A Vaguely Philosophical Post-Script

In strictly logical terms, I can see that why my two statements:
1) There is no such thing as an absolute interpretation of a poem
2) Some interpretations are more valid (or more convincing etc.) than 
others,
are problematic, and, again in logical terms, I would be wrong to claim 
there was no necessary contradiction. The logical conclusion of the first 
statement would be that all interpretations are equally valid. In order to 
try to reconcile the statements you would need to set up a series of 
criteria, as indeed Jeff has asked me to supply, that would make make one 
interpretation more valid than another, but I think that would not only be 
an extremely lengthy but also an ultimately doomed project from the 
perspective of logic.

   The discussion of these matters on this list was not for me an attempt to 
write philosophy, but rather an attempt to explore intuitions that we have 
about poems and their interpretations, for which with no disrespect intended 
towards logic, logic is of very little use. Logic, for example, is 
notoriously ill equipped to deal with metaphor, as a metaphor is essentially 
a contradictory proposition. In practically every area of literary 
interpretation that I can envisage logic is likely to be a liability, or 
woefully inadequate as an interpretative tool. As must be clear by now, I am 
not a philosopher, but in order to seek any escape from analytic philosophy, 
you'd need to look into some phenomenological accounts of the world and how 
we interpret it, and that might perhaps help in justifying my 2nd statement, 
but this is beyond my competence.

   One way to justify our natural intuition that some interpretations are 
more valid than others would be to pose an evidently ridiculous 
interpretation such as the one I offered with Frost's poem and the tortoise 
who doesn't love walls. With logical consistency, but staggering 
insensitivity to the way language works in a poem and in indeed in prose 
about a poem, Jeff has defended the equal validity of this to any other 
interpretation. As I remarked a couple of posts back "Jeff's position that 
all interpretations are equally valid is quite possibly a watertight one, 
but comes, it seems to me, at an annihilating cost to the art."
For watertight read logical, for the art I mean both literature, but also by 
extension literary criticism. Subjected to logical scrutiny, most of what is 
written on this list (including quite a lot of what Jeff has written) and 
most of what passes as literary criticism would fail, or be considered 
nonsensical. For example, the statement I made in an interview which Jeff 
was kind enough to give his assent to, has, I think, at least one logical 
inconsistency. (So I suppose his assent comes not from any new-found logical 
rigour on my part, but merely from a general intuitive agreement with a 
position that is far from definitively stated.)

Against the requirements of logic, I would still defend my 2nd statement as 
one which is intuitively and experientially true. At least most of us can 
recognize inaccuracies of various kinds in an account of a poem. If I 
described the line "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" as three 
dactyls followed by a spondee, I think this interpretation could easily be 
refuted. For a start it's computed an extra syllable, and no-one with any 
knowledge of English phonetics would give equal emphasis to the last two 
syllables. My own inclination would be to see it as iambic with a reversed 
initial foot. Other lines, however, may be more problematic where two (or 
more) competing interpretations would be more or less valid according to an 
argument about meaning (a quandary that directors or actors will often face 
in how a line of Shakespeare, say, is actually to be spoken). The choice 
will have very distinct interpretative consequences, and one must be chosen. 
A critic, on the other hand, can explore the implications of the two or more 
possibilities and may argue for one above the other(s). We attend to that 
argument, but may reject it favour of another that we find more convincing. 
Not because there is an absolute truth to that critic's position but because 
the reasons that are offered are deemed more convincing, and the criteria 
that influence this conviction will already be quite complicated, even here 
dealing with the relatively factual matter of where stress is allocated in 
speech. The complication of criteria that begin to aggregate around a fuller 
interpretation of even a short poem become steeply and dizzyingly various, 
but that does not mean we can't productively operate with them. In my view, 
their complexity can have an appeal precisely because, with poems, they are 
attempting to understand extraordinarily complex linguistic phenomena. The 
wish to subject literary discourse to the single criteria of logic is - I'm 
tempted to say - a deeply illogical one: it will lead only to the most 
tautological or banal insights.

I had already signed myself off on this topic, and plead indulgence for 
signing myself back on, and also for the fact that this post includes a 
great deal of very obvious argument.
I think this time I really have reached the limit of my engagement with this 
topic.


-----Original Message----- 
From: Jeffrey Side
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2013 5:23 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: "Multiple Registers, Intertextuality and Boundaries of 
Interpretation in Veronica Forrest-Thompson"

Jamie,

You say:

“When you write "I’m sorry, but I still think you have a commitment to an 
ultimate meaning" (before that was "a single, ultimate meaning", so no 
longer "single"?) I'm afraid this is why further communication is not 
impossible, at least unbearably impeded.”

An ultimate of anything has to be definitive, therefore singly so, otherwise 
it wouldn’t have an ultimate status. It would still be in question. For you 
to say of this: “I'm afraid this is why further communication is not 
impossible, at least unbearably impeded” makes no sense.

You say:

“You refuse to accept my statements and insist that you know better than I 
do what I believe. The only conclusion I can draw from this is you think I 
am ignorant of my own beliefs or you think I am dishonest. Both are 
insulting though in different ways.”

