Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [94]
The figure of the mother then would have meaning only insofar as it contained the two colors mentioned in the painting’s title, black and gray, and the painting’s representational content (the aspects of life that it shows us) would be assigned less importance. This is a promising and plausible idea for an interpretation. It makes use of different details from previous interpretations that we’ve suggested, but it would also address some of the details already targeted (the dress, the curtain) from an entirely different context, focusing on the use and arrangement of color.
To generalize: two equally plausible interpretations can be made of the same thing. It is not the case that our first reading (in Chapter 3), focusing on the profile view of the mother and suggesting the painting’s concern with mysterious separateness, is right, whereas the painting-about-painting (or aesthetic) view, building from the clue in the title, is wrong. They operate within different contexts.
An interpretive context is a lens. Depending on the context you choose—preferably a context suggested by the evidence itself—you will see different things. Regardless of how the context is arrived at, an important part of getting an interpretation accepted as plausible is to argue for the appropriateness of the interpretive context you use, not just the interpretation it takes you to.
Specifying an Interpretive Context: A Brief Example
Notice how, in the following analysis, the student writer’s interpretation relies on his choice of a particular interpretive context, post–World War II Japan. Had he selected another context, he might have arrived at some different conclusions about the same details. Notice also how the writer perceives a pattern in the details and queries his own observations (“So what?”) to arrive at an interpretation.
The series entitled “Kamaitachi” is a journal of the photographer Hosoe’s desolate childhood and wartime evacuation in the Tokyo countryside. He returns years later to the areas where he grew up, a stranger to his native land, perhaps likening himself to the legendary Kamaitachi, an invisible sickle-toothed weasel, intertwined with the soil and its unrealized fertility. “Kamaitachi #8” (1956), a platinum palladium print, stands alone to best capture Hosoe’s alienation from and troubled expectation of the future of Japan. [Here, the writer chooses the photographer’s life as his interpretive context.]
The image is that of a tall fence of stark horizontal and vertical rough wood lashed together, looming above the barren rice fields. Straddling the fence, half-crouched and half-clinging, is a solitary male figure, gazing in profile to the horizon. Oblivious to the sky above of dark and churning thunderclouds, the figure instead focuses his attentions and concentrations elsewhere. [The writer selects and describes significant detail.]
It is exactly this elsewhere that makes the image successful, for in studying the man we are to turn our attention in the direction of the figure’s gaze and away from the photograph itself. He hangs curiously between heaven and earth, suspended on a makeshift man-made structure, in a purgatorial limbo awaiting the future. He waits with anticipation—perhaps dread?—for a time that has not yet come; he is directed away from the present, and it is this sensitivity to time which sets this print apart from the others in the series.One could argue that in effect this man, clothed in common garb, has become Japan itself, indicative of the post-war uncertainty of a country once-dominant and now destroyed. What will the future (dark storm clouds) hold for this newly-humbled nation? [Here, the writer notices a pattern of in-between-ness and locates it in an historical context in order to make his interpretive leap.]
Remember that regardless of the subject you select for your analysis,