Discussion → The Value of Interpretation
-
In her essay 'Against Interpretation,' Susan Sontag wrote that interpretation “amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.” Does explaining a work of fiction undermine the experience of simply reading it?
-
Unknowing a piece of art, as knowing a piece of art, is a valuable skill.
-
There's always a danger, I guess. But, explanation and interpretation is better suited to prose than it is to poetry. Although I know there's a host of misguided teachers focusing on the mine field and waste-of-time "What does the poem mean..." Or let me say it this way - explanation is less intrusive or destructive in prose than it is in poetry.
I think Joseph is right though. Add to his idea the notion that there's a line that shouldn’t be crossed. There's a point where the work of art is no longer just that ... instead it's become our idea of it as a work of art.
For me, the actual greatness of a piece of writing can never really be explained. It just is.
-
We work in symbols and abstraction. It is only natural for anyone who encounters symbols to want to make meaning from them. That is their inherent value.
-
This is a personal preference, I think--something individual to each reader, and perhaps to each reader's education. So all I can offer here is my personal experience as I have navigated artistic interpretation.
First, I should say that (since we *are* on Fictionaut here) when I comment on some Fictionaut pieces, I often take too long trying to figure out what to say. This is because what I *really* want to say, "I like this." It's like great sex or dark chocolate: I just want to sit back and enjoy the taste on my tongue. I don't want to explain why it was so good, because it might ruin the experience. So I started out on F'naut as an anonymous fave-er who rarely commented, but as the community grew, I have commented more and more, because I believe that comments truly foster the community. This is one way that interpretation is valuable in our immediate group. (Plus it's fun to see how readers read a piece, what they pull out of it.)
It's a testament to the mysterious and subjective nature of art that I agree with everything posted here, contradictory or not. There's some art where a line shouldn't be crossed. But, yes, I naturally want to make sense of the symbols too. And yet I do not want to get hung up on meaning. If I know a piece too well, there is value in unknowing it, in approaching it with a new eye. And I agree with Sontag too. It depends on what I'm reading, what day I'm reading, and what mood I'm in. I can choose to interpret or not, but I don't 100% fall into any single camp.
When I write a critical piece, I am fully aware that I am working in a construct created by a thesis, which may or may not be true, but according to my evidence, is indeed true. Is this artificial? Sometimes. It feels like I am punishing the piece by looking at it microscopically, but there *is* value in turning it over and making connections. I find value in interpretation as a reader of criticism because I am introduced to new aspects of a piece that broaden my view of it. But it also gets exhausting, depending on the critic. Some days I want to tell Harold Bloom and Elizabeth Abel to suck my balls; other days I think they're brilliant and am (gulp!) envious of them.
I fear that I'm rambling and not being entirely helpful. Just like a critic....
-
My answer to your question is sometimes but not always.
"In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone."
The 'in most' is important to consider as Sontag goes on further in her essay to describe the 'in least' alternatives of interpretation. I am not sure that I accept that any art is ever left alone, or that there is any need to leave it alone or to even care one way or the other, excepting where interpretation wears us out and dulls a pleasure of the senses.
Other than the art that we create ourselves our experience of art is as an external environment created by others.
In general people need things to do with themselves and if they want to yammer on about what they think is going on I am not inclined to stop them. Sometimes I need something to do and yammering works just fine. When I get tired of yammering I will walk away and go do something else.
Sontag in her first graph of the essay references the paintings in the caves at Lascaux. "The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual." I suspect she has to qualify as 'must have been' because in fact she does not know. She is messing with my cave paintings? Is this a pointer to some manner of romantic notion of a natural innocence?
I ran across a comment recently wherein a statement was made that opposed to the general subjective interpretation that the hand prints (along with animals there are hand prints on the cave walls) are not necessarily long ago expressions of the 'artiste' as that they are impressions of hands reaching out of the wall toward the viewer. That is an interpretation that simply blows me away. It blows me away in a similar fashion to contemplation of Tibetan long horns tooted in stone buildings is an attempt to communicate w/ the other side.
