Interpretation Outside of the Institution
How to Interpret a Text, pt. 4
This is the final part of a series that offers a guided tour of selected bits of literary theory. This final post is my response and summation. The series asks what various critics thought about the question: Is there a right way or a wrong way to interpret a literary text? You can read part 1, part 2, and part 3 if you’d like to, but each post can be read separately.
Most of the theories of interpretation that I’ve been reviewing in this series are all about English professors. Hirsch’s Validity in Interpretation is in part an expression of anxiety about the status of English departments compared to other university departments: his goal is to find standards for interpretation that can give English professors a sense of institutional authority and legitimacy. “On what ground,” he frets, “does [a professor] claim that his ‘reading’ is more valid than that of any pupil? On no very firm ground.” The point of all of this thinking, at least in part, is to distinguish certain interpretations as authoritative. “If a theorist wants to save the ideal of validity,” Hirsch writes a few pages later, “he has to save the author as well.” Hirsch is an admirably clear reasoner, but here he reveals that his clear reasoning is also highly motivated. He wants to save the ideals of validity and expertise and to bolster the reputation of its representatives, the professors.
Although her argument deeply opposes Hirsch’s, Judith Fetterley is also invested in the question of what English departments in universities ought to do. Fetterley argues that universities and other schools “immasculate” women students, imposing upon them the worldview of men. Detailing the psychic scars this can cause, Fetterley suggests that it is the responsibility of teachers to perform a kind of “exorcism” of the maleness of American literature as a political act. Fetterley seems to take for granted what Hirsch seems anxious about: the authority wielded by teachers and professors of literature, their ability to mold the minds of students and instruct them in what to believe. Her theory is developed to change the way that professors wield their institutional authority. In other words, Fetterley is not making an argument about which interpretations are “right” or “correct.” She’s making an essentially moral and political argument about how English professors ought to teach. Like Hirsch’s, her philosophy of interpretation is also an expression of professional ideals.
The postcritical writers I’ve looked at are similarly thinking mostly about the kinds of interpretation that happens inside of English departments. In both Uses of Literature and The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski contextualizes her arguments in terms of the ongoing “crisis of the humanities.” She recites the common list of problems: dipping enrollment in university English programs; increasing college costs; the crumbling belief in the value of humanistic inquiry. “In such an austere and inauspicious climate, how do scholars of literature make a case for the value of what we do? How do we come up with rationales for reading and talking about books without reverting to the canon-worship of the past?” Her phrasing here—“how do we come up with rationales…?”—is revealing. The book isn’t only trying to talk about the best way to interpret literature. It’s also about how English professors can justify the existence of university English departments. (Maybe it is even mostly about this.)
So it’s all about university English departments. Hirsch is worried about their prestige; Fetterley is worried about their power; Felski is worried about their existence. But all of these arguments are tangled up with the question of how English professors should do their jobs.
Well, I’m probably not going to teach literature in a university, and anyways the power and prestige of university English departments have never been so low. The question of what English departments ought to do is, therefore, no longer particularly interesting to me. I’ll be sad as these departments continue to bleed out, and as graduate programs in English continue to shutter. But the question of what they ought to do will be their affair and not mine.
The interesting question this poses for me is this: if most of these theories of interpretation have been motivated by the impulse to defend or critique university English departments, what happens when we talk about interpretation without talking about the university English departments?
One way to begin is to pose the question of what the stakes are for the question of interpretation. What would we lose if we didn’t know how to interpret literature?
Well, there are a few things I would not be worried about. In some cosmic sense, it is not clear that there is ever a “correct” reading or interpretation of any literary text. Even Hirsch acknowledges that “the possibilities of legitimate criticism are boundless.” So it seems clear to me that we are not really missing out on true knowledge if we don’t know how to interpret literature.
Second, I am not too worried about the immediate practical implications of misinterpreting a poem. Planes will not fall from the sky if someone misreads “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
What would be lost, though, is still important: the possibility of having a shared human literary culture founded on conversation. It seems to me that, to have a shared culture, at least some critical mass of people have to share cultural knowledge and share at least some ground rules (stated or unstated) about how to argue about the meaning and value of that cultural knowledge. These ground rules can shift and change over time as they are criticized or made obsolete; the important thing is that there must be an active consensus about their approximate validity. If there are no ground rules for interpreting art, you can’t argue about it, and so its meaning becomes subject to the individual whim or idiosyncrasy of the person taking it in. Rather than being the product of social debate, notions of what literature means and what constitutes “good literature” would be subjective, personal, and supra-rational. In this scenario, a lot of cultural consensus would shatter—people would stop trying to persuade one another that their interpretations or valuations are correct, and everyone would have their own individual opinions about what literature means and which books are good. Whatever cultural consensuses would be left would not be built on conversations between human beings (complete with their vulnerability to ethical appeals, caprice, mischievous creativity, and unreason). They would be built on opaque, unreachable, even autonomous technological forces.
This hypothetical scenario seems bad to me! But, on reflection, I don’t think the way to safeguard a shared human culture is to develop a correct theory of interpretation, some set of predetermined ground rules that settle how we should talk about literature. Imagine that someone comes up with a Correct Theory of Interpretation, something that is both logically airtight and completely emotionally aware of every aspect of reading and interpreting literature. It achieves the perfect balance between appreciation and critique, and is just so perfect that it demands assent by all readers. First off, nobody’d read it. But if they did, it still wouldn’t matter very much, because interpretation isn’t something people theorize and then do. They do it and then theorize about what they’ve just done. Like moral standards, which also seem to flex and change over time, in the real world we evaluate interpretations more on the basis of vibes and feelings than by the development of a perfect theory that can then be deployed.
And just as the revelation of the One True Ethical System would by no means make actual human beings act more ethically, the revelation of the Correct Theory of Interpretation would by no means make us better interpreters. When it comes to ethical living, the important thing is to keep trying to be good. When it comes to interpretation, the important thing is to try to make sense of and create a shared culture. In both cases, one must establish and maintain ground rules by observing them, not by writing them out in a list. Our interpretations don’t need an elaborate theoretical justification. We just need to keep doing them as well as we can with our human brains. I have my own ideas about what good criticism entails, and I think they’re right, even if I can’t justify them a priori. Someday they will be outdated, I am sure. As long as the activity itself—the reading, the judging, the trying to think well, the writing and talking and persuading—does not end, I almost don’t care if someone’s interpretation is “right” or “wrong.”
The world that Hirsch sought to defend—the world where the informed expert classes exercise authority over the meaning of literature, to which the masses in general assent—sure feels as if it is coming to an end. I’ll miss it, in many ways, but in the end I think it’ll be OK. What matters is the constant chatter that produces a shared human culture. That, more than any one theory, is what I prize.
