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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

My favorite 'English' class in high school was a journalism class, which was centered around learning to write well and communicate something effectively, with none of the BS about "hidden symbolism".

I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest, and that, truth be told, if the author wanted to tell me something, he ought to have come out and said it directly instead of beating around the bush with "symbolism" that to me was as clear as mud, and that in the process he would have saved us all a great deal of time because his message wasn't really all that difficult to summarize in a paragraph or two.

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"I proudly got a D on an English paper once, when the topic was "how does the symbolism help us understand what the author is telling us", where I answered that it didn't help in the slightest,"

I think I've already used this story once on HN, but what the heck.

The assignment was to address Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra. I pointed out several instances of Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra, then as a conclusion, said that I actually didn't think there was really any Orientalism in Antony and Cleopatra at all, but "found" some to fulfill the assignment.

When I got my paper back, it had positive remarks in the margins, until the remark at the end saying "Jim, we need to talk about this."

I got an A in that class.

Do you know how zen koans work? They help you understand yourself. They don't do it by telling you about yourself, but rather by tricking your mind into paying attention to nothing other than yourself, even though you might not consciously want to.

In the same way, symbolism is intended to trick the mind into grasping a concept it consciously has problems with understanding, or perhaps outright disagrees with. It's like grinding a vitamin into dogfood--the dog won't notice, but it's getting healthier. You might be an ardant anti-___ist and never want to hear a single word on ____ism, but a carefully crafted allegory about ____ism might have you more of a believer than you knew.

The thing is, I'm not a dog, but a person, and I am actually quite willing to listen to people I disagree with as long as they are polite and reasonable.

Trick the mind, not the person. Symbolism may convey something you can't understand through normal conversation.

I'll grant this. However, I'm willing to say that most literary criticism is based off of imagined rather than real symbolism.

There's listening, then there's listening. When someone is really learning, you are dealing with the edges of their model of the world and their conscious perception. When you are really teaching, you are playing in this dangerous interstice. Sometimes, the best way of teaching people is tricking them. Sometimes, if you just tell them, they'll just rationalize what you have to tell them away.

This is more apt to apply to classes in history than to computers, however. Even then, there are popular misconceptions to deal with.

Sounds like jesus:

Mark 4:10 When he was alone, those around him and the Twelve asked him about the parables.

Luke 8:10 He said, 'The secret of the kingdom of God is granted to you.'

Mark 4:11-12 'But to those on the outside, everything comes in parables so that they may look and look but never perceive, listen and listen but never understand.'

DavidW, what was the book?

Don't recall, sorry.

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