-
Great comments! I disagree with Sontag's conflation of explaining & interpretation, and feel that searching for meaning in a work of art is always valuable, whether you find evidence to support your ideas or not. For me, discovering how a text is situated within historical, social, and political contexts is a deeply pleasurable experience. One of my favorite quotes is from Ron Carlson's Ordinary Son, "To see something is to establish the first terms of your misunderstanding."
Great discussion all around - thanks Edward for starting this thread!
-
the question made me think of john berger ("ways of seeing") and his argument that the paintings of old are altered by means of modern reproductive technique. though he does not talk about interpretation, i think a similar process is set in motion when i interpret the writing of another: when i read it i re-produce it according to my own frame of reference. a change of context is inevitable. hence, to read is to interpret, on any level.
most of what’s been discussed here (unless i didn’t get it) referred to works of art in general (and to the tension between the symbolic and the concrete) and not to fiction in particular.
so what about fiction?i would compare my way of reading fiction with dreaming (shades of john gardner here - fiction as creating a dream in which the reader may enter) - about as far from conscious interpretation as one can go. i read most pieces on fnaut uncritically at first looking for anything i might enjoy (except in the groups created for critique). i enjoy if i can get in a trance of sorts without going to sleep. most of my comments on a text are not interpretative but formatively evaluating with respect to this quality. the comments, when i read them myself, reflect that (they may appear obscure at times, though i prefer the kinder word ‘playful’).
before a second or third reading i look at the comments of others. this reading is now more interpretative, a “thesis” as katrina (transgressively ball-sucking instead of traditionally ball-busting - nice!) is forming using a prism made up of shards of other readers’ readings.
since most writers spend most of their time not reading other people’s stuff but their own, what interests me more is if sontag’s claim also “undermines” the reading of our own texts in the sense alluded to by here (though not spelled out): namely, if reading our own texts precludes us from enjoying them - which would seriously hamper our power of editing and improving them (i think).
here i’m a bit clueless. i disown my texts very quickly - when i read them after only a few days i often have difficulty believing that i wrote them. that furthers my need to re-‘interpret’ (= "explain, expound, understand") my own work and it also enables me to read it as i like to read - as a dreamer. more i cannot see/say right now, but i’m curious what you think about that - reading/interpreting your own stuff.
(mantrap: i knew it - i shouldn’t have engaged with this thread. i should have stuck to the incredibly mind-numbingly boring academic paper that i have to finish by monday. now i’m all excited and as you well know excitement doesn’t go well with science. blarp.)
Keywords: symbol, dream, C G Jung, La Science des Rêves, ubersontag, sex [sometimes in the last line].
-
Very recently, I made the conscious decision to interpret (very briefly) a very short story I read at Fictionaut. I felt very careful in my phrasing because I didn't want to cancel other interpretations or to insist on something that was only there as a glint or to chase it away. I needed to write the comment in a way that worked with the mystery of the piece, instead of running it out of hiding: aha! like a cop.
Susan Sontag's name as a critic, like Elizabeth Bishop's name as a poet, carries authority. It took a long time for me to get around to reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and her fiction. It was the sort of delay that might never have resolved; I might never have read her. I might have gone on thinking in the back of my mind that she was a musty old founding mother. I learned things about writing fiction itself from reading de Beauvoir's fiction; I haven't read Sontag's fiction.
I decided against reading "Against Interpretation" before commenting here -- I looked at it and judged it as a thicket intended mostly for serious art critics that is not useful to me on this particular day, though the question is.
Commenting on our own work here at Fictionaut is as one writer to another, writers of roughly similar clout. Very few of the writers who've dipped their pens here have power in the fiction market. I agree with Katrina that the process of commenting can seem to take a long time. It seems important not to fire off interpretations, but to consider them carefully amidst other factors: the writer is starting out, for example, or risking something.
I feel that most as I participate at Fictionaut and on the internet generally: risk. It's risky behavior. It's risky to offer a story or an interpretation of another's story.
