Saussure\'s Definition of Sign Every

Saussure's Definition Of Sign

Every aspect of communication with other individuals has to do with semiotics, but our actions also have to do with semiotics. We need signs to function in our world, however, as Ryan (42) notes in Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction, while "we depend on the legibility of signs in our lives," signs, as King Lear discovers, "can also be used to mislead." In Alice Munro's short story "Hold Me Fast. Don't Let Me Pass," we meet Hazel, a woman on vacation in Scotland. Hazel is in a place that is completely unfamiliar -- both culturally and socially speaking. It is a semiotic world that Munro has constructed and Hazel has trouble figuring out the world because she does not understand the signs that she sees (42). She is on a mission to retrace the past, but she ends up as confused in the present as she is making sense of the past.

Ryan (42) notes that "passing" can pertain to pretending to be something that one is not, whether one is pretending to be a boy when she is a girl or vice versa, or pretending to be wealthy when one is poor -- or vice versa. While Hazel is able to figure out the woman who runs the hotel (she thinks she reads her signs well), she is unable to fully understand the young man she meets. This is a good example of how some people have signs that are easily read while others do not; however, this does not mean that one can really truly know the person because their signs are clearer -- perhaps they are pretending to be something or someone they are not either. Ryan (42) gives the example of the story The Talented Mr. Ripley to drive this point home.

Hazel is not able to understand the young man, though she observes that he "has given both the rival women in his life a form of happiness by giving them 'something to concentrate on'" (Kakutani). Hazel is an observer of all that goes on around her -- and of life, in general -- and through Hazel the reader is able to get a very good sense of Hazel's sense of displacement.

Hazel, who is trying to uncover her husband's past while in Scotland, realizes that it's more difficult than she thought and thus the present becomes entangled with the past. She finds herself in a strange entanglement with her husband's ex-lover, the friendly man, and the young woman who wants "to hold him fast in a re-enactment of the Old Scottish ballad that re-echoes throughout the story" (Waterston, 262). However, neither one of these women is able to hold the man fast; "I can't make two women happy," he says (Munro, 103).

The whole idea of "holding someone fast" resonates in different ways throughout the story. Hazel was not able to hold her husband fast and she must come to terms with the fact that she, in some ways, abandoned him before he died -- not "striving toward him" in the past or in the present in memory (Munro, 104).