I Am a Strange Loop

Instead of a dog that, when placed in front of a TV screen, sees only pixels rather than people, imagine little three-year-old Chantal Duplessix, who is watching La Femme du boulanger with her parents. All three are native speakers of French, so there’s no language barrier. Just like her maman and papa, Chantal sees right through the pixels to the events in the village, and when that wonderful final scene arrives and Aimable rakes the cat over the coals, Chantal laughs and laughs at Aimable’s fury — but she doesn’t suspect for a moment that there is another reading of his words. She’s too young to get the analogy between Aurélie and Pomponnette, and so for her there is only one meaning there. Filmmaker Pagnol’s analogy-mediated meaning, which takes for granted the “simple” (although dog-eluding) mapping of pixels to remote events and thus piggybacks on it, is effortlessly perceived by her parents, but for the time being, it lies intellectually beyond Chantal, and is utterly inaccessible to her. In a few years, of course, things will be different — Chantal will have learned how to pick up on analogies between all sorts of complex situations — but that’s how things are now.

With this situation, we can make a more realistic and more generous comparison to Bertrand Russell (yet another analogy!). Chantal, unlike a dog, does not merely see meaningless patterns of light on the screen; she effortlessly sees people and events — the “easy” meaning of the patterns. But there is a second level of meaning that takes the people and events for granted, a meaning transmitted by an analogy between events, and it’s that higher level of meaning that eludes Chantal. In much the same way, Gödel’s higher level of meaning, mediated by his mapping, his marvelous analogy, eluded Bertrand Russell. From what I have read about Russell, he never saw the second level of meaning of formulas of PM. In a certain sad sense, the good Lord never learned to read his own holy books.

Pickets at the Posh Shop

As I suggested above, your recently returned roving sweetheart might well hear an extra level of meaning while listening to Aimable chastise Pomponnette. Thus a play or film can carry levels of meaning that the author never dreamt of. Let’s consider, for example, the little-known 1931 play The Posh Shop Picketeers, written by social activist playwright Rosalyn Wadhead (ever hear of her?). This play is about a wildcat strike called by the workers at Alf and Bertie’s Posh Shop (I admit, I never did figure out what they sold there). In this play, there is a scene where shoppers approaching the store’s entrance are exhorted not to cross the picket line and not to buy anything in the store (“Alf and Bertie are filthy dirty! Please don’t cross our Posh Shop pickets! Please cross over to the mom-and-pop shop!”). In the skilled hands of our playwright, this simple situation led to a drama of great tension. But for some reason, just before the play was to open, the ushers in the theater and the actors in the play got embroiled in a bitter dispute, as a result of which the ushers’ union staged a wildcat strike on opening night, put up picket lines, and beseeched potential playgoers not to cross their lines to see The Posh Shop Picketeers.

Obviously, given this unanticipated political context, the lines uttered by the actors inside the play assumed a powerful second meaning for viewers in the audience, an extra level of meaning that Rosalyn Wadhead never intended. In fact, the picketing Posh Shop worker named “Cagey”, who disgustedly proclaims, after a brash matron pushes her aside and arrogantly strides into Alf and Bertie’s upscale showroom, “Anyone who crosses the picket line in front of Alf and Bertie’s Posh Shop is scum”, was inevitably heard by everyone in the audience (which by definition consisted solely of people who had crossed the picket line outside the theater) as saying, “Anyone who crossed the picket line in front of this theater is scum”, and of course this amounted to saying, “Anyone who is now sitting in this audience is scum”, which could also be heard as “You should not be listening to these lines”, which was the diametric opposite of what all the actors, including the one playing the part of Cagey, wanted to tell their audience, whose entry into the theater they so much appreciated, given the ushers’ hostile picket line.