Established writers mostly avoid the internet unless they are represented there by someone or something (also established) other than themselves. Consensus tells us that only publishing houses and elite magazines can confer status on the writer or the work. The writer in turn may confer status by nominating other writers and their work. I'd like to confer status (by interpreting and appreciating work), but I have only a little (what my writing has created by itself) by which to do it. Status is necessary. I'm figuring this out. When a writer has status, the onus shifts to the reader to appreciate and interpet the work.
(That paragraph is thick.)
I looked up "willing suspension of disbelief" for my latest story at Fictionaut. It's Coleridge, and the meaning has changed; the onus has shifted from writer to reader. Coleridge meant that the writer is under obligation to use supernatural elements in a way the reader will accept as believable; for us today, it means the reader accepts artifice in exchange for being entertained.
-
I did a lot of growing at the Anansi Writers' Workshop in Los Angeles' Leimert Park (which focuses more on poetry) and there, I developed a mantra -- "less chat, more poem" -- that I feel applies to fiction as well.
If somebody's telling me about the story, they're not telling me the story. If the information I need isn't in the actual content, then that's a problem of craft and needs to be applied to the actual content. Oingo Boingo doesn't get to preface "Little Girls" every time somebody hears some of it, so if people think they're child molesters, well, that's just what it is. If it's worth knowing, put it in the poem. If they don't know it, they can look it up. Sting and Chuck D introduced me to Scylla, Charybdis, Chesimard, Farrakhan and a number of other names I hadn't heard in my distrubingly boring Memphis upbringing. If they're too lazy to look it up ... well, they miss out.
As with all things, your mileage may vary, standard disclaimers apply.
-
Of course, Sontag was reacting to the heavy-duty Freudian/Marxist criticism of the moment -- and to her ex-husband Philip Rieff's style of criticism. I don't think she was wrong to stick up for the "aesthetic experience" -- e.g., I really dig how the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum here in Boston isn't organized by artist or historical era, but just however Mrs. Gardner thought each room should look. You can just groove on the artwork, the experience of being surrounded by the artworks...
On the other hand, you can go too far in the other direction, too. I have a film critic friend who tells me that when he watches a movie he's able to let it wash over him, to experience it as innocently and directly as anybody else, even while criticizing it in some other part of his brain. That seems like a good trick.
-
Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slideor press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.--Billy Collins
-
ann's thick 'graf, and the rest of 'em, bear re-reading by us all--
i think, edward, you may have been a tad reductionistic regarding sontag's theseis in that remarkable book (sorry).
in any case, the work of the artist and the work of the critic differ greatly, and are not of the same moment--as has been remarked in other threads.
galileo once said, "mathematics is for the mathematition." and criticism is for the critics. critic perform a valuable servcice, though there are fewer and fewer of them. (note: a book reviewer is NOT the same as a literay critic. this seems so basic, yet i am always amazed that folk continue to conflate the two. i was once talking with tom boyle about this and he pointed out (quite correctly) that when a new novel or story collection is published, newspapers or mags are so short of staff, so understaffed in the arts, that they assign the "review" to whoever is the poor english major on the staff. which is why, i suppose, that the ny times book review asks other writers to review a new novel or collection--figuring that only an artist can evaluate art? although not even this system is perfect--i once asked frederick barthelme about how he thought the reviewers had treated his work and he said "favorably, generally, except for a few--i guess they thought what i was doing was somehow a threat to what they were doing?)
and so it goes--
finally: we have still not come to grips with sontag. her loss is much too close to us. not saying we cannot speak of her work, only that we need more distance and time.
same is true of roland barthes--
may they rest in peace, great-hearts, both of them--
g
-
I just realized how apt my quote is since I misread Edward's post and thought that it was Sontag who used explanation and interpretation interchangeably. In any case, Josh, thank you for contextualizing Sontag's work. But I would argue that there is no such thing as "innocent" viewing or reading. I will refrain from quoting Foucault :) Anne makes this point well in relation to the implications of conferring status upon certain writers. Gary, thank you for posting Billy Collin's funny and wonderful poem. I would ask my students: Who is the narrator? Is it Collins? And what is really at stake for her or him?
Could you discuss in more detail why you thought Edward's post was reductionist regarding Sontag?
