Deformance and Interpretation (with Lisa Samuels)

Abstract

