On "Over-reading" and "Under-reading" Films

Abstract

Stanley Cavell. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Universtiy Press, 1981.283 pp. William Luhr. Raymond Chandler and Film. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1982. 208 pp. Gerald Mast. Howard Hawks: Storyteller. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.406 pp. Perhaps the most provocative section in Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness turns around the question of "reading in" or "over-reading a text," terms often employed to invalidate the writings of Cavell and his colleague William Rothman. Cavell, who is Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, writes: "In my experience people worried about reading in, or overinterpretation, or going too far, are, or were typically afraid of getting started.... My experience is that most texts, like most lives, are underread, not overread....Reading in, therefore, going too far, is a risk inherent in the business of reading and venial in comparison with not going far enough, not reaching the end; indeed it may be essential to knowing what the ending is" (p. 37). At base, it is the argumentation in this passage that has driven a wedge between Cavell and many contemporary film scholars. Interpreting, unless of a specific type (feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist) has become devalued as a critical activity. Cavell believes that a personal response to art is valid (and that film is an art, not a science as structuralist and post-structuralist critics would have one believe); for Cavell the reading of a film by the spectator has at least as much—if not more— significance as the film itself. In this heightened estimation of the reading process, Cavell is not unlike the group of reader-response critics (Fish, Iser, et al.) who have come to prominence in the last ten years and whose work is beginning to be acknowledged among film scholars. The act of reading- particularly when informed by the breadth of knowledge Cavell brings to his work—is not merely an adjunct to film; it is, in and of itself, a work of art. In the same vein, Cavell indirectly chastises formalist critics (for whom the value of art resides solely in the object) when he writes: "So many remarks one has endured about the kind and number of feet in a line of verse, or about a superb modulation, or about a beautiful diagonal in a painting, or about a wonderful camera angle, have not been readings of a passage at all but something like items in a tabulation, with no suggestion about what is being counted—or what the total might mean. Such remarks, I feel, say nothing, though they may be, as Wittgenstein says, about naming, preparations for saying something..." (pp. 36-37). It is no wonder, then, that Pursuits of Happi- ness has roused considerable antipathy among formalist-materialist critics. In Cavell's work the "spectator" is once again human; Cavell the spectator sees and writes with a refreshing abundance of insight, intelligence and originality.