I was only attempting to draw out from you what you meant when you said, 
“Interpretations are not absolute but they can be more or less persuasive”. 
As I said earlier, your use of the word “persuasive” seems to be shoring up 
the idea that interpretations can be absolute. If interpretations are not 
absolute, “persuasion” wouldn’t be necessary, as there would be no absolute 
interpretation that would need to be persuasive. It is unfortunate that you 
think this line of discussion is insulting to you.

You say:

“You have very much misunderstood my Frost example if you infer from it that 
my approach to reading poems 'is based on public approval, hence your fear 
that people might think you are “off your trolley”'. That last phrase was 
intended as my own judgment on the putative interpretation, a moment of 
levity I should have realized would be taken by you with deadly seriousness. 
Once again a false assumption of yours has made nonsense out of what I'm 
arguing. I think anyone who reads this (apart from yourself) will 
immediately understand what you've failed to: that my argument has nothing 
to do with fear of public disapproval, but it does concern notions of 
plausibility and evidence.”

I’m sorry if I missed the levity that you now ascribe to it. It was your use 
of the word “evidence”, and your saying that any reader will have the “right 
to say I’m completely off my trolley” that gave me the impression you were 
in favour of an approved meaning for the Frost poem. I just found it curious 
that you automatically assumed other people should have the right to 
disapprove of a particular interpretation of a poem, given that you said, 
“interpretations are not absolute”. But I appreciate now that that statement 
is a qualified one, given that you now say, “my argument has nothing to do 
with fear of public disapproval, but it does concern notions of plausibility 
and evidence”. This is precisely what I have been trying to draw out from 
you in this discussion.

You say:

“As to the immutability of your interpretations of a poem, it seems that you 
have shifted ground. At first you said very categorically that you had never 
had your opinion of a poem changed by any critical essay (which left me 
bewildered as to why you should think other's opinions might be changed by 
yours, and this is a mystery you've yet to explain). And yet now you are 
saying in reply to Alison and to me, that "an individual’s response to a 
poem, can, indeed, change for that individual over time, and new meanings 
can replace older ones in relation to new information and life experiences. 
I believe that a poem’s meanings are not set in stone but are mutable." 
Well, welcome to the club. But to reconcile these two statements, for you 
"life experiences" would then have to exclude contact with other people's 
readings and interpretations, so I'm afraid we're back in the zone of 
hermeneutical solipsism.”

Again, you have misunderstood what I have been saying, ignored it or are 
misrepresenting it. This particular matter was addressed in an earlier part 
of the disunion, in the following exchange:

You said:

“it leaves me perplexed as to why you should bother to write any critical 
essays or articles. Presumably if all of your readers held the same 
immobility of response, they would remain obdurately unconvinced by anything 
you argue unless it coincided exactly with their own established view. The 
whole activity would be futile.”

I replied:

“I don’t know why you say this, as I had already said in answer to your 
question (“Have you never had your personal response to a poem (or novel or 
film etc.) changed by contact with another person’s opinion or argument? For 
the present discussion, let’s say by a critical essay. If so, what has 
happened to this “problematical” meeting of text and reader?”), that other 
people’s views on novels, films, essays etc., can change me. So I would hope 
that my essays could do the same for them.”

You say:

“But to reconcile these two statements, for you "life experiences" would 
then have to exclude contact with other people's readings and 
interpretations, so I'm afraid we're back in the zone of hermeneutical 
solipsism.”

Life experiences, for me, are the significant experiences we go through in 
life, the ups and downs, the pains and losses, joys and sadness etc. It is 
not about listening and debating with people about poetry and coming to 
consensus opinions regarding “correct” or “incorrect”  interpretations.

You say:

“I can't be bothered to go over the confusions that you bring to the last 
part of the email.”

If you do not wish to address the last part of my email, which I have again 
reproduced below, that is your privilege. I fail to see why, though, it is 
salient to most of what you have said

Last part of my email:

“In response to this, I can only reproduce the latter section of my previous 
email to you that you have ignored, and which clears up this accusation of 
yours (all of the following that is in double quotation marks are your 
words):

‘In this you say:

“debating the problematic nature of poetic language” is not what I called 
“dumbing-down” and “patronizing” - I called your use of the term “elitist” 
potentially so”.

I’m afraid this is not accurate. What you said was:

“It’s arguable that pretending every interpretation is equally valid is not 
just a dumbing-down of the art but also patronizing to those people whom the 
person who cries ‘elitist’ is meant to be defending.”

Here, you say: “pretending every interpretation is equally valid is not just 
a dumbing-down of the art but also patronizing”. In this, you are not 
responding to my saying that to stop people being allowed to interpret poems 
freely would be elitist, but to my saying that people should be allowed to 
interpret poems freely, and your response is that to allow this would be a 
“dumbing down” and “patronizing”. No doubt you will say this is also logic 
chopping and misrepresenting your position.’

As can be seen here, the context of my use of the word “elitism” is very 
different from the framework you have placed around it.

You say:

“But it makes clear to me that any definition of what might be a more valid 
approach, even if I was capable of shaping a coherent one, would have to run 
a gauntlet of misconstructions from you, and would take weeks of work 
without much chance of being understood.”

I think it is you who is misconstruing things, rather than me, as the above 
extract from my email to you demonstrates.

I realise, however, that I am perhaps wasting my time pointing out to you 
your various inconsistencies and misapprehensions of my position.”=