From: Fiona Moore nydersdyner@yahoo.co.uk
The way we were taught, all works are supposed to stand by themselves. When evaluating a literary creation, you look only at the creation itself. You disregard when it was created, you disregard who created it, you disregard why it was created; you just look at the creation as it appears before you. No more, and no less[1].
However, this strikes me as effectively impossible to do. Whenever you
read
a programme or watch a book, you cannot avoid bringing in some of the surrounding context. For instance, if I watch *Casablanca,* I can try to disregard everything but the film itself... but the fact remains that I
know
when 1943 was, I know where Africa is, I know who the Germans are, and I know why they happened to be in Africa at that time. If I could shut all
of
these side points out of my mind entirely (which I can't), all I would see would be a sequence of one picture following another.
I think that's a slight misinterpretation of what Calle said. Understanding Casablanca requires an awareness of the city's status in 1943 amid the war in North Africa, because that is the situation in the film. What Calle means is forget that the film was *made* in 1943, that it came from a Hollywood studio, starred whoever, was directed by Michael Curtiz etc.
Though Umberto Eco has had a bit of fun with postulating the kind of interpretations bits of popular culture might get when divorced from common contextual understanding: "We are struck by the lines of another fragment, apparently from a propitiatory or fertility hymn to nature ... It is easy to imagine this sung by a chorus of young girls; the delicate words evoke the image of maidens in white veils dancing at sowing time in some pervigilium. 'I'm singing in the rain, just singing in the rain...' "
A consequence of this view is that there is no such thing as a "right" or a "wrong" interpretation. There are interpretations that can be more or less strongly argued for or against, but that is not at all the same thing. There are also no such thing as an impossible interpretation. As soon as someone has interpreted a work in a certain way, that interpretation is obviously possible, and all that remains to do is to argue for or against it (or to ignore it, of course).
This last point is certainly true, but I still think it's impossible to
take
anything, including interpretations, totally free from context or value judgement. People make their interpretations for a variety of reasons from
a
variety of backgrounds, and unless they can somehow erase their minds totally prior to the interpretive act, this will inform their
interpretation
thereof.
I think the process you're referring to is essentially that of
Author + Noise --> Text --> Reader + Noise --> Reading
where 'noise' is all the impedimenta interfering with either creation or interpretation, whether it's limitations of ability, cultural constraints, or some bloke from Porlock knocking on the door.
Which leads to the question of where meaning actually resides. In the author? No, because authorial meaning is inevitably altered in the act of authorship. In the reader? No again, because no two readers can be guaranteed to extract the same meaning. In the text itself? Not even there, because its extraction depends on an ideal noise-fre reader, who can't possibly exist.
Personally I think it is hiding behind the fridge.
Basically, by this analysis a Mills and Boon romance is every bit as literarily valid as a Shakespeare play. Which is something I've never been able to accept-- and frankly, very few English departments seem to be teaching First-Year Mills and Boon, despite the litcrit movement.
Actually I find it very easy to put high literature and popular literature. Why shouldn't you be able to interpret a M&B in the same way you would, say, a Bronte novel? They've both got plot, characters, setting and areas of emphasis.
Though most of the criticism of popular literature that I've read has treated it as generic, and looked for generic conventions. I've seen this done with short stories in womens weeklies, for thrillers, for detective stories, and Joanna Russ gives the modern gothic a wonderfully readable going over in an essay called "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think it's My Husband." Such analyses are more concerned with the messages they intend to impart to their intended readership, as in the way protagonists are constructed in such a way that readers might identify with them, or the moral reassurances peddled by such genres. Individual works are cited as examples to illustrate the variation of form within the conventions.
Some subgenres of fanfic are wide open to that kind of treatment.
Neil