Artistic interpretation

2. Meaning

Most theorists of literary criticism agree that the interpretation of literature aims to disclose meanings in texts. They disagree about the ground of such meaning, whether it is simply the semantic conventions of the language, the intentions of authors, or the interpretive activities of readers or critics. But it should be clear that interpretation does not always consist in disclosing meanings (unless we think of meaning in the broad sense of significance, and of significance as the value of a work or the place of its parts in its broader structure); and disclosing meaning is not always interpreting. Trivially, in musical works and paintings there is not always semantic content to be revealed. In literature, if revelation of meaning were always interpretation, then every obvious paraphrase of every section of text would count as literary interpretation. But we need not interpret every simple sentence in a novel, and stating the ordinary dictionary meanings of the words in such sentences does not count as literary interpretation. As noted above, we simply grasp the meanings of such sentences as we read them, much as we see trees in a true-to-life landscape painting without having to interpret the painted shapes as trees.

One way of avoiding this objection is to view interpreting as determining the meaning of a whole text or a large segment of it from the lexical meanings of its words and sentences. But this view ignores the fact that phrases and even words in texts can be interpreted as well. Stating the meaning of some obscure phrase or line in a poem constitutes an interpretation when there is an implicit claim that the phrase is there to convey that meaning, and that its literary value lies at least partially in its doing so. Statements of meanings will rarely be complete interpretations of texts, since in literature the ways in which meanings are presented are relevant to the values of the works. Hence form and not merely content must be explained in complete interpretations. But certainly words often have value in a text largely because of the meanings they convey.

The idea that interpretation consists in determining the meaning of a whole text also implies that a simple paraphrase of a whole work is the paradigm interpretation of it. According to the explanatory account, it is most unlikely to be an interpretation at all. Simply to paraphrase a work is not normally to indicate the ways that its passages contribute to its overall artistic value. Conveying certain meanings is normally only part of that value, and paraphrase is needed to explain that part only when the text itself is ambiguous or obscure. Explanation of metaphorical, symbolic or ironic meaning is more often a part of genuine literary interpretation.