Seventeen ideas about interpretation

1. Literature exceeds criticism. There are no complete interpretations; there are only complete poems, novels, plays.

2. Criticism is about literature. It makes a gesture toward identifying or illuminating some aspect(s) of a work or works.

3. Criticism is not a negation of pleasure. Knowing more about what it is you’re reading can only inform and deepen pleasure, if there’s genuine pleasure to be had. Knowledge (not ignorance) is bliss.

4. One interprets, but one interprets what’s there. In other words, criticism involves a reader and a text.

5. We can value works that concern our own particular preoccupations. But we can’t merely hunt for — or worse, create — our own preoccupations within texts. We can also read for something other than our own preoccupations. Or we might find in a work of literature a new preoccupation. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, was a serious student of Buddhism.

6. It’s a truism to say that a work of literature means something different to each reader. But the meanings of a work of literature are contained in language, and words cannot mean anything.

7. What a text can be said to mean and what its author can be said to have meant: these are two ways of talking about the same thing.

8. The meaning of the text isn’t in an author’s mind but in all the relevant intricacies of her or his words.

9. How do you know what an author meant? By reading and reading and reading what she or he wrote and constructing a sense of what the text means. And, perhaps, after doing that for a long time, by reading what other (good) readers have written too.

10. A text’s significance is not of its author’s making. For instance, the ways in which the Iliad has a particular significance to the philosopher Simone Weil thinking about Nazi Germany, or to the poet Alice Notley thinking about the war in Vietnam. For instance, the ways in which William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” can serve as a paradigm for thinking about Romantic poetry and nature.

11. A question to always consider: what’s the basis for making a particular interpretive move? What’s the basis for saying that the red wheelbarrow is anything other than a wheelbarrow? The basis for a move might be an appeal to what an author meant, to textual evidence, or to interpretive conventions. It’s not enough just to say that “x” is what you get from the poem. The questions that follow: Did you really get “x” from the poem? (See no. 5.) If so how? And if so, is the how a plausible how? (Is, say, counting the number of letters in a poem a plausible how?)

12. Good readers notice details, and they know what details have pointed them toward particular understandings of what they’ve read.

13. Many student-readers don’t realize that interpretation is typically a matter of adjusting and refining and revising — noticing one detail, noticing another, noticing something else that requires rethinking what you were thinking. The hermeneutic circle — from a sense of the parts, we construct a sense of the whole; from a sense of the whole, we construct a sense of the parts — suggests that interpretation is continually under revision. All of which might mean that really reading works of literature often demands more time than is available in a survey course.

14. Many student-readers profess disdain for “the critics” while simultaneously seeing in critical work an enormous interpretive authority.

15. It’s not scandalous that critics can often explicate works with greater facility than the makers of those works can muster. The work of noticing and explaining is different from the work of making literature, just as musicological analysis is different from making music. And many makers, whatever their critical abilities, prefer not to explain, just as composers and visual artists do. An interpretation provided by a maker would in any event be an interpretation. (See no. 1.)

16. To say that an interpretation is plausible need not mean that you agree with it. To say that an interpretation is plausible is to say that it deserves consideration. Allowing for points of view other than your own is typically called critical pluralism.

17. What makes an interpretation plausible? The ways in which it accounts or doesn’t account for a text. What makes an interpretation implausible? The ways in which it accounts or doesn’t account for a text.

[The number in the post title is no Internet ploy: I wrote these observations, with this title, somewhere in the late 1980s or the early 1990s, probably to share with students in a course on “theory.” The printout is from an Apple ImageWriter. What’s underlined there is italicized here.The context for no. 11: a hypothetical off-the-wall interpretation of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.” See also this post.]

