the text. I detest far-fetched interpretations -- the ones that have more to do with the prejudices and outlook of the critic than of the author -- and the faintest whiff of deconstructionism or Marxist/ feminist cant leads me to throw down the book and head for the door. For example, in the example about the cigarette ad, I think Robyn starts getting a bit carried away when she starts speculating about masochistic women; my take would be that the ad was designed to appeal to men. Similarly, in Erik's example, are the good semioticians reading too much into the Italian motorist's use of a certain gesture? The self-accusatory root of this gesture is very interesting, but did that meaning persist through history? Is that what the Italian meant on even a subconscious level when he made the gesture? In English, the words "conceit" and "nice" don't mean the same thing that they did in the 17th century, and I think it would be unwise to try to read those old meanings into contemporary uses of those words. When is semiotics useful and when is it just showing off?

I am also having trouble comprehending where the border is between semiotics and plain old literary criticism. Let's say we're looking at Brideshead Revisited. My approach to carefully reading this book would be to look first at the story Waugh presents, look at the actions of the characters and at the results of their actions. I would then look more closely at the book for more clues. I would look at things like the names of the characters and the places in the books -- is there a reason that Ryder sounds so close to "writer"? Is the name Cordelia supposed to remind us of something, or did Waugh just think it's a pretty name? Is the light in Nanny's room supposed to remind us of something? (I try to avoid the word "symbol"; in my old book group I usually led the discussions of novels, and I had to fight hard to keep some of our members from trying to approach symbols as rebuses -- this equals this, and this equals this.) What do the titles of the two halves of the book tell us about the story? --that kind of thing. I don't think it's inappropriate to bring modern ways of looking at things -- for example, a psychological approach -- to literature, as long as your conclusions are supported by the text. For example, if you're going to tell me that Lady Marchmain is a codependent, you'd better tell me exactly what you mean by that and provide plenty of evidence from the book itself.

Now, I guess this is not the semiotic approach. Can one even take a semiotic approach to a book or poem, or is semiotics the "everything else" field? Would you take a semiotic approach to the film version of Brideshead? And if you did, what aspects of the film would you be looking at? What makes a semiotic approach different from ordinary film criticism.

Can you take a semiotic approach to architecture? Would it look something like, "The architecture and lack of adornment of certain churches suggests metaphorically that God is bland, uncomplicated, and boring?"

I'm trying hard to understand semiotics both because I'm interested in anything that will help me better understand what I hear and see and because it sounds interesting for its own sake. A big key to understanding Peony is that I am a frustrated English major (I did not have the pluck to go up against the disapproval of my parents and the deconstructionism of the English profs who seemed to have a lock on the introductory courses.)

I've been nibbling away at this post over the course of the afternoon, and every time I read Erik's posts, I think it becomes a little clearer. Maybe if I just repeat "semiotics is semantics applied to all of human communication" and keep mulling it over, things will become a little clearer.