How to Interpret Literature

Abstract

How to Interpret Literature Carol Billman (bio) E.D. Hirsch, Jr. The Aims of Interpretation. University of Chicago Press, 1976. John Reichert . Making Sense of Literature. University of Chicago Press, 1977. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. and John Reichert give us two statements about (as their titles suggest) the nature of literary interpretation, and also about the history and current state of the art (for Reichert) or science (for Hirsch) of criticism. Regarding the nature of interpretation, Hirsch and Reichert agree on several fundamental points. Both contend that reading literature and reading other kinds of writing are not such different activities as those who spend their critical energies setting up aesthetic criteria for defining literature make out. Accordingly, both argue that text-centered criticism is ultimately necessary, but not sufficient for complete literary interpretation. And both suggest that literary critics borrow from the work of linguists and philosophers of language their emphasis on the author's intention in his verbal "utterance," of whatever sort. Both Hirsch and Reichert are pluralists; indeed, Reichert makes it clear in his Preface that he is of no particular critical persuasion but speaks, rather, for the "demystification of criticism." Hirsch points out that there is no one kind of literary significance, and he attacks head on the currently influential work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Hirsch and Reichert agree, finally, that literary analysis is inevitably, and should be, accompanied by evaluation—aesthetic, pragmatic, and moral. There are, to be sure, some important points of disagreement in these two books. Hirsch argues in the first half of The Aims of Interpretation, as he did in his earlier Validity in Interpretation, that there is the possibility of knowledge in interpretation [End Page 34] (hence his objections to the "cognitive atheism" of Heidegger and Derrida). He offers "original meaning"—i.e., authorial intention—as the norm for determining meaning and, further, connects (and thereby exonerates) the historical and biographical methods with his aim to discover authorial intention. Where pluralism comes in for Hirsch is not in multiple perspectives of interpretation, but in the evaluation of significance: there is, to repeat, no privileged means for determining the significance of a work. Significance, as he defines it, is meaning-as-releated-to-something-else" (p. 80), and the "something else" may vary from such intrinsic concerns as technical excellence, recurrent myths, and genre-traits, to the important Platonic criterion, the benefit of literature to mankind. It is not that Reichert objects to Hirsch's theory on the grounds of the intentional fallacy, but he does call "bogus" and "confusing" the "assumption that 'intentionalist' criticism must go hand in hand with historical-biographical research" (p. 101). He stresses the varied knowledge readers bring to their interpretation of literary work—linguistic knowledge, knowledge of literary genres, conventions and aims, and knowledge of human behavior, all in addition to specific information about an author. Readers then subject their knowledge "to the complexity of the text, letting the composition filter out the irrelevant and the unlikely, letting it bend or complicate whatever is too rigid or simple in [their] expectations" (p. 125). Another significant difference between Hirsch and Reichert is that the latter devotes as much attention to readers of texts as he does to writers, and he distinguishes between readers and critics, noting that critics are not—as Hirsch would have it—"truth tellers" but "perception inducers" (p. 24). Evaluation, finally, is not separate from interpretation for Reichert, but accompanies critical interpretation and "relates the very specific nature of the individual work to human experiences, concerns, and choices" (p. 188). These, then, are the two positions in a nutshell. What can we as readers, teachers, critics of children's literature learn from or do with what Hirsch and Reichert say? At the most elementary level, both theorists provide useful and concise overviews of current critical debate and of the historical groundings of various contemporary positions (see chapters five and six in Reichert and seven and eight in Hirsch for short histories of the claims that have been made about the purpose of criticism, the place of evaluation in literary analysis, the means for evaluating literature). I would make the obvious argument that—be...