Here is a difficult and deep literary question. What is the difference between apparent meaning and actual meaning and how do texts make use of that distinction? The actual meaning of a text is what critics will say is the accurate meaning even if people are misled to think the text is otherwise, as when readers have a sense of what they are getting at, what the text is communicating, even if the text has not been sufficiently analyzed so as to find what it actually means by looking at its words, phrases, images, and all the other apparatus through which critics or just careful readers interrogate a text. An ordinary communication exemplifies the difference of the two meanings. You get a sense that a beloved loves you even if the spouse sends you unclear or stunted signals. A person won’t rely on the words rather than appreciate the meanings of the words, consulting the intentions rather than the words themselves. The same thing happens if people swear an oath to God. It doesn’t mean that God will punish the person for having broken the oath, but a person has just indicated that they will speak truthfully by whatever one holds dear, such as a mother’s grave. The intention is more important than the formula of words even as in literature a reader can get a sense that people seem polite in Jane Austen because they use what seem to us today to be cordial words, when in fact, critics would say, Austen characters are very cutting with one another, some readers preferring politeness to incisiveness, and so separating “Janites”, as they were and are called, from the darker Austen considered by some critics. While, then, there is evidence in the text that leads people to misinterpret the text, and so the text gives off an apparent meaning, there is also and better evidence which justifies the actual text, which is the accurate or, at the least, the more accurate text as constituting the actual text.
The simultaneous presence of apparent and actual meanings is ubiquitous, whether as a characteristic of language or of logic. All of literary criticism has this double meaning. On the one hand, a critic advocates and evaluates the worth of a piece of literature. Lionel Trilling finds Jane Austen wise because she, according to Trilling, thinks that manners are tied to or enhance or constrain morals, and that one can admire Regency England as a situation where that association of the two took place, and lament that the Twentieth Century world replaced that connection with the idea of sincerity. On the other hand, Trilling or any other critic can be thought of as an objective observer of texts and situations, keenly observant and yet objective about the actual meaning of what he said, which is that the connection between the two, manners and morals, was in Jane Austen and also in Regency England, a perception of cultural consciousness which critics are likely to be observant, even if what is observed may be repellant or challenging, as when a review of a recent biography of Phillip Roth can honor or diminish Roth’s use of personal life as the basis for his literature as was his preoccupation with country matters, while coldly observing, however uncold is the critic’s text, that Roth did this thing of mining his own history for his writing, which other authors more or less do, and that Roth’s was an age for describing details of sexuality, as happened in Cheever and Updike and perhaps inspired by Joyce and Lawrence. A good critic is as objective in assessing the emotions available in “Triumph of the Will” as in the much less upsetting and only acceptably unsettling works of Somerset Maugham. Perhaps it is in the nature of things that there is an apparent meaning, that expressing will, while there is also an actual meaning, which expresses the indubitability of a sentence being either true or false.
The most visible and flexible use of the juxtaposition of apparent and actual texts can be found in Shakespeare, who regularly employs conventionalized expectations of what will unfold in a play as its apparent text while the development of a plot or in the words offered by the actors will gradually make an audience disabused at its apparent text and so resort to a more recondite and weighty meaning of the play as its actual meaning, the true meaning, of the play. It is commonly said of “Hamlet” that at the beginning of the play, the audience is set up for a revenge tragedy. Hamlet has been cued up to take revenge on Claudius for his having killed his father. And then the plot unravels in that revenge is delayed, Hamlet appears to be mad, Hamlet keeps insisting on proof of Claudius’s guilt, Hamlet dealing with his mother in a problematic way, and so on. By the end of it, it isn’t at all clear what was going on with Hamlet, him being an intriguing personality rather than just a mission, and so people have wondered for four hundred years about what the play is about. There is also an initial expectation in “Othello”. This is a Moor riding high as a general and having a high born white wife. He is bound to get his deserts, displaced from his pretensions and so the audience is there to see it happen. But as the play moves on, the Moor deteriorating from the onslaught of lies said to him by people he trusted, he becomes a sympathetic character rather than a villain, and so his final act, which is to kill the person he loves the most, is tragic in that he has become overwhelmed and his evil deed understandable.
