Delving Deeper Into The Beautiful World of Literature
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” — Ezra Pound, renowned poet and critic
Between culturalist and conceptualist readings, between distant and close readings, there are diverse ways to approach the literary texts. This article is an attempt to familiarize the readers with different ideas of reading and various paradigms of interpretation in literary studies, and how they have evolved over the years.
Reading and Interpretation: What’s the Difference?
Often, the terms reading and interpretation are used interchangeably. If we talk about the meanings, reading is the sensory process of engaging with the content and it involves processes like our looking at a text, listening to things, and so on. Whereas, interpretation is concerned with analysis. So, the question arises — where, how and exactly when does reading become interpretation?
In literary studies, we do not talk about reading for pleasure, rather this reading should engage us in the act of interpretation. We can think of pleasure and analysis as two different poles in literature. Frank Kermode, a literary critic, gave a set of lectures (which became a book, titled Pleasure and Change, in 2004) where he talked about these two ideas of reading and discussed that the analysis is a modality of change. The famous axiom in Karl Marx’s (renowned philosopher) work states that the ‘philosophers have, so far, interpreted the world but the point is to change it’. Louis Althusser (French Marxist philosopher) saw this remark as a break from philosophy and claimed that there is no philosophy in Marx’s works post this statement since he became interested in change and not interpretation. We can see a silent assumption in this statement that there is an opposition between interpretation and change!
When we talk about reading in the interpretative sense, it is a reading to form arguments. In other words, it’s an argumentative reading. Renowned writer C. S. Lewis, in his 1961 book An Experimental in Criticism, talks about argumentative reading (argument formation) as a kind of experimental reading (creative experiment). Literary interpretation is not necessarily an objectivist idea but is more of a subjectivist idea of analysis where a text can have as many meanings as its readers. In that sense, truth is not a matter of discovery in this domain, it is more of an invention.
The readers have to invent the truths of literary reading, which means that it is a creative experimental process! It is an act of unpacking or unraveling.
Critique: The Game Changer
Let us say that interpretation could enable a form of change. Now, if we go back to the title of Kermode’s book, in terms of the different kinds of reading in literary studies, intervention is supposed to make a change through interpretation.
Historically speaking, the idea of critique in literature comes into the picture more explicitly when we witnessed the cultural turn in literary studies that took place in the 90s and has been present for a while now. This event signifies that the literary form is seen as one among many cultural forms. For instance, journalism or cinema is another cultural form. It is from where various ideas of interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity came strongly into the domain of literature. It is during this time when the notion of critique was imported primarily from social sciences. After the cultural turn, critique (or reading for change or intervention) has always been a critical part of the discussions on reading in literary studies. Earlier, it was not the case.
Critique is an ideological mode of reading literary texts. It is a primarily political vector of analysis where the reading wants to identify the ways in which literature can critique dominant ideologies and on other occasions, it can also become complicit in dominant ideologies. This idea of critique can be posed alongside an interventionist notion of reading.
Psychoanalysis, Unreadability, and Deconstruction
When we talk about analysis and interpretation, we could say that interpretation can be exhaustive, meaning, it can either be totalistic (we could understand everything about the content) or there can be certain points that cannot be understood or have a sense of unreadability within them.
Deconstructive reading starts to ethically respect this paradigm of unreadability. The logic of this reading is not fundamentally different from that of psychoanalytic reading. Generally, when someone goes for psychoanalysis in the clinic, they do not want their life to be interpreted. There is resistance and that’s the beginning and part of analyses. Once this concept is brought into the field of philosophy, the important question is — how does psychoanalysis change the idea of analysis in general?
There are parts or nodes in a literary text that resist interpretation. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in his book The Interpretation of Dreams, discusses in one of the footnotes about the navel of dreams. He says that every dream has a navel, beyond which it is connected with its repressed thoughts. Beyond this point, we cannot analyze that dream. In simple terms, the navel of the dream is the unreadable point in the text of the dream that cannot be understood properly or analyzed exhaustively!
Simply put, deconstructive reading is a strategy where we try to read a text against its intentionality. Say, there is a manifesto for pacifism (peace). To read this text as a manifesto for war would be a deconstructive reading. Here, we are going against the intentional grain of a particular text. This is similar to the psychoanalytic logic of the unconscious. Consciously, we try to make certain points through the composition of a text, but this text can also be interpreted against itself — the unconscious speaks against the conscious order of the reading! It is in this context that Robert Scholes (literary critic and theorist) informs us about the laws of reading.
