Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [94]
This is to say that the relative value of interpretive meanings is to some extent socially (culturally) determined. Although people are free to say that things mean whatever they want them to mean, saying doesn’t make it so. The mourning theory has more evidence than the alien astronaut theory, but it still relies too heavily on what is not there, on a narrative for which there is insufficient evidence in the painting itself.
In experimental science, it is especially important that a writer/researcher can locate his or her work in the context of other scientists who have achieved similar results. Isolated results and interpretations, those that are not corroborated by others’ research, have much less credibility. In this respect, the making of meaning is collaborative and communal. The collaborative nature of scientific and scholarly work is one of the reasons that writing about reading is so important in college-level writing. In order to interpret evidence in a way that others will find plausible, you first have to have some idea of what others in the field are talking about.
INTERPRETIVE CONTEXTS AND MULTIPLE MEANINGS
There are, however, other possible interpretations that would satisfy the two criteria of sufficient evidence and broad cultural acceptance. And it is valuable to recognize that evidence usually will support more than one plausible interpretation. Consider, for example, a reading of Whistler’s Mother that a person might produce if he or she began with noticing the actual title, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother. From this starting point, a person might focus observation on the disposition of color exclusively and arrive at an interpretation that the painting is about painting (which might then explain why there is also a painting on the wall).
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