By the way, Shakespeare is able to toy with the discrepancy between an apparent meaning and its actual meaning in a single speech. It happens when Mark Antony gives his eulogy on the death of Julius Caesar. He famously begins that he is not there to praise Caesar rather than to bury him, to give his eulogy, but it becomes clear, if you pay attention, that the actual meaning of his speech, in spite of his introduction, is to indirectly praise Caesar, constrained as he is because the cabal that killed him are still around and could kill Antony, a leader in the anti-Caesar forces. What will eventuate is a war, and what Antony does is to let on that there is more to be said about Caesar than would be said about the conspirators.
Here is perhaps a more fresh example of how conventionalization is able to show the difference between apparent and actual meanings. There is a long standing set of conventions about war movies. It is formulated in the classic silent movie “The Big Parade”. There is the frenzy of patriotism that leads to recruitment; then, the training of troops with recruits from all walks of life; then a preliminary and then a big assault; and then the aftermath, back home, and perhaps some romance, which in “The Big Parade'' includes a French woman with whom the hero falls in love and comes back to her after finding the civilian world so unsatisfying. Most of the same elements are there in any number of movies and novels, such as “The Fighting Sixty Ninth”, Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead” and “Band of Brothers”, though the last, that mini-series, has no romance and so seems like a quasi-documentary for that reason alone. Even “Battleground”, which is about the Battle of the Bulge, fits in Corrine Calvert for a brief appearance. But the two major Vietnam movies interrupted that progress of events and so allowed a discrepancy between the apparent meaning of the movies, from anticipation through horror and then the aftermath, to some actual meaning which differs for having played on the convention. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” begins with an experienced officer who is recovering from an assignment where he might or might not have done anything illegal and so thinking he might be court marshalled, who is taken to the center of command, complete with steaks and drinks, to be told that there is a Col. Kurtz who is to be “terminated with sanctions” and goes off on an odyssey ever more removed from headquarters to the ever further peripheries of American influenced areas, finally reaching the heart of darkness where Col. Kurtz presides as a primal war lord. The point is that even war has to be done in a civilized way, no matter the brutality of war and however much its distractions with women or incidents when local boats are destroyed, presumably those occupied by civilians. Then there is Stanley Kubrik’s “Full Metal Jacket” where the director divides the movie starkly in two, the first part of training and the second about combat. But the first part just narrows down to the barracks where the drill sergeant bullies the recruits to the point that one of them shoots the drill instructor, and so counters the idea that drill instructors are meant to make the recruits into manly soldiers rather than psychological wrecks, and what happens when the recruits come over into Vietnam is that they disregard everything they have learned about how to be soldiers and so respond emotionally to combat rather than as honed and toned warriors. A mess from beginning to end.
There is another technique that can be applied so as to reveal the difference between apparent and actual meanings. Rather than provide a generic context, a play or novel can provide a sequential arrangement whereby an apparent meaning is first established in sufficient detail so that it is not just plausible but also sufficient or an argument that has been clinched, and then there is a dramatic change and further discourse which makes just the opposite point as the actual meaning of the burden of the play or novel. Shaw’s “Major Barbara” is a prime example. Major Barbara shows that the strong man does not use violence; that is the strength of him as a man and also the basis for social life. And then the opposition between peace and violence is overturned. The Salvation Army takes a large contribution from Undershaft, the munitions magnate, which Major Barbara thinks has undercut their principles, and then Major Barbara visits Undershaft, who has a very different take in that making munitions can be progressive in that it provides work and also worker villages, and Major Barbara’s boyfriend becomes a high level executive with Undershaft. Shaw does the same thing in “Pygmalion” where Eliza emerges from being a subservient but persistent person to becoming someone who will match eloquence with Henry Higgins.
