Unearthing Significance in What You See
Reading Time: 10 Minutes
Now What?
In the last post, I talked about the first essential step in critical reading: Noticing. We practiced slowing down, pointing at what we read, and simply identifying what stands out in a text – whether it’s a striking image in a poem, a peculiar detail in a film, or an unexpected phrase in a news article.
But what happens after you’ve filled your mental (or even physical) notebook with observations? You’ve got your list of “noticings”: the blond, blue-eyed man in Invisible Man, the jarring shifts in “This Is America,” a school bus with “Crichton Middle School” written on it in Jurassic World Rebirth, or the idea of “eternal lines” in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18.” Now what?
This is where the second step of our critical reading framework comes in: Significance. While you might think of it as finding the ‘meaning,’ I choose ‘Significance’ because it pushes us to consider not just what something means, but why it matters – why it holds importance beyond a surface-level interpretation.
It’s not about finding the meaning, but exploring what meanings are possible.
From Observing to Asking
My first and critical point is to trust our initial reactions, that our understanding of language is perhaps greater than we imagine. Once you’ve deliberately noticed something, our first impulse is to ask: “What does this mean?” Or, more productively, “What could this mean?” This is the heart of exploring significance. It’s about moving beyond simply seeing to actively asking.
For many, this is the most frightening step of interpretation, because you are asking about an idea which is perhaps not explicitly on the page, but implied by what is on the page. For me, it is the most fun step: the trick is not to worry too much about your guesses; instead, they’re hypotheses. Think of it like a detective at a crime scene: if they find a used pipe, they might suppose that anyone who smokes a pipe is a suspect, but they don’t jump to conclusions or accuse anyone just yet.”
The problem is that so many of us are trained to look for the answer. We want to check off the box, get the “correct” interpretation, answer “C” for the multiple choice quiz, and move on. But literature and life rarely offer such tidy solutions. As I mentioned last time, trying to find a single answer or interpretation too often leads to dissatisfaction; it denies the richness and “manyness” of truly powerful texts. It’s asking for a bumper sticker to summarize a symphony.
The crucial shift in understanding significance is to embrace the idea that a single element that you have noticed can hold multiple potential meanings. It’s not about finding the meaning, but exploring what meanings are possible. Maybe eight overlapping meanings could be made of Childish Gambino’s (Donald Glover’s) facial expressions through his video. Perhaps you see three and someone else found two others. In this case, it isn’t a matter of one person being right but that your ideas may be right and theirs. No threats, no worries, no quizzes, and no pressure or anxiety about your supposings!
Even so, this is often where the real “healthy discomfort” of critical reading begins (as we’ll explore in later posts) – when we realize there isn’t just one right answer. In other words, that anxiety about making guesses for meaning might also be the “correct” feeling to have!
Why One Answer Isn’t Enough
Let’s be honest: in school, we often learned that literature was a puzzle. Every symbol had a single meaning, every conflict a clear resolution. You’d get your flashcard ready during that The Great Gatsby quiz: “Green light = Undying Love.” Easy points for the test!
But this approach simplifies what is inherently complex. It forces a neat, objective answer onto something that is far more elusive and complex. The green light at the end of the dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, for example, could symbolize Gatsby’s “undying love” for Daisy. But if we stop there, we miss so much. Couldn’t it also signify:
- The elusive American Dream itself, always just out of reach?
- The corrupting allure of money and material wealth?
- A desperate, almost pathetic hope that clashes with the reality of despair?
- The psychological distance between illusion and reality?
- The fleeting glimpse of an “orgiastic future” that is ultimately unattainable?
To say it’s only about “undying love” is to grab the electric fence of simple answers. One advantage of having multiple meanings you have supposed for a text (like having multiple suspects for a crime) is that you make room for an answer that might prove unlikely.
Sticking to your first and single idea for meaning might satisfy our impatience, but it doesn’t foster complex thinking. Good literature wants us to wrestle with these multiple possibilities. If all the answers of art could be found so easily, they’d be . . . Ikea instructions.
Unpacking Significance with Diverse Texts
Let’s see what we might find in some of last week’s examples. Your lists may be different, of course, but notice here how our supposing could work:
Childish Gambino - “This Is America” (Music Video): Let’s say that one thing you noticed in the video (among dozens!) is that Gambino’s face contorts, as if it isn’t certain what it can or wants to communicate. But it also shows stubbornness, disgust, relaxation, serenity (even when executing someone), assertiveness, glib happiness, slyness, sarcasm, obliviousness or intoxication, joy, and maybe more all in the first minute of the video. That’s our Notice. But what could it mean?
- Are the positive emotions masks or covers for the darker acts of violence and trouble?
- Is he desensitized to the violence?
- Is he searching for the right emotion to put to it?
- Is he showing how we are all “jerked around” from feeling to feeling?
- Is he showing the various emotions Americans wear around acts of violence?
- Is he shrinking all of life’s experiences down into a series of emotions?
- Is any of the above related directly to the black experience rather than all Americans?