The ‘Strange’ Literary Institution
One of the many things that Scholes had in mind is the literary institution. Are there protocols in reading? Jacques Derrida, a renowned philosopher, tells us about this strange institution of literature which is lawless, but at the same time, this lawlessness also becomes law.
There are certain writers who are read more than others because they are taught in academic institutes. But, that doesn’t mean that the others were less capable in their works. In this way, these specific people are backed by the educational bodies which can be thought of as machines of interpretation. Such writers are known as canonical in the literary tradition. An obvious example is Shakespeare from the English canon. Hence, we can see that there is a certain institutional law at work in literature. It is not entirely true that it is a lawless domain but at the same time, this field seems, perhaps, a little loose on the question of law.
Some Fascinating Types of Reading
All of reality is inflected by reading. There is no such thing as an immediate reality. Everything is mediated through perception, language, our own belief systems, and ideologies. Reading is a certain ideological action in itself. Interpretation is always ideological because there is a human subject analyzing a literary text and they would have their own ideologies. What does this mean? That reading is a dialectical process.
When we read a literary text alongside a theoretical or philosophical tradition, it is not applied but is comparatist. It is a parallel reading or contrapuntal reading. Image is a category of thinking in contemporary Australian writer Gerald Murnane’s literary texts. If we place it alongside Gilles Deleuze (French 20th century continental philosopher) who talks a lot about image, it becomes a comparatist reading where Deleuze would discuss various things on the image of thought and Murnane will deploy images in his fiction. There will be a certain dialectic. It is not that the philosopher and the writer say exactly the same thing.
In fact, when we read literature with theory, there is always reciprocity! It can be understood better with the following example. Philosopher Alan Badiou has written on Samuel Beckett, the Nobel laureate literary writer. Badiou is interested in the idea of the event. But for him, death is a counter-event. There is a set of philosophers he refutes in order to construct this idea. For these philosophers, death is one of the absolutely fundamental metaphors for thinking and a very strong figure of thought. Badiou, in a way, opposes them to construct the idea that thought cannot go in the same direction as death. Hence, Badiou’s system is silently resistant towards these philosophers on this topic. One could bring out this resistance in Badiou’s philosophy by reading death as an event in Beckett’s literary texts. This is the idea behind reciprocity — you are not just reading literature with theory, but you are also using literature to read theory back and reconfigure some of those theoretical paradigms!
Text and Context
Can we read a text without context? It is one of the most crucial questions in literary studies. I. A. Richards, a literary critic, conducted experiments to find the answer to this question. He would come to the classroom and distribute five poems to five students without telling them about the author, the historical period of its writing, and other similar details. In short, he gave them no background about the poems — contextless texts.
With the cultural turn, the world has seen a certain saturation of context on the other hand. It is the exact opposite of Richards’ experiments. Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work in relation to literature starts with literary texts, but the movement is outward — the text is permeated with historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts and this allows for the entry of other disciplines and fields.
Reading is always about strategy. We read certain aspects of a literary work — there are only partial readings. There are no such things as complete readings of literature-texts. Whenever we read, we background some aspects and foreground others.
A Glimpse into Close and Distant Readings
Close readings are one of the orthodox techniques of literary reading. They derive their logic from Aristotle’s famous idea of necessity — every detail in a text is necessary, there is nothing superfluous and we have to pay attention to every single detail. It’s almost like a detective reading a crime scene!
Against this idea, Franco Moretti (literary historian and theorist) conceptualized what is known as distant reading. It is not just structurally, but also culturally distant reading. He accuses close reading of being a theological exercise. It is, perhaps, too restrictive. Suppose, we have a Hungarian literary text. But we are not Hungarian and hence, we may not be privy to certain culture-specific nuances in that work. Does that mean we cannot read a text from another culture? It is one of the interventionist points to float this idea of distant reading where distance becomes a condition of knowledge.
The World of Micro and Macro
Interestingly, Moretti also talks about two levels of reading — micro and macro reading. This brings us to a question — what’s the unit of interpretation in literature? Are we reading something that is just a microelement in the text? Maybe, a theme that appears just once or twice in a literary text. Or, are we reading a larger question, which is not necessarily a micro-unit within the text but is a macro-unit outside it? For example, reading Indian novels from the Colonial period with the mind to observe how the system of science operates in them, would be the reading of a large corpus of literature around a particular question. This question binds an entire tradition as one
Stephen King, a renowned horror fiction writer, has a tendency of repeating his characters. A minor character from one of his books published in the 1980s would come back to become the protagonist of his other book in the 2000s. There are many scholars who have done a very complicated macro-system analysis of King’s corpus to show whether there is a logic for selecting certain tangential characters from certain texts. This is also a good example of backgrounding and foregrounding at work!