Here is a third way by which literary resources are allowed to create a discrepancy or notice of the difference between apparent and actual meanings. That is by allowing a significant figure sanction switching from the apparent meaning to a very different actual meaning rather than what happens in most literary cases, the apparent meaning is subtly related to the actual meaning, the easier transition taking place in, let us say, where Dickens allows Pip to understand in “Great Expectations'' that his fortune has been provided by an ex-criminal rather than the classy rich but nutsy Mrs. Haversham, and that Pip is not the worse for wear of the exchange, he pursued in his life as a member of the middle class rather than the comfortable poverty in which he was raised. Jesus is such a spectacular figure. As Nietsche said, the ordinary or apparent meaning of life is that the strong dominate the weak, and that has ever been the case. But Jesus made something different, an actual meaning of life, whereby the weak came to dominate the strong by expanding the expanse of life to include the afterlife, where those who were strong now get punishment in Hell, while the weak, as the expression goes “inherit the earth”. Quite topsy turvy, even if you have to be dead to find your satisfaction. Then there is the biblical David, who has become the second king in Israel and fully engages that particular role. Where the previous, apparent meaning of a great leader was that he was awesome in his religious power, devout and righteous, channelling God, as had Abraham and Moses, David has become a king, which is a role distinguished by its secular aspects in that it is given with pomp and panoply and has power enough to get what he wants to do to satisfy his human cravings. David is just a king and so he takes the wife of one of his generals, sends him off to be killed at the front lines, and engages in genocide for reasons of state. So somehow Israel falls from the era of judges into kingship, which is a baleful kind of existence, but people put up for it because David becomes glorious and makes Israel prosper and get more extensive, which is what subjects and not just the king will think is something within their own interests.
To move on. The distinction between apparent meaning and actual meaning is also employed in scientific prose so long as there is a narrative whereby the apparent meaning of that “story” is established before undercutting it with an actual meaning that still allows why it makes sense to retain seeing the apparent meaning. Darwin’s theory of evolution is a clear example of the persistence of that double take. In his first book, “On the Origin of Species'', he opens with a long discussion of unnatural selection, which is the way people create new kinds of plants that have such advantages as durability and greater productivity by blending other species of the same or related plants, such as wheat. The artificer of the new species is human cultivation and it has been around since the domestication of agriculture. Everyone is aware of that. Darwin then introduced the idea of natural selection, which requires no artificer but rather the comingling of traits with one another so that the new species is also hardier than it otherwise would be and that those accidental developments would prosper because they were also more hardy or flexible or had some other advantage in competing for survival with other species which might not be able to retain an area where the new species was taking over. That is natural selection. It is selection without planning or direction,and it is what accounts for the variety of biological life which is frightening to some precisely because it is devoid of plan or idea but just the inevitable processes of nature. There is no sound to be heard in the plains but the wind going through the fields of grain. Unnatural selection endures because everyone knows they can make cuttings so that a new plant is created, or a new breed of dog can begin as when there was a time before the labradoodle and then mankind had mated two breeds to create another. But that perception is swamped by the natural selection which predated, for eons, human created unnatural selection and is the mechanism that is attributed to all of life, from the primordial earth and water and heat from which life emerged to the evolution of mammals and people, people then possible to breed themselves as well as the plants and animals they create. Both are real but one underlies the other in that natural selection is so much more powerful a force until quite recently. Unnatural selection is the apparent meaning of things among those unschooled to evolution but the real meaning of evolution is its actual meaning of natural selection, however unpalatable it may be to contemplate biological evolution as a process without a deity. There is a persistent irony in making the inevitable comparison between the apparent and the actual.
Even a theory of physics makes use of apparent and actual meanings. The universe includes forces, like gravity, and objects, like stars, planets and asteroids. That is the apparent meaning of what is observable. But Stephan Weinberg, in “The First Three Minutes” plots what happens as we reverse time and go back farther and farther until we reach three minutes after the time of the Big Bang. What happens is that no objects have yet been able to appear, that the limits of space are narrower and narrower, and what is composed in these very high pressures and temperatures, are particles of a variety of sorts banging against one another that have not coalesced as yet to form bodies. This is the actual primeval state of the cosmos and Weinberg finds that if the relative weight of some of these had been slightly different from what they were, these particles would never have coalesced into solid entities, which makes people as scary as anything offered by Darwin. What happened did happen and so we can have evolved to notice that as the cosmos that is familiar, including the objects including flesh and blood. Weinberg’s view is reminiscent of Lucretius in that Lucretius thought that just some random waves as atoms descended to the earth led the cosmos to be other than deterministic, everything that ever happened having had to happen, while people have free will and choice because of the random motions. Weinberg is saying that the fact of slightly different weights of pre-atomic particles allowed for a formation that otherwise would not have been and is so totally different from what it had been before the chaos having switched from being made of particles, which is the real meaning or basis of the universe, and the sets of objects familiar in the apparent world, its meaning seen as solid in comparison to its much more remote condition.
