Everything you understand is received within a context. The context may be very general, implicit - for example in an English context if you read the word kind you're unlikely to think that it means "child" in German, even if you know both languages. The context may be social (the expected behaviour at a funeral isn't that of a wedding). It may be quite specialised, though it uses words/images from wider contexts ("sheafs" in maths, for example). To understand something it may be necessary to first identify the context - before you can understand a story it helps to know whether it's for infants or adults, for example.
With some things, their context is intrinsic - text written in English looks like English; Abstract Expressionism looks like Abstract Expressionism. At other times, the observer needs to work out the context. Artists/poets/comedians may exploit that uncertainty. For example, a realist story may turn surreal. The observer may not want to play along with the game, or may be unable to. Someone unfamiliar with Surrealism may dismiss the later part of the story as unrealistic, normalising it as a dream, or a character gone mad.
These contexts go under various names - "interpretive frames", "discourse contexts", "genres", "language games". In conversation, the context can be fluid, but there are settings where there are "rules" to follow. At an appointment between a GP and a patient for example, a patient is expected to react to the doctor's invitation to informality, seeing it perhaps as an indication that there's nothing seriously wrong. The GP on the other hand might be trying to extract a less inhibited description of perhaps significant symptoms from the patient. The patient may try to keep the conversation light, knowing that you're not supposed to spoil the mood by giving bad news.
A feature of painting and sometimes poetry is that there are many schools/genres - overlapping, contrasting, etc. A painter may go round a gallery looking at the paintings and think that being a painter is enough to understand paintings, but until a painting's genre is identified, the meaning may be hard to interpret. A naked body needs to be interpreted differently depending on whether its Religious Art or Impressionism.
How is someone new to Art expected to know all the genres? Dare one open one's mouth? It depends on the language game you're playing. If you're going around a gallery on a first date the rules will be different to if you're being interviewed for an Art College application. It helps to be aware of some genres/contexts but inevitably you won't know everything. And anyway, aren't some of the genres silly - Emperor's New Clothes?
In literature I think some modernist writing poses problems. Readers don't notice that there's been a shift of context, that the language game has changed, that the discourse frame is different. They think that because they're good with language in one context (writing novels, for example) they have transferable skills, but recognition of frame/context-changing may not be one of them.
How can one identify a context switch? I think in conversation we're alert (often subconsciously) to these nuances of register change - to how they're signalled and what their purpose is. In a text it's sometimes signalled by the use of italics or a paragraph break though sometimes there are sudden, unannounced context changes without there being body language or voice inflections to help. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is challenging -
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images |
Suppose you didn't know that there were languages other than English. Line 2 wouldn't be a indentified as a language-switch, it would be nonsense - a misprint. But there are other switches here too - rapid changes of register (changes of intimacy, intensity and voice). Bakhtin suggested that poetry is marked by heteroglossia, which perhaps what this is.
I suspect that in writer's groups there's more of a variety of language games than in many other situations, and the switches are more sudden. Orwell's advice was prose style should be transparent, that you shouldn't be distracted by the language, but apparently he was in favour of The Waste Land (in principle anyway) and was obsessed for a while with Ulysses, more upset by its lack or political awareness than by its obscurity. I think that many prose pieces can still be read (by non-deconstructionists) as if language were like clear glass. However, I think much modern poetry (and especially discussion about poetry) requires an acceptance of the "play" (looseness) of language and context, of the (possibly) uncertain context affecting the meaning of words, of the context being retrospectively changed.