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By Root 946 0

” a shifting concept that is itself always open, never closed. The progressive tense of being read is a further tip-off, should we need one, since many readers may re-read, or reconsider, or re-discuss the novel, poem, or play in a class, in a reading group, upon revisiting the volume on a bookshelf, when a child or friend first encounters the same text, etc. If every production of a play is an interpretation, then so is every reading of that play. This is equally true for lyric poetry, for fiction, for sermons, for treatises, for political speeches, for any work in language that makes a claim upon our literary attention.

By attention, I mean to suggest not only a close analysis of language, rhetoric, grammar, figure, and argument but also the complex psychic process that has engaged the interest of modern-day observers from William James, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin to contemporary cognitive theorists. James defined attention as “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form,” and he opposed it to “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.”17

Walter Benjamin addressed the question of distraction, which for James was the opposite of attention, and found in it an alternative modern mode of cognition: art and architecture, he thought, were apprehended “much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion.” Indeed, “reception in a state of distraction” was “increasing noticeably in all fields of art” and was “symptomatic of profound changes in apperception.” But the preeminent modern genre for reception in a state of distraction was the film. At the movies, the public is put “in the position of the critic.” But at the movies, “this position requires no attention.”18

And yet “no attention” can also be a different kind of paying attention.

Freud, analyzing the dream state and the “preconscious,” distinguished between the application of attention to issues of conscious thought and the ongoing processes by which “the train of thought which has … been initiated and dropped can continue to spin itself out without attention being drawn to it again, unless at some point or other it reaches a specially high degree of intensity which forces attention to it.”19 Such preconscious or unconscious rumination, the train of thought running, so to speak, on a side track until it is ready to rejoin the main line—is how much intellectual work takes place: distraction, or sleep, or dream, or any other apparent act of inattention often accomplishes what conscious attention cannot, in reframing or rephrasing the issue or problem in order to present a different kind of attack upon it. This is another instance of “the impossibility of closure.” The way Freud describes a dream is closely analogous to how we might describe a work of literature, and the activity animating and energizing these mental artifacts or rebuses is what we have come to call, as in the English-language title of Freud’s own great book on the topic, interpretation.

Interpreting Interpretation

In early use, interpretation was a term applied to religious scripture, to writing of all kinds, and to law, but over time it also came to apply to the decipherment of human character, the assessment of military information, the translation from one language to another, and the rendering of a musical, dramatic, or artistic composition (a song, a play, a landscape). It seems important to distinguish interpretation from definition or any other “conclusive” practice; as the examples of artwork, law, spy photographs, and linguistic translation all suggest in their different ways, interpretations can be motivated, personal, fallible, opinionated, compelling, insightful, and/or brilliant. They may also be time-bound or time-linked. Biblical or scriptural interpretation (and the secular editorial practices that followed from it) was frequently cumulative: an interpreter’s views became part of the textual apparatus, to be read and interpreted, in turn, by those who came afterward.