Interpreting Literary Works

Interpretation is the process of making meaning from a text. Literary theorists have different understandings of what meaning is, what constitutes a “good” interpretation, and whether we should even be interpreting literary texts at all. Frank Kermode, for example, claimed that the only people who are able to interpret stories properly are insiders, but even the most knowledgeable insiders – such as Jesus’ disciples – are prone to errors (Jesus had to explain his parables to the disciples because they needed his help). Susan Sontag argued that we should refrain from interpretation and confront the literary and artistic work “as is” so we can experience it on its own terms and not as a different thing (such as an explanation). Umberto Eco stated that literature allows for a range of interpretations but that some interpretations are better than others (though we need to establish standards to assess the quality of different interpretations).

Disagreements about interpretation focus mainly on the reader’s limits. Should the reader be able to make any meaning whatsoever from a text? Does the text resist interpretation and insist on being read on its own terms? What constrains the reader’s freedom to interpret? Do constraints arise from the author, from within the text itself, from within the reader, or from within the culture? Whose culture, we might also ask, should determine the proper interpretation: the reader’s, the author’s, or someone else’s?

Interpretation is a process of gathering evidence (from within the literary text) and making reasoned inferences from that evidence. Our goal when interpreting a text is to offer a better interpretation than the others available. A better interpretation is one that meets particular criteria, though we have to justify and explain why we chose those criteria and not others. Because it it is possible to overlook evidence, misread evidence, etc., we can say that an interpretation that makes good use of evidence is likely better than one that does not. We can also say that a better interpretation will provide a coherent conceptual framework with which to understand a literary text. A better interpretation might account for possible counter-arguments and make a compelling case against each of them.

A better interpretation is also one that is free from reasoning errors. For example, if someone says 2+3+4 = 5, we can say that their chain of reasoning is flawed. Since it is possible to make reasoning errors, we can likely conclude that an interpretation that includes fewer errors in reasoning is better than an interpretation that has serious errors in reasoning. A better interpretation is likely one that produces a greater quantity and quality of meaning than a competing interpretation. Therefore, some interpretations are better than others because they make better use of evidence and reasoning, provide clear conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate advantages over weaker interpretations. Good interpretations give us insight.

The interpretive steps above are by no means the final word on this story and you should feel free to make your own interpretation of it. Note, however, that interpreters of literature make use of others’ work. If your interpretation goes further or in a different direction from the one above, you would make use of this example to explain how and why yours differs.

Discourses

Scholars read literary works within a variety of discourses. Roughly, these discourses are grouped in four general types: social-cultural, creative, psychological, and genre:

Scholars apply discourses not only to literary texts but also to the contexts around those texts. Contexts can include the life of the author, the place and time of the writing, the audience, other literary works, critical reception of the work, etc. So, for example, a scholar may discuss the poetry of Ezra Pound using the discourse of genre, which the critic can apply both to Pound’s poetry and to his context, which includes the poetry of other writers of his time.

How to Interpret Literary Texts Using Schemata

There are numerous schools of interpretation, each with their own interpretive schema. A schema is a broad theoretical framework – a meta-story – for understanding the world. We discussed a variety of these theoretical frameworks in the previous chapter. To oversimplify: psychoanalysis uses the schema of personal development; Marxism uses the schema of class struggle; feminism uses the schema of gender inequality; Christianity uses the schema of sin and redemption; etc.

When we write about a literary text, we are first creating a conceptual model – a critical description – of the text, seeing it as an author’s attempt to address a problem (which can be aesthetic, technical, social, political, etc.). The model we construct is built from a set of details about the literary work and its context, organized into a pattern. Michael Baxandall, an art critic and historian, notes that we build conceptual models any time we think or write about an object – a literary text, a person, a natural phenomenon, a concept; when we encounter any of these things we are constructing/fabricating a model of it in our minds.

Baxandall describes this conceptualizing process as it relates to creating critical descriptions of paintings.^[4]

Below is an example of this kind of work by a famous critic, Walter Benjamin, writing about a picture by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus (1920):

Notice that Benjamin creates a conceptual model of the picture by accounting for the details of the picture, but also by explaining what he makes up about the picture and its effect on himself. Benjamin’s reading involves his imagination and he famously turned the picture into an allegory of modernity.