- If it is about the black experience, are these the various expressions and responses demanded of blacks in the wake of violence? Of racial violence? Of law enforcement? In the media?
- In the first minute of the video he repeats the line “Don’t catch you slippin’ now.” This may suggest a play-acting or performance required of blacks or of all America.
- Are these expressions about social performance? About hypocrisy?
What’s important about these first questions or supposings, these significances, is that most can exist together. That is, you may like one more than another, but it’s harder to say that any is exactly wrong. Also, notice that if we have stopped at the first one (emotional masks), we might never have reached some more interesting ones later on. Don’t stop at one possible interpretation!
Now that we have these (and we could add more!), we can move to think about the possible significances of other things we noticed in the video.
Returning to Ellison
Notice what happens when we do the same thing with the passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, where we noticed that the man was “tall and blond”:
“One night, I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled.”
–Invisible Man, Prologue
Some possible meanings or significances of that “tall blond” detail:
- The man is larger, perhaps menacing or a physical threat
- Blond might mean he’s white–probably means that
- Why am I guessing? Because Ellison never says he’s a white man
- Wouldn’t that have been easier? Why is “tall blond” a better description than white?
- It’s not a “better” description: it’s a more meaningful one. What does “tall blond” say that “white man” does not?
- “Tall blond” and “blue eyes.” Not all white men have these.
- “Tall blond and blue eyes” are stereotypical, very white. Is he Aryan?
- Is this scene about racism? Do I know that the “insulting name” must be?
- Is this a scene of a black man beating up a white supremacist?
- Who is the aggressor? It seems like the black narrator.
Here, our guessing and supposing led us down a path of guesses. That’s good! And look where it led us, a possible scene of violence and racism where our black narrator responds violently to a racial slur. Now, we don’t know that this is what happened exactly, but it looks likely. . . .
We begin to see that literature isn’t about single answers but a massive web of potential meanings.
So Many Ways to Do It!
When creating your list of significances, your focus can certainly be on the text itself–that’s where most readers spend their time. But with this process you might also ask possible meanings of yourself as a reader: Why did I respond with anger to this image? Which sentences or lines give me the most joy–what could I guess about them? In other words, any reading, done thoughtfully, can also help us better know ourselves.
Other approaches to significance might be:
- Why a writer left out a detail or a character perspective (silence speaks loudest!)
- Why two details, objects, or images are placed next to each other or in the same paragraph or sentence
- What does a metaphor or personification suggest? Where does the comparison work or break down?
- If some language is illogical or seems manipulative, why might it be? From whom? Towards whom?
- For allusions, what is referred to and how do the two texts connect?
- How might a character’s ignorance or misunderstanding be important?
- How might the era or setting of the work change its possible meanings?
None of these are complete lists at all. The goal is for you to consider and discover significances for you. In other words, meanings are meanings, but what meanings are important (significant) are what you alone might see!
Your Tool for Significance: Organize Your Insights
In the last post I offered a table for organizing approaches to what you noticed as a practice for that skill. Here I am offering nine different passages from novels and poems and film, but I’ve already given you the “Notice.” As you read them, speculate on what they might mean, even if you do not have the full work in front of you to explore. (Fitting it all together comes next!) Can you come up with five or more possible meanings for each passage?
Conclusion: The Open Door of Meaning
By deliberately searching for and noting the multiple significances of what we notice, we change reading from consumption into active discovery. We begin to see that literature isn’t about single answers but a massive web of potential meanings.
This important (if intimidating, no fun!) step expands our understanding and prepares us for the next stage: seeing how these individual significances weave together into broader Patterns.
In our next entry we learn to “Think It” and uncover the larger design.
Want More Still? Literary Nomads
The Literary Nomads podcast helps listeners see connections that we all make in our readings, in our language, in our cultures. It’s more about reading itself, how we make meaning, how we discover it, and what uses we put it to.
Three episodes from Journey 5: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” talk at length about “Significance” and its importance. Give them a listen here!
Deeper Reasons
For those interested in the more academic, researched basis for this approach, I lean quite a bit on the phenomenology of reading and reader-response criticism, which emphasize the active role of readers in creating and discovering meaning.
Like the previous entry, My “Significance” stage here aligns most closely with Wolfgang Iser’s work, which really directs us to the core of reader-response theory, where meaning is co-created by the reader. Readers bring their own experiences, biases, and expectations of the text, shaping their interpretation. Exploring multiple potential meanings instead of a single one is kind of a hallmark for reader-response criticism and creates varied interpretations.
One obvious criticism of this approach is relativism, that if there are no single right answers that therefore we might find no wrong answers, either. This concern, however, misses a crucial point, as we will see in the next two entries.
A lot of work has been done in the field after Iser’s works, The Implied Reader (1974) and The Act of Reading (1978), especially in cultural context, intersectionality, and digital humanities; more, a quick overview of Iser appears to expose criticisms of ignoring history, of the role of community, or relativism, and how actual real-world readers work differently than implied readers. These are valid criticism, and I will address them as we move forward.
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