In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice PDF
Preview In Defence of Literary Interpretation: Theory and Practice
IN DEFENCE OF LITERARY INTERPRETATION By the same authar GEORGE ELIOT: ROMANTIC HUMANIST IN DEFENCE OF LITERARY INTERPRETATION Theory and Practice K. M. NEWTON Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-18449-1 ISBN 978-1-349-18447-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18447-7 © Kenneth McMillan Newton 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1986 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly & Reference Division, S1. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1986 ISBN 978-0-312-41080-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newton, K. M. In defence of literary interpretation. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Hermeneutics. I. Title PN81.N44 1986 801'.95 86-3937 ISBN 978-0-312-41080-3 Contents Acknowledgements VI Is Literary Interpretation Defensible? 2 Interpreting Pinter 45 3 Shaw and Tragedy 83 4 Ideology and the Humanist Interpretation of Shakespeare 115 5 Interpreting Tolstoy's Intention in Anna Karmina 153 6 Conflict and Dialectic in the Interpretation of Great Expectations 173 7 Daniel Deronda and Circumcision 193 8 Interest, Authority and Ideology in Literary Interpretation 212 Notes 229 Index 243 Acknowledgements Some of the material of this book has been published before in slightly different form: Section 11 of Chapter 1 and Chapter 8 in the British Journal of Aesthetics in 1985 and 1982 respectively; Chapter 7 in Essays in Criticism in 1981. I am grateful to the Oxford University Press and to the editors of Essays in Criticism for permission to reprint. Chapter 5 originally appeared in the Cambridge Quarterly in 1983. I should also like to thank the following people for comment ing on drafts of one or more chapters: Dr Cairns Craig, Dr David Gervais, Dr T. F. Healy, Catriona Newton, Mr R. J. C. Watt. My thanks also to Mrs Moira Anthony for help with typing. K. M. N. VI 1 Is Literary Interpretation Defensible? I In a provocative essay entitled 'Against Interpretation', first published in 1964, Susan Sontag asserted, To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world - in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings' .... In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, comfortable. This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. I Although one can find this essay reprinted in anthologies of crititism, it is doubtful whether it had much impact on literary critical practice when it first appeared. Susan Sontag had no great reputation as a literary critic and was more noted for her defence of some of the more bizarre manifestations of contempor ary art. Her attack would also have been easy to relate to the tradition of formalism or aestheticism in the arts, a tradition which itself has not been invulnerable to criticism. Nevertheless, this essay can be seen as an important sign of things to come in contemporary literary criticism. A striking feature of the revival of interest in literary theory and the emergence of a number of new critical approach es in recent years, mainly as a result of the inftuence of structuralism on literary criticism, has been the attack, from several different 2 In Defence 01 Literary Interpretation standpoints, on the interpretation of literature. For example, Jonathan Culler, a critic who, until recently, has been particu larly associated with the earlier stage of structuralism, attacked critical interpretation as vigorously as Sontag in an essay entitled 'Beyond Interpretation', first published in 1976, and argued that Anglo-American New Criticism was particularly blameworthy in this respect: the most important and insidious legacy of the New Criticism is the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of the notion that the critic's job is to interpret literary works. Indeed, fulfillment of the interpretive task has come to be the touch stone by which other kinds of critical writing are judged, and reviewers inevitably ask ofany work ofliterary theory, linguis tic analysis, or historical scholarship, wh ether it actually assists us in our understanding of particular works. In this critical climate it is therefore important, if only as a means of loosening the grip which interpretation has on critical con sciousness, to take up a tendentious position and to maintain that, while the experience ofliterature may be an experience of interpreting works, in fact the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of li tera ture. . . . Indeed, there are many tasks that confront criticism, many things that we need ifwe are to advance our understanding of literature, but if there is one thing we do not need it is more interpretations of literary works.2 In another essay Culler asserts that, 'if the study of literature is a discipline, it must become a poetics: a study ofthe conditions of meaning and thus a study of reading', and goes on to say, A theory of reading is an attempt to come to terms with the single most salient and puzzling fact about literature: that a literary work can have a range of meanings, but not just any meaning. ... But since we believe that for any work there is a range of possible readings, and that this is an open rather than a closed set of meanings, we need to explain how these meanings arise.3 Is Literary Interpretation Difensible? 3 Wolfg ang Iser, generally regarded as one of the most import ant figures in both reception theory and reader-response criti cism, also attacks interpretation: If interpretation has set itself the task of conveying the mean ing of the literary text, obviously the text cannot have al ready formulated that meaning. How can the meaning possibly be experienced if ... it is already there, merely waiting for a referential exposition? As meaning arises out of the process of actualization, the interpreter should perhaps pay more atten tion to the process than to the product. His object should therefore be, not to explain a work, but to reveal the condi tions that bring about its various possible effects. Ifhe clarifies the potential of a text, he will no longer fall into the fatal trap of trying to impose one meaning on his reader, as ifthat were the right, or at least the best, interpretation. I Thus, like Culler, he believes literary criticism should turn away from interpretation as such to a study of the conditions of meaning or the procedures by which it is created in literature. Another challenge to interpretative criticism has come from the deconstructive critic Paul de Man. In an article entitled 'The Return to Philology', he expresses his admiration for a course he did at Harvard which restricted students to elose linguistic analysis: 'Some never saw the point of thus restricting their attention to the matter in hand and of concentrating on the way meaning is conveyed rat her than on the meaning itself.' The value of theory for hirn is that it 'occurred as areturn to philology, to an examination ofthe structure oflanguage prior to the meaning it produces' . Questioning the compatibility be tween aesthetic values and linguistic structures he concludes, What is established is that their compatibility, or lack of it, has to remain an open question and that the manner in which the teaching of literature, since its beginning in the later nineteenth century, has foreclosed the question is unsound, even if motivated by the best of intentions. What also ought to be (but is not) established is that the professing of literature ought to take pi ace under the aegis of this question. From a purely methodological point ofview, this would not
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