From Baxandall, we can learn the process of creating conceptual models of literary works by replacing the word “picture” with “text.” In the example above in which we read Storm Jameson’s “Departures,” we built a conceptual model of the text by, in Baxandall’s terms, creating “a representation of thinking about having [read the text].” We referred “to the effect the [text] has on us, or to other things that would have a comparable effect on us, or to inferred causes of an object that would have such an effect on us as the [text] does.” Finally, “the description has only the most general independent meaning and depends for such precision as it has on the presence of the [text].”

The process of creating conceptual models often goes unrecognized. For instance, when we identify a person by their face, we are going through an enormous number of sensory and mental processes very quickly. Our brains take a bunch of shapes, lines, and colors, and construct a mental model, then compare it to an existing mental model and conclude, “Oh yeah, that’s Jane.” In working with literary texts we are more explicit about the process. For instance, in Cleanth Brooks’ writing about “Canonization,” he selects and organizes features of the text showing how they relate to one another and to his framing concept: paradox. Propp does the same thing around narrative actants and functions in folk tales.

Notice that interpretation moves from the specific to the general, from the details of the literary work into more abstract conceptual terms. Most critics only use some, not all, of the details from a literary work in the interpretation. If you disagree with a critic, you can pose a contrary interpretation by claiming that the critic overlooked significant details from the literary work, formed a misleading pattern, and mapped those details to the wrong schema. Finally, you should offer your own interpretation, following the steps outlined above. Many critics combine interpretive schemas. Also, it is acceptable to be suspicious of schema and of overarching narratives, especially ones that supposedly “explain everything.”

In the sample interpretation above, the schemata used to interpret the Storm Jameson story “Departures” is social-cultural. The interpretation views the story through a lens of cultural critique that sees Jameson as criticizing the dominant Stoic attitude in British life.

David Bordwell, in his book Making Meaning (which is primarily about film interpretation but works quite well for understanding literary interpretation), discusses two major interpretive traditions: explicatory and symptomatic. A symptomatic reading is one in which the critic treats the text with suspicion, as though it disguises its true intentions. Your goal, using this method, is to get the text to “confess” its meaning by pointing to “symptoms” in the text. Freud stated, “A symptom is a sign of, and a substitute for, an instinctual satisfaction which has remained in abeyance; it is a consequence of the process of repression” (“Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety” 20.91). The symptomatic critic is looking for signs that betray the real intention of the text or the author, just as Freud seized on forgotten names or slips of the tongue as symptoms that more accurately revealed the patient’s state of mind than did their explicit statements. In a symptomatic reading, a reader might argue that a text that seems anti-racist hides a racist intent or effect.

An explicatory reading is one in which the critic turns implied meaning into explicit meaning. An explicatory reading does not treat the literary text with suspicion. For instance, you might find a text that seems anti-racist, and your interpretation explains how it is, in fact, anti-racist.

Bordwell argues that critics often switch the way they read depending on the literary work. Some literary works ― ones that critics believe are ideologically abusive ― are read symptomatically, while other works ― those critics believe are ideologically healthy ― are read using explicatory methods.

Bordwell presents the following passage about explicatory criticism:

On a summer day, a suburban father looks out at the family lawn and says to his teen-aged son: “The grass is so tall I can hardly see the cat walking through it.” The son construes this to mean: “Mow the lawn.” This is an implicit meaning. In a similar way, the interpreter of a film may take referential or explicit meaning as only the point of departure for inferences about implicit meanings. That is, she or he explicates the film, just as the son might turn to his pal and explain, “That means Dad wants me to mow the lawn.” Explicatory criticism rests upon the belief that the principal goal of critical activity is to ascribe implicit meanings to films (Making 43).

