Part II: Making Sure Your Reading Is A Good
One
When I was a Teaching Assistant
in an English Literature department, my fellows TAs and I used to tell our
classes with some frequency that there was no such thing as the 'right'
interpretation, but there were better and worse interpretations. What, then,
makes one interpretation better than another? The truest answer is probably
unsatisfying—the one which can be argued most persuasively is best[1]—but
the reason it's truest is that there are a lot of things which might make an
interpretation convincing. Here is a list, which may not include every
possibility:
1. The interpretation makes sense
of as much of the text as possible.
2. The interpretation does not
require that you posit things not mentioned (or warranted) by the text.
3. The interpretation makes sense
of the text in its historical and artistic context.
4. The interpretation tends to
enable more new and good
interpretations, not fewer.
1. The interpretation makes sense of as much
of the text as possible.
A simple way of saying this is
that there are no passages in the text which contradict your interpretations,
but that's not necessarily the best way of saying it (I'll discuss this later
in my section on deconstruction). But, in general, the idea is that your
interpretation shouldn't require you to ignore parts of the text which are
inconvenient to your interpretation. In other words, you need to look at all of
the evidence.
2. The interpretation does not require that
you posit things not mentioned (or warranted) by the text.
An interpretation is not a very
good one if it requires you to make things up in order for it to work. This doesn't mean that we don't look for
implications in the text, for connections between the elements of a text. And
this doesn't mean that we give up symbolic, analogical, or psychological
readings, either; rather, we make sure that any interpretations are thoroughly
rooted in the text, that we have a reason to read it that way, and our reason
comes out of the text itself. You work from the very strict and literal interpretations
up to more interpretive ones. But all interpretations must by based on the
actual words of the text, and not on possible interpretations which you posit but do not demonstrate. I tend to think
of this as a warning against conspiracy-theories.
This criterion needs to be taken
in balance with the fourth; I'll explain then why the stereotypical high school
student complaint against English class—"Why does everything have to have
a hidden meaning?"—isn't one of the better interpretations.
3. The interpretation makes sense of the text
in its historical and artistic context.
As I already noted above, the set
of signs which allow a text to mean something is a social convention. It's
worth noting that the social conventions through which the text gains meaning
change in time; allusions in one time period have wholly different connotations
than they do in another.
If a text generates a field of
possible meanings by using a set of signs, then an interpreter must be
sensitive to how that set of signs would work during the text's composition.
Of course a contemporary reader
will have a different set of signs than a member of Shakespeare's or
Euripides's original audiences would have. Part III will deal with this
difference at greater length, but the important point is that the contemporary
experience of a novel, poem, or play is not the same thing as an interpretation
of it. As a caution, however, I will note that this does not mean an
interpretation is only legitimate if the author would recognize the
interpretation; Marlowe may not have understood a Marxist analysis of Tamburlaine, but a Marxist analysis
would still be legitimate if it was addressing the set of signs as they make
sense in Marlowe’s context.
4. The interpretation tends to enable more
new, good interpretations, not fewer.
If a text has a field of possible
meanings, then an interpretation which enables access to more meanings is
better than an interpretation which enables access to fewer. After all, an
interpretation which does not acknowledge the fact that there are multiple ways
of reading a text is not being particularly faithful to that text. In literary
criticism, we call this a reductive
reading: it reduces a text to a limited interpretation.
Now, the point here is not that
any old reading will do—I've shown that misreadings are possible and that the
field of possible meanings has limits. It is always possible to say that
something is a misinterpretation, but to deny the existence of multiple
possible meanings—ones you haven't thought of yet—is also false. The best example
of a reductive meaning is the stereotypical high school student's complaint
against symbolism: to insist on a strictly literal interpretation falsely constricts
the possible meanings of the text.
The upshot of what I've said so
far is that we can never expect to master the text; it is not likely that we
can exhaust the entire field of possible meanings, or say that there are no
possible interpretations remaining. Some new knowledge of the novel's context
might come to light; some new interpretive tool, or some new area of interest,
might develop. It might be possible that a play has been interpreted so many
times that it doesn't look like future attempts will be worthwhile because the
interpretations will only be subtle nuances or minor changes in focus; it
isn't, however, ever accurate to say that no other interpretations are possible, just that they might not be worthwhile.
Index
Part I: Where Is The Meaning Of A Text?
Part III: Reading Experience and Interpretation
[1] “Can
be argued” is different from “has been argued”; the latter, as important as it
is for grading, is pure sophistry.
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