From the same file folder
Aglio e olio
The Art Ensemble of Chicago in Boston
Coppola/“Godfather” sauce
Jim Doyle on education
Mary Backstayge marigold seeds
A Meeting with Ludwig Wittgenstein
Tile-pilfering questionnaire

Leigh Fermor’s Brueghel

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (1977), the first of three volumes recounting the writer’s 1933–1934 walk across Europe:

The link between journeys and painting, especially this sort of journey, is very close. There was plenty to think about as I made my way through the snow-bound monastic orchards; and it occurred to me, in the silent fields that followed, and for the hundredth time since my landing in Holland, that so far one painter had presided over every stage of this Winterreise. When no buildings were in sight, I was back in the Dark Ages. But the moment a farmhouse or a village impinged, I was in the world of Peter Brueghel. The white flakes falling beside the Waal — or the Rhine or the Neckar or the Danube — and the zigzag gables and the muffled roofs, were all his. The icicles, too, and the trampled snow, the logs piled on the sledges and the peasants stooped double under loads of faggots. When children with woollen hoods and satchels burst out of a village school with a sudden scamper of miniature clogs, I knew in advance that in a moment they would be flapping their arms and blowing on mittened fingers and clearing a space to beat a top in, or galloping down a lane to slide on the nearest brook, with everyone—children, grown-ups, cattle and dogs — moving about in the wake of their own cloudy breath. When the wintry light crept dimly from slits close to the horizon or an orange sun was setting through the branches of a frozen osier-bed, the identity was complete.

The cover of the New York Review Books reprint shows a detail of Hunters in the Snow. Muffled roofs: exactly. Katy Homans is the book’s designer. Here is an article about her NYRB covers.

Related posts
From A Time of Gifts : One word from A Time of Gifts : Leigh Fermor’s eye

Word of the day: hamper

Reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977), I keep a pencil and memo pad at hand to collect words that need looking up, mostly (so far) words from architecture, art, and German. This flurry had me reaching for my pencil: “gables, bell-hampers, well-heads, oriels, and arcades.”

It wasn’t oriel that got me: I already have that one. And a well-head is a structure that covers a well. The puzzle here is bell-hamper. The Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for bell-hamper, and nothing for hamper that seems to help. Webster’s Third strikes out. But there’s a relevant definition of hamper at the UK site Looking at Buildings: “In 20th-century and later architecture, a visually distinct topmost storey or storeys.” And via Google Books, an example of the word in use:


[John Newman, The Buildings of Wales: Glamorgan (New York: Penguin, 1995).]

Thinking about the hamper as the top storey — or story, in AmE — led me back to the OED which — lo! — has an entry for top-hamper. I had missed that term, cross-referenced in a definition of hamper that I’d thought irrelevant:

Naut. Things which form a necessary part of the equipment of a vessel, but are in the way at certain times.

That meaning of hamper comes, as you might suspect, from the verb hamper. And here’s top-hamper :

a. Naut. Weight or encumbrance aloft: orig. said of the upper masts, sails, and rigging of a ship; later, also, weight or encumbrance on the deck, as in a steamer, ironclad, etc.

b. transf. and fig. An encumbrance on the top or upper part of anything; something that makes it “top-heavy”; the “head-piece.”

And an OED citation, from Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers (1861):

Though the top-hamper of houses had long been removed, and the piers patched and strengthened at various times, the [London] bridge was becoming every year less and less adapted for accommodating the increasing traffic to and from the City.

The everyday equivalent of the bell-hamper might be the walls that enclose rooftop water towers.

It amuses me that it’s the top or upper sense that explains the architectural hamper. I like the idea of a hamper as a snug enclosure for a bell. Granted, a bell-hamper wouldn’t be made of wicker. The noun hamper itself is made from the noun hanaper “by elision of middle vowel, and assimilation of np to mp, as in ampersand.” A hanaper is “a case for a hanap [“a drinking-vessel, a wine-cup or goblet”] or hanaps; a plate-basket; a repository for treasure or money,” or “a round wicker case or small basket in which documents were kept.”

Do you see how much work went into figuring out hamper? That’s why it is the word of the day.

Related posts
From A Time of Gifts
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s eye

[A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube is the first of three books recounting Leigh Fermor’s journey from the Netherlands to Turkey. The others: Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (1986) and The Broken Road: Travels from Bulgaria to Mount Athos (2013). The first two books have been reissued by New York Review Books.]

