The Necker Cube (1832) by Louis Albert Necker.
May the Horse Be With You
Of all the questions that come your Director’s way, ‘What does it mean?’ is the one most frequently asked. I’m speaking of questions in the classroom here. If I was to consider what questions most often appear in other avenues of my life, they might give this column an altogether different hue. So let us remain in the relatively cloistered world of the classroom. For safety’s sake if nothing else.
A story I like is 塞翁失馬 (sai weng shi ma), or old Sai loses a horse. Off the top of my head, it goes something like this:
There was an old man, Sai Weng, who lived near the border of a village. One day, his horse ran away. The neighbours came to commiserate: ‘Oh, what bad luck!’
Sai Weng replied calmly: ‘Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.’
Some weeks later, the horse returned, bringing with it a magnificent wild horse. The neighbours celebrated: ‘Oh, what good luck!’
Sai Weng replied: ‘Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.’
Later, Sai Weng’s son was riding the new horse and fell, breaking his leg. The neighbours exclaimed: ‘Oh, what terrible luck!’
Sai Weng replied: ‘Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.’
Later, the kingdom went to war, and all the able-bodied young men were drafted. Sai Weng’s son, because of his broken leg, was spared. The neighbours exclaimed: ‘Oh, what good luck!’
I mention it here because the story speaks very well of the idea that meaning depends on context. As dear old Hamlet says, there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
So when a curious student struggling to make sense of a line in a poem for example, asks me to tell them what it means, I cannot answer without first understanding how they think poetry comes to ‘mean’ anything at all, in other words, what the ‘context’ of their question is. If they think it’s a matter of me just ‘translating’ then we have a lot of work to do. Unless we appreciate the context in which the words appear, the words will remain to most intents and purposes, meaningless. In poetry, as in many of the other crucial aspects of life, meaning is largely implicit. If we lose the implicit as the context in which meaning takes place, we’re in danger of throwing the meaning baby out with the contextual bathwater.
Funnily enough many people in these modern days of ours are very happy to invoke the power of context when it comes to shaping meanings. The phrase, ‘taken out of context’ is often used by those who have said something they probably ought not to have. The football manager lambasting the referee, a politician delivering a choice morsel of prejudice, a celebrity making an ill-judged remark on a podcast. Inevitably, the apology comes ‘My words were taken out of context.’ As if context were some kind of dry-cleaner that can take the stains out of a statement.
But the cliché does point to something deeper than the PR departments of the rich and famous intend. Context, I humbly suggest, is not a detergent for meaning; it’s the very structure by which meaning is made. Words, objects, gestures, even whole lives mean only because of where, when, and how they find themselves.
Take the word fine. On the lips of a teenager, it means ‘don’t ask me again.’ In the mouth of an art critic, it elevates something to the level of the ‘fine arts.’ On a council notice through your letterbox, it empties your bank account. Same word, same letters, utterly different meanings. And none of these meanings can be found in the letters f-i-n-e themselves.
This is as true in literature as it is in life. Shakespeare, for instance, is endlessly aware of context. Hamlet’s ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ can be bitter sarcasm, desperate plea, or outright cruelty depending on whether Ophelia is played as conspirator, victim, or bewildered lover. The line doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Meaning emerges in the performance, in the relation between words, bodies, audience, and stage.
John Milton understood this too. There’s dear old Satan’s rallying cry: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Out of context, it sounds almost heroic, like the anthem of independence and defiance Romantic poets like Blake and Shelley thrilled to. But within Milton’s epic, it is laced with irony, the self-deception of a figure who cannot see the tragic consequences of his rebellion. Context flips heroism into hubris.
Modernism, as we have discussed, makes context itself the battleground. Eliot’s The Waste Land is stitched together from fragments, quotations, and allusions. Its power lies in the dissonance between them: a snatch of Wagner collides with a pub conversation; the Upanishads brush against Cockney slang. Without context, the lines often appear baffling. With context, they reverberate. Indeed, the poem almost forces the reader to create new contexts, to draw connections that make meaning.
Fairy tales, as we have also discussed, live by context. Read in one context, Snow White is a tale of innocence rewarded; in another, it is a parable of gender, power, and patriarchy. Context does not just colour the meaning of the tale it determines it.