Remain aware that the distinction between apparent and actual meanings is not the old literary distinction between illusion and reality, whereby there is a mirage that distracts people from seeing reality, whether in Eugene O”Neill where characters use drink to keep them from facing the ugly parts of their lives, or in “Othello'', where Iago has designed events and taken advantage of circumstances so that Othello will be deluded about Desdemona’s fidelity. Rather, an apparent meaning is one for which there are good reasons to think are the case, that the apparent meaning seems like common sense or obvious, the ordinary way of things, that has to be abused and replaced by a careful reading that includes more facts or some crucial facts or a pattern of facts that leads to an alternative interpretation, to an actual meaning. That is why a careful reader is disquieted by an ordinary reader: what has been taken as a meaning is replaced by a very different reading through consulting the very same set of facts. The careful reader pays attention.
The dynamics between the apparent and the actual meaning can be applied to any text or situation and will illuminate a particularly controversial issue: that of climate change. The apparent meaning of the weather was what Mark Twain said about it, that everyone talked about it while doing nothing about it. Winters were cold and there were snow storms. Summer was hot and there were droughts. There were pile ups of cars because of snow and sleet and people died from heat waves before there was universal or near universal air conditioning. Some place or other was setting record high or low temperatures. Not just farm folks watched or commented on the weather. It was a way to catch up with the weather at Aunt Alice a thousand miles away or a way to make non-controversial small talk with a stranger. Then things changed and people insisted that there was a mighty change in the weather that replaced the apparent weather with an actual weather filled with gloom and doom. Seas would envelop coast lines; there would be more hurricanes and tornadoes; temperatures would climb and climb because of the greenhouse effect. But none of these things happened and yet there persists the belief that climate change has and is taking place (the idea of “global warming” has been abandoned because it hasn’t happened in favor of the less clearly relevant measurement). A quarter century ago, temperature was supposed to increase exponentially, but it hasn’t. There is less polar ice for the polar bears, but Greenland a thousand years ago raised sheep and Newfoundland raised grapes, and these conditions do not hold today, even with global warming. Cities like New Orleans and Miami have not been inundated much less abandoned, though that was the alarm warned by Al Gore.
So what has happened? There is a real meaning which underlies the apparent meaning of weather as usual. If you dig deep, which means consult the very impenetrable reports by climate activists, there are apocalyptic weather events taking place that will doom most people or will soon become aware that underlie weather as usual, these dates postponed every once in a while rather than treated as already having happened, as if they were Adventists recalculating when the world would come to an end when the last milestone didn’t happen. So people have their apocalypse and enjoy it because it doesn’t happen but they can feel it is about to happen, the contradiction between as usual weather and the fear and trepidation of the end of things held simultaneously, no need to resolve the cognitive dissonance, people liking the weather as it is and feeling righteous about saving a few watts of electrical energy, as if that would make a difference if the weather changes predicted would engage in force. My speculation is that climate change is a cause which is satisfying because it requires little effort and Joe Biden uses climate change as an excuse for creating new jobs without knowing or caring to displace the actual meaning of weather with the apparent meaning of weather. That would cut his support from the Democratic constituency which treats climate change as a verified science and as something to be smug about because people are so righteous about it.
We flip back and forth from apparent and real meanings as it pleases the imagination on ordinary rather than just apocalyptic matters. Friends I know read zombie movies and laugh at them because they walk so slowly and so easily fall apart, they enjoy reading the actual meaning that they are very faulty monsters, while I indulge in the apparent meaning and so am terrified by zombie movies and all other horror movies. I am afraid of the guy with a mask or a chainsaw. I don’t worry, however, about North Korean nuclear missiles against Seattle, because the apparent threat is to be counteracted by the awareness that Mutually Assured Destruction worked to keep the Cold War from becoming very hot and that North Korea wouldn’t gain anything by launching a missile against people in that the US would obliterate it, and why would they do that? Better just to threaten so as to get more food through China. Yes, a madman might push the nuclear button, but that would be true of any leader. Authoritarians are not necessarily crazy. Similarly, there are any number of texts and situations whereby to choose the apparent or the actual meaning. Perhaps that is part of the human condition: that people engage in that alteration or refusal to choose for arbitrary though also understandable reasons, and it is literature rather than social analysis that reveals it.