Table Of ContentIN 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