Even contemporary fiction plays this game. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is, at one level, a bleak post-apocalyptic survival tale. But read in the context of Christian eschatology, it becomes a meditation on faith, hope, and the endurance of love. Read in the context of climate change anxiety, it is a prophecy. Read without either, it may appear merely as despair. Context plays with whether the story ends in darkness or in something that can still be called light.
The point, then, is not simply that great writers are aware of context; it’s that to read literature well is to practice the art of inhabiting context, a skill as vital for navigating a novel as it is for navigating a life.
Philosophers have long circled around this truth. Wittgenstein, in his later work, insisted that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. He gave the example of the word ‘game.’ Try to define it. Is a game something with rules? Chess fits, but children’s clapping rhymes don’t. Is it competition? Solitaire doesn’t count. Is it fun? Maybe, but maybe not when you’re losing heavily on a rainy Sunday football pitch. For Wittgenstein, words don’t mean by some kind of essence; they mean by family resemblance and by how they are used in contexts we recognise.
Heidegger presses further still. His famous notion of being-in-the-world reminds us that we are not detached observers floating above reality, labelling things with their meanings. We are thrown into a world already thick with practices, tools, histories, and relationships. A hammer only ‘means’ hammer in the workshop, in the carpenter’s hand, with nails and wood nearby. Take it out and put it on a pedestal in a gallery, and suddenly it means ‘art.’ Place it in a forensic laboratory, and it may mean ‘evidence.’
As with so many things, Iain McGilchrist’s hemisphere theory offers a helpful gloss here. The left hemisphere, he suggests, likes to abstract things from their contexts, to analyse and fix them in categories. The right hemisphere insists that nothing means apart from the whole: a word is only a word in its relationship in a language game. This is something which I believe those in charge of the Large Language Models like ChatGPT are beginning to understand, with their autoregressive next token generation models and, wait for it, in-context learning. But these are matters for our future discussions. Suffice it to say that everything is what it is because of its context, in other words its relationship to everything else. Lose context, and you lose reality itself. And all of us are a kind of language. We aren’t the self-contained atoms of meaning, or little capsules of identity who then enter relationships, jobs, or communities. It’s the other way round; like words, we mean only in context.
A child’s identity emerges in a family; a teacher’s in a classroom; a friend’s in a friendship. Even solitude is only solitude in contrast to the possibility of relationship. Moments when we feel ourselves to be ‘out of context’ can be profoundly unsettling. I think of my first tentative steps in front of a class as a teacher, or my first argument as a barrister in front of a jury, or anywhere stripped of all the familiar markers of what might feel like home. I remember dear old Frank Sinatra saying to me once how he only felt really at home, on stage. Everywhere else, he felt like he did not belong. I fear we may all have felt that experience of exile, where your very self seems to dissolve because the world that gave you meaning has vanished.
This is why literature often presents characters as ‘out of place’ in order to dramatise their search for meaning: Odysseus away from Ithaca, Jane Eyre away from Thornfield, Gregor Samsa waking up as a beetle. Each narrative asks what do we mean when stripped of our usual contexts? In Othello, Iago thrives on supplying contexts that aren’t there, prompting Othello to misread Desdemona’s words and gestures. Jealousy is fuelled not by what is said, but by what is suggested, framed and wrenched into poisonous contexts.
And it’s not just poor old Desdemona and Othello; we all know how easily things go awry when context is stripped away. In fact, social media thrives on this. A single phrase, snatched from a 60 minute lecture or a 120 page book, is weaponised as if it stood on its own. ‘Taken out of context’ is not just a celebrity excuse; it’s the business model of X.
So, yes context is everything. Words without context are just sounds; objects without context are just shapes; lives without context are mere biological facts. Put them back into relation, and suddenly the world lights up with significance.
Perhaps, then, the challenge for us is to stop asking, ‘What does this mean?’ as if meaning were a hidden nugget waiting to be dug up. The better question is ‘In what context does this come to mean?’ This question shifts the burden of proof from the isolated statement to the entire ecosystem in which it lives. To ask it is to accept that meaning is not found, but made. To live, as Heidegger reminds us, is to be always already in a world where context cannot be escaped and should not be ignored. And if I may be so bold as to suggest: to live as if there is always more context to be discovered. Because there is.
Until next time: Happy reading/contexting!
Fun problems to solve related to context #32
When Henry Ford interviewed a candidate for a senior position in his company he often took them out to lunch and ordered soup for them. Why?