Anthony Bourdain in the Bronx

One word to describe Anthony Bourdain in the Bronx: insufferable. Bourdain insists again and again that he is ignorant of the borough, “ridiculously, shamefully ignorant.” He sits in a Bronx park from which he can see his Manhattan “house” and marvels that he has no idea where he is. (Hint: turn on Location Services.) He describes the borough as a “blank space,” “the great unknown.” The Bronx is also for him, I daresay, the Dark Borough, land of colorful ethnic peoples. Most embarrassing moment: “I didn’t know there were Hondurans here.”

At least Bourdain — or his native informant — had the good sense to include a visit to City Island. But to pass up Arthur Avenue? Where Marty Piletti butchered? Not exotic enough, I guess. Marone.

[The Addeo Bakery appears on screen for a split-second. But no visit to Arthur Avenue.]

Recently updated

Grammar brawl There’s a plea.

Bourdain in the Bronx

Tomorrow night on CNN: Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown visits the Bronx.

“Locally Grown”

I picked up a head of red leaf lettuce at the supermarket the other day. “Locally Grown,” said the wrapper. The grower is in Michigan, 268 miles away.

There is no single standard for “locally grown.” A 2008 bill, H.R. 2419, defines a “locally or regionally produced agricultural product” as one

(i) which is produced and distributed in the locality or region where the finished product is marketed;

(ii) which has been shipped a total distance of 400 or fewer miles, as determined by the Secretary [of Agriculture]; and

(iii) about which the distributor has conveyed to the end-use consumers information regarding the origin of the product or production practices, or other valuable information.

The first two conditions seem nearly contradictory: few if any shoppers at a farmers market would think of “locally grown” produce as having originated 400 miles away. The joining of locally and regionally here engenders confusion.

“Locally grown” begins to look meaningless: all produce, wherever it’s grown, is grown locally. The real question is where it’s sold.

A film about grammar

Grammar Revolution is a film from David and Elizabeth O’Brien. Any film with Bryan Garner and John McWhorter and Steven Pinker is a film I want to see, though I suspect that they and all other interviewees appear separately. It’s safer that way: no fireworks, or fisticuffs.

Related reading
All OCA grammar posts

Keep On Keepin’ On

In The New York Times, the story of Keep On Keepin’ On (dir. Alan Hicks, 2014), a documentary about the friendship of the trumpeter and flugelhornist Clark Terry and the pianist Justin Kauflin: “A Rare Musical Mentorship, Captured With Heart and Soul.” Here’s the film’s website.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to interview Clark Terry for an hour on my university’s FM station. A Basie-ite. An Ellingtonian. A great musician, and a great man.

Goodbye, Naked City

[Zohra Lampert says goodbye. From the final moments of the Naked City episode “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals,” May 29, 1963. Click any image for a larger view.]

It would be nice to know whether the makers of Naked City knew that this episode was to be the show’s last. End of the season or end of the series — either way, the long goodbye is fitting.

“Barefoot on a Bed of Coals” is a strange episode with a baffling start. The episode looks at the life of Stanley Walenty (Steven Hill), a police wannabe who patrols his pretend beat wearing a real uniform and carrying a real gun. His downstairs neighbor Clara Espuella (Zohra Lampert) knows none of that. All she knows is that she’s smitten with Stanley. In the episode’s long final shot, Clara says goodbye to him as he’s taken to the hospital with a wound from a real criminal’s gun.

The final scene plays out on East Fourth Street, between the Bowery and Second Avenue. It’s an appropriate location for an episode focused on make-believe: this block of East Fourth was and is a world of theater. Notice the Writers’ Stage and East End Theatre on the right. Today, the block is home to La MaMa (nos. 66 and 74A), Duo Multicultural Arts Center (no. 62), and the New York Theatre Workshop (no. 79).

There are now fifty-three Naked City posts in the Orange Crate Art archives. Naked City is one the great television series, and it’s all on DVD.

[You might recognize Zohra Lampert as Angelina from Splendor in the Grass (dir. Elia Kazan, 1961).]

*

June 3, 2015: The closing shot of the film Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949) might have inspired this episode’s ending. See what you think.