-
An interesting series of interviews about writing (poetry) book reviews is taking place at Sina Queyras' Lemon Hound weblog:
-
This is from the essay (google gets you there):
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.So a dichotomy is enforced, but I don't know any artists who don't know what they are about, where they come from. They may be hesitant to speak it, because of these fumes of interpretation. And maybe hailing artists over critics is easy. The good critics make us better artists. They teach us to see. Comparitivily, they are more easily vilified. But if they have egos, if they are propped up, if they consider their power justified, maybe some is...
Then there's this:
Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail. In fact, a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become (“merely”) decorative. Or it may become non-art.
The primacy of interpretation is given credit for art that resists interpretation, or maybe these artists see it as the tyrrany of interpretation. Yet, when I come across good criticism of,say, Donald Barthelme, I appreciate it that much more, because the critic is daring enough to articulate a wiggly object. I can experience the Donald Barthelme and get it just fine, but then it becomes just a little more complex for me. It doesn't add that much more value, but there is value. Sontag, if I'm understanding, sees interp as a way of subsuming art into cultural objects. And so it's not as much the critic, but the culture that is kills art.
And so there's this from the essay:
Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.
So this is a manifesto, and pretty Fing serious. I doubt too many of us, as artists, are really all that thrilled with the culture - it's anti-intellectualism, materialism, celebrity worship - and so we take on the role of critic, by responding with exageration, or by focusing on spaces where none of that intrudes. And I think those of us "emerging writers" want to be interpreted. It would make us matter, make us read, and understood (thinking of Ann's post here).
If only Sontag and a few of the other great critics had more of an influence on the culture. Yes, there's power I'm interpretation, but perhaps not enough. Mostly, the culture is a glacier, mostly unmoved.
-
well. most of you have said what I would say. as John said, as emerging writers, being interpreted "would make us matter," and I think on a larger scale, being interpreted at all makes a given piece of work matter.
art in a vacuum matters not.
as artists, we generally are commenting in some way on society. why should society remain silent on the issue? interpretation is the initiation of discussion on our views about society; I, for one, welcome interpretation for just that reason.
I do think that artists should not supply interpretation of their work. JK Rowling telling everyone that Dumbledore was gay is a prime, albeit superficial, example of this. leave it all on the page, don't save it for the press conference.
-
Great Carlson quote, Marcelle!
-
Three slightly disjointed responses to the conversation:
"I do think that artists should not supply interpretation of their work." -- Samuel, I tend to agree. In fact, this is the only sort of rewrite that Rob and I routinely ask for, when an author we've invited to participate in Significant Objects submits a story. As you may or may not know, we assign a random object to each author, about which they must write a story -- our hypothesis being that narrative is what transforms an insignificant object into a significant one. Some of our participants want to interpret the significance of the object for the reader, but Rob and I almost always ask them to cut such passages -- we'd prefer that the reader be allowed to figure out the significance for herself.
Gary, thanks for the Billy C. poem. Yes, I said something along those lines in the introduction to a book of significant-object essays I edited a couple years ago (this is the book which led Rob to propose the SO project to me): although I welcome the advent of what's called Material Culture Studies, it's depressing to read most work in that field, because these cult studs don't have a conversation with the material objects in question -- they interrogate them. And we all know that torture victims just tell the torturers whatever it is they seem to want to hear.
PS: I re-read Sontag's essays not long ago, because I wanted to sharpen my thinking about another of my projects, Hilobrow.com. I came away feeling that Sontag was groping her way towards an amazing position (or disposition, really, a mode of being in the world) that few of her contemporaries really appreciated. However, I don't think she really ever arrived at that position. So reading her is a rewarding exercise in the history of ideas, and I'm amazed by how ahead of her time she was, but she's slightly frustrating if what you're looking for is THE ANSWER.
-
this is
Group Description
We're an online literary journal that publishes works of short, indeterminate prose and accompanying criticism. We feature one author every posting period (every two weeks). Every so often a question related to the form and function of fiction will be posted here for discussion.
http://www.matchbooklitmag.comThis is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.