ABSTRACT
We have been looking at a number of extracts which collectively suggest that the way in which we have traditionally thought about how we see (perception) and how we use language (communication) need reassessing. This shift in position could be explained away by saying that what was being talked about were objects from everyday life, that they are not things which we ordinarily study and that, because of this, we have been caught off our guard, we have fallen prey to misconceptions in a casual fashion. The implication being that when we engage in the formal study of something we will be fully aware and will not be caught unawares. But the following extract from Robert Eaglestone’s Doing English is prompted by the notion that even when we are intellectually on our toes we could well be labouring under similar misconceptions. Reading, Eaglestone argues, is not the act of mere looking, or even uncovering what the author intended, but an act of personal selection and interpretation. Although Eaglestone (like Barry in Extract 1 above) is talking about the reading of literary texts as students of Communication Studies we suggest that his admonitions apply to all texts.
Understanding literature isn’t a natural process and we have to use certain tools to find meaning in a text, whether we realise we are doing so or not. What you make of a novel, a poem or play is exactly that: what you make of it. Another way of expressing this is to say that to read a literary text, to think about it, or to write about it in any way, is to undertake an act of interpretation. When you interpret text it means that you find some things important and not others, or that you focus on some ideas and questions and exclude others. Rather than reading in a vacuum, we take our ideas, our tendencies and preferences – ourselves – to a text. This means that ‘reading’ and ‘interpreting’ mean almost the same … It is because of the importance of interpretation that I have used the word ‘text’ regularly throughout this book. Apart from being shorter to write than ‘novel, poem or play’, it emphasises that reading is an act of interpretation – texts are things that are interpreted. (The word ‘text’ also makes it clear that it’s not only literature that is interpreted; so are people’s actions, television and music, for example. News is interpreted both when it is watched, heard or read, and when it is put together by journalists.)
Because interpretation doesn’t happen in a vacuum, no interpretation is neutral or objective. Whenever you interpret a novel, poem or play (or anything else for that matter: TV soap, advert, film) your interpretation is shaped by a number of presuppositions. These are the ‘taken for granted’ ideas, tendencies and preferences you carry with you and, like the glasses that you can’t take off, you always tend to read through them. On a surface level, your interpretation will be affected by the context in which you read and the expectations you have of the text. For example, if you read a novel about World War II for a history project, you’ll think about it in a different way from how you would look at it if you were to read it for fun. At a deeper level, you bring with you presuppositions about yourself, other people and the world, which you may take so much for granted that you don’t even realise you have them. At this level everyone has different presuppositions because – simply – people are different, to a greater or lesser degree, and have been shaped by different experiences. People from different backgrounds, sexes, sexualities, religions, classes and so on will be struck by different things in any text. Everything you have read and experienced previously affects how you interpret now. This idea can be summed up by saying that everyone is ‘located’ in the world. Just as you can’t jump higher than your shadow, you can’t escape your location in the world.
(Eaglestone 2000: 20–1)