The flip side of this paradigm is that critics tend to perform symptomatic criticism on texts they consider ideologically suspect. Bordwell explains symptomatic criticism in this passage:

On a summer day, a father looks out at the family lawn and says to his teen-aged son: “The grass is so tall I can hardly see the cat walking through it.” The son slopes off to mow the lawn, but the interchange has been witnessed by a team of live-in social scientists, and they interpret the father’s remarks in various ways. One sees it as typical of an American household’s rituals of power and negotiation. Another observer construes the remark as revealing a characteristic bourgeois concern for appearances and a pride in private property. Yet another, perhaps having had some training in the humanities, insists that the father envies the son’s sexual proficiency and that the feline image constitutes a fantasy that unwittingly symbolizes (a) the father’s identification with a predator; (b) his desire for liberation from his stifling life; his fears of castration (the cat in question has been neutered): or (d) all of the above. […] Now if these observers were to propose their interpretations to the father, he might deny them with great vehemence, but this would not persuade the social scientists to repudiate their conclusions. They would reply that the meanings they ascribed to the remark were involuntary, concealed by a referential meaning (a report on the height of the grass) and an implicit meaning (the order to mow the lawn). The social scientists have constructed a set of symptomatic meanings, and these cannot be demolished by the father’s protest. Whether the sources of meaning are intrapsychic or broadly cultural, they lie outside the conscious control of the individual who produces the utterance. We are now practicing a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a scholarly debunking, a strategy that sees apparently innocent interactions as masking unflattering impulses (Making 71–72).

Critics employing the symptomatic approach look for “incompatibility between the film’s explicit moral and what emerges as a cultural symptom” (75). In other words, the symptomatic approach looks for instances that indicate a text’s explicit message hides a less flattering message. Such symptomatic readings warn people not to be fooled by appearances; the true, yet disguised, intentions of a text ― its “repressed meanings” ― are apparent if you know how to look for them. Explicatory criticism, by contrast, urges the audience not to miss the text’s implied messages.

The distinction between explicatory and symptomatic criticism is hinted at by their names. Both have to do with intentionality. An explicatory interpretation explains – it clarifies the author’s overt intention (and is generally flattering), while a symptomatic interpretation points to a covert intention (and is generally unflattering); it claims that a literary work is a symptom of an unflattering impulse or state of affairs.

If we look at “Tell Me a Story” by Paul Auster (below), we might say that his overt intention is to explain how he became a writer by listening to his father’s stories. His covert intention could be to reproduce his father’s evasiveness by telling stories that distract from his vulnerabilities. We might go further and argue that storytelling is a form of manipulation and control used to fool people.

Note that both kinds of criticism still use conceptual frameworks.

Steps to Interpretation

An interpretation, which translates the details of a literary work into the schemata of a discourse, requires that we go through a series of steps.

1. A denotative reading of a text provides an inventory of what is in it. It tells us things like setting, characters, action, point of view, etc.
2. A connotative reading of a text tells us what these things suggest or “mean” within their cultural context; it tells us what is implicit.
3. An explicatory reading argues that a text has an overt intention; it has a purpose and lesson(s) for the reader.
4. A symptomatic reading reveals that a text has a covert intention; it tries to conceal or disguise an unflattering truth.

At the very least, any interpretation must produce an explicatory reading, which is itself based upon solid denotative and connotative readings. A symptomatic reading must be based on denotative, connotative, and explicatory readings, and must show how the symptomatic reading differs from the explicatory one.

Here is a video explaining the four levels of meaning.

Reading Literary Works [Refresher]

Take this quiz to check your comprehension of this section.
If you are using an offline version of this text, access the quiz for this section via the QR code.

Exercises

1. Practice your reading skills on the story below using explication, analysis, or comparison/contrast.

   • Make sure you tell us what the story is about. At a literal or denotative level it is about a son remembering his father telling him stories. But we also need to know at a connotative level what the story is about. Is it about the power of stories? Is it about emotional connection/disconnection? Is it about how the author became an author? Ask yourself questions like these and answer them.

   • Make sure you identify a schemata you are using – genre, social-cultural, creative, and/or psychological.

   • Make sure you create a model text from the story. I provide an example of this with the Storm Jameson text on our Interpreting Literature page.

   • Make sure you move from specific to general, showing how you made the connections. For instance, the son’s request for a story (specific) means he wants emotional connection with his father (general). The father tells a story about himself that is not true (specific), therefore deflecting his son’s request (general) but also satisfying the son’s request through substitution (general) by telling a compelling story rather than a true one (specific).

1. Do an interpretation of the story above, using either an explicatory or symptomatic approach (see rubric below). Remember to first construct a conceptual model of the literary work, which accounts for its features.
2. If there are any elements of your assignment that need clarification, please list them.
3. What was the most important lesson you learned from this page? What point was confusing or difficult to understand?