Exploring Literature: Interesting Case Studies
1) The Pebble and The Palm Tree
This short story is written by Balai Chand Mukhopadhyay. It talks about two spatial vantage points. What does a small pebble lying under a huge palm tree see? It sees the grass and monsoons year after year. When it asks the same question to the palm tree, it has a sense of excitement and is fascinated with what the tree is able to see — the sun rising and setting and rising again… The panoramic vision that the palm tree is allowed but the poor pebble is not! So, the characters show us a spectrum of two scales — micro (pebble) and macro (palm tree). The theme of this story is itself micro and macro reading. The most interesting part of this story seems to be its conclusion that the two scales are not that different! The pebble’s expectation from the palm tree that it would be able to observe magnificent things because of its huge size is not correct. According to the tree, it can only see the sun, rising and setting in the sky, and the repetition (of this activity) marks the end of this short story. Both the pebble and the palm tree are experiencing repetition of everyday life, though at different scales.
2) A Little Fable
Written by Franz Kafka, it depicts a kind of strange scale shifting. One of its characters, the mouse initially thought that the entire world is very big and it was afraid of the world’s vastness. It is a space that the mouse conceives as frightening. But then, all of a sudden, there was this shift of scale in his perception, and he realized that the world is, in fact, not so big — he felt being walled in. There was a sense of confinement and the mouse thought that he was fated to go into the trap and get killed. Suddenly, another character appears- the cat. It offers some words of wisdom to the mouse — if the world was terribly big earlier and it suddenly narrowed down, the mouse must have come into some closed space. The practical suggestion (you only need to change your direction) was to turn back and not continue forward. But the moment the mouse follows this advice and changes its path, the cat eats it up!
3) The Top
This one is again by Kafka and is open to many interpretations and truths. Micro and macro levels of analysis are thematically constructed in this short text. The character of the philosopher does not want to talk about macro problems but wants to engage with micro problems (hence, his obsession with the spinning of the top). He runs after the spinning tops and takes them against the wishes of the playing children because he wants to see that moment when the top stops spinning. But, he feels nauseated when he looks at the inert and unmoving top in his hands and quickly lets go of it. He had this belief that the understanding of any detail was sufficient for the understanding of all things. So, basically, everything is connected to everything. The micro is connected inextricably with the macro! There is a resonance here — the moving earth and the spinning top. There is also a certain dialectical tension between motion and stillness as two qualities of matter.
4) No Matter Which Way We Turned
This flash fiction is written by Brian Evenson. It is a complicated and disturbing gothic story. The lack of context which any reader would wonder about is — what happened to the girl in the story? It is one of those unreadable questions in a literary text. Are we talking about some sort of occult practice? The following line in the story points towards this assumption — ‘you have taken half of her, you have taken the same half of her twice’. It seems that the people called out to the sky and invoked the supernatural forces to take the girl in two halves. But those forces took two frontal halves, instead of taking the front and the back. This is the reason why the girl did not have a face. It is a very difficult visual image. One of the ways in which we make sense of any text is that we visualize its images. Even though the girl with no face gives rise to an interesting, uncanny, and strong visual image, we are not able to imagine it easily. Earlier we talked about literature that produces images. We also discussed that literature produces truth. Now, what is the truth of this girl? What kind of knowledge is produced by such literary works? A certain kind of literature that covers tales and works like these, especially the experimental modernist literature, produces ambivalence (an openness) more than clear knowledge. This story also introduces us to the narrating self — the first-person pronoun. This narrator, towards the end, has a dream where he sees the other version of that girl. This time, she only has a face on both sides and no back. This short piece of literature puts forward the thought-provoking question — What are the possible interpretations of a girl who will always face you and a girl who will never face you? It doesn’t quite answer this question but it addresses the very formulation of such a question.
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This article is based on one of the sessions (delivered by Arka Chattopadhyay, faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences discipline) of the Virtual Seminar Series by IIT Gandhinagar. It is an online program started by the Institute in the wake of the current pandemic as a means to engage the people so that they can learn about a diversity of topics from the comfort of their homes, in an interesting manner. (The 6th article of this series can be found here. For the 8th article, please visit here.)
