Quit Shaking Your Eyes!

I came across a quotation today that I wish I'd had in my tool-belt when I was teaching:

"We cannot succeed in making even a single sentence mean one and only one thing; we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions." (Gopen and Swan 1990)

I fought a number of battles with students over the issue of authorial intent. Some students refused to believe that I couldn't explicitly answer the question "but what is the author trying to say here?" (as if there were only one possible meaning) and got frustrated when I answered their question with, "well, what do you think it means?"

Other students teetered on the other edge of the reader-response spectrum and decided textual meaning was as individual and personalized as their tattoos. One student posited that the titular character in "My Last Duchess," whose posthumous portrait is the ostensible subject of the poem, is actually not dead but, in fact, is imprisoned behind the wall and looking out with "Scooby-Doo Eyes."

(You know, the way that the eye-holes in the portraits in Scooby Doo are always peep-holes for the villains in which their pupils dance around. The same student also diagnosed the unfortunate duchess with teen alcoholism - this on the strength of a passing textual reference to flushed skin.)

When it comes to the question of "can we know what the author intended?", I place myself somewhere in the middle. No, I can't rule out a portrait whose eyes really do follow you around the room or youthful exuberance caused by hitting the bottle too hard, but I (and everyone else I've consulted - dead or alive) have a pretty good idea that that wasn't what Browning had in mind.

Which is where today's quotation comes in. Writers assume at their peril that they can ever convey exactly what they wish - no matter how detailed or how exact their attempt. Readers likewise perilously assume that they can come up with exactly what the writer intended, no matter how careful their reading. Yet readers also err if they go on to assume that they can read a text however they wish, just because.

The quotation struck me doubly as I've just embarked on reading the entire Bible in 2008 (yikes - now I'm committed - nothing like accountability to blog-lurkers to keep me going) and today's reading included the giants. Yes, that little-read and even less-often-preached-upon reference to the sons of God marrying the daughters of earth.

My guess is that interpretations of this passage are as various as the readers themselves, with a majority clustering around one particular reading and a few outliers suggesting space aliens or a vertically-challenged author. And that's fine with me; I believe that there is Truth, but when it comes to that which we view through this glass darkly, the best we can do on this side of Heaven is come close.

Which is why those who hold their opinions to be The. Only. Right. Interpretation. Of. The. Bible (Creationists who break out the smelling salts, picketing signs and lawsuits over the merest whiff of the "E-word" and hysterically demand that we keep such satanic teachings out of "our" schools, yet who refuse to even look either at biblical literary conventions or the science which both suggest "six days" is metaphorical - I'm looking at you) bother me so much.

Clinging to the belief that it's "my-way-or-the-highway" when it comes to textual interpretation (particularly interpretation of religious texts that inform faith/lifestyle/doctrinal questions) is a precarious position for the reader. If any part of the interpretation is proven wrong, the entire set of suppositions on which the reading is based falls like a house of cards. Ask citizens of Britain in the mid-19th century how faith-shaking that can be.

At the same time, consensus in terms of interpretation is important; if other people, faced with the same evidence, come to a similar conclusion as you, then you're probably closer to the author's intent than the out-in-left-fielder.

It's not that I necessarily disagree with Creationism or any other interpretation; it's the refusal to admit that there might be another possibility that is so frustrating. And the sense that I get that such a dogmatic position defense arises from a fear that if the possible existence of another position is admitted, suddenly the Bible will be submitted to scrutiny that it ultimately cannot withstand.

Bottom line: multiplicity of meaning is a potential for every text (yes, even the Bible), despite the likelihood that the author(s) had one particular intention. This is not scary; this is simply an invitation to refuse to accept blindly what other people say the text "means," an invitation to scrutinize what you take away from a text and what it is about the text and its author (and, of course, its reader) that leads you to come to that conclusion. You might very well come to the same conclusion as everyone else. But at least you got there on your own.

Wanna shake your eyes at me and tell me I'm the one who's reading it wrong? Go ahead. Just make sure you have a good reason to shake'em.