going anywhere else. The most disastrous readings are those that are wildly inventive and largely independent of the story’s factual content, those that go riffing off on a word out of context or a supposed image that is in truth not at all the image presented in the text. What I want to do, on the other hand, is consider the noumenal level of the story, its spiritual or essential level of being. If you don’t think such a thing is possible, neither does my spellchecker, but here we go. This is an exercise in feeling my way into the text. I’ll be honest here. I’m about to cheat. I asked you to tell me what the story signifies first, but for my own response, I’m going to hold that for last. It’s more dramatic that way. Way back I mentioned that Joyce’s Ulysses makes heavy use of Homer’s tale of long-suffering …show more content…
You may recall that I also mentioned that, except for the title, there are almost no textual cues to suggest that these Homeric parallels are at work in the novel. That’s a pretty big level of signification to hang on one word, even a very prominent one. Well, if you can do that with the title of an immense novel, why not with a little story? “The Garden Party.” Now all the student respondents worked with it, too, chiefly with its last word. Me, I like the middle one. I like looking at gardens and thinking about them. For years I’ve lived next to one of the great agricultural universities, and its campus is a giant garden filled with a number of spectacular smaller gardens. Every one of those gardens, and every garden that’s ever been, is on some level an imperfect copy of another garden, the paradise in which our first parents lived. So when I see a garden in a story or poem, the first thing I do is to see how well it fits that Edenic template, and I must admit that