We’ve Got to Go Deeper

The ninth chapter of Sheridan Blau’s The Literature Workshop, “Honoring Readers and Respecting Texts”, deals quite thoroughly with what seems to be a fundamental and recurring problem amongst students and teachers of literature, namely, how to arrive at and determine the validity of an interpretation of a text. Blau, as is the case with several of the other writers we’ve read in class, straddles the line between the authority of a text and the authority of that text’s readers; there is not necessarily a single, correct, best interpretation of any given text, but at the same time, it is not at all accurate or honest to say that any and all interpretations of said text are equally valid. Not to beat a dead horse, but this reminds me, once again, of Rabinowitz’s swing-set metaphor: the author gives a set of instructions for the swing-set, and everyone who reads the instructions builds their approximation of it. Blau falls squarely on the side of readers needing to support their interpretations with textual evidence (which implies that close reading, as a strategy, is necessary in some capacity, even if people are relying on specific interpretive lenses) and to re-read the work multiple times in order to cover anything that’s been missed. Even then, there is the possibility that their outside knowledge (as in the case of the Ball-Turret Gunner) simply isn’t expansive enough for them to understand fundamental parts of texts, and so their interpretations, while not invalid, are still clearly flawed or lacking in some way. Someone who builds a swing-set, even if it is the wrong size, still has built a reasonable fascimile of a swing-set; someone who has no idea what a screwdriver is would probably have some trouble even getting to that point in the first place.

This “compromise” approach is much more engaging than relying entirely on texts or readers (to each others’ exclusion) to provide meaning; as Blau points out, providing the “correct” reading to students does not require them to put in any effort, and their literary muscles atrophy, forcing them to rely on being spoonfed “correct” meanings indefinitely. On the other hand, the “anything goes” approach means that readers don’t have to provide more than an incredibly basic, shallow set of textual evidence (if even that) to back up whatever their first impressions were, and reading literature becomes pointless. It’s also just much more intellectually honest: we cannot point without error to explicit formulas or plans embedded in every text since the beginning of writing, nor can we say that all text is entirely without intent or meaning until a reader invents it out of thin air. So we need thorough, thoughtful reading(s), and evidence from those readings, in order to have an interpretation that can be thought of as, at least, not completely flawed (“correct” is too much to hope for).

But this still doesn’t address the problem of how deep one must go, and how informed one must be to get beyond misinterpretation. The poems that Blau picks are relatively straightforward in the ways in which people might misinterpret them: if you don’t know what a ball turret gunner is, you are bound to misinterpret the poem; if you can’t read Spanish or focus on the narrator literally living in a doorway (being homeless), you are misinterpreting the poem. And so on. But what about, for example, William Faulkner’s Light In August? I took a class on Faulkner as an undergrad, and when we came to this book, the class’s interpretations were wildly divided. Some students felt that it was a nuanced examination of the impossible situation that mixed-race individuals are forced into in our society, while others felt that Faulkner was essentially saying that miscegenation creates flawed, fallen people who cannot be anything but destructive to society. In a five-hundred-plus-page novel, there is ample evidence for both interpretations (I fall on the side of the former), and it wasn’t simply an issue of a class being unfamiliar with the themes and viewpoints that Faulkner writes about in his other works; we’d all read several novels and much of his short fiction by that point. These are, I think, irreconcilable interpretations: you cannot have real sympathy for a group of people marginalized by society and simultaneously feel that those people should not exist because they are somehow fundamentally flawed. But these were not inexperienced readers giving shallow, uninformed readings of a text. How deep did we need to go to reconcile these interpretations, or find which one was flawed in some way that we had not noticed? That point is clear in the poems that Blau used; it is not so in dense, lengthy fiction. Can we make a judgment as to which interpretation might be missing something?

One thought on “We’ve Got to Go Deeper

  1. Professor Sample

    Faulkner is a great example of a rich text producing seemingly irreconcilable readings. But I’m not surprised at all that your class was divided on the book. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if any single person held both interpretations in his or her head at once. We do it all the time, in fact. Rationally, we may understand that one of our beliefs flies in the face of another one of our beliefs, but still it happens and people—all of us—end up holding contradictory positions regarding all sorts of things. So rather than trying to figure out (in the case of literature) how one interpretation is missing something, I’d be more interested in hearing what about the text makes it available to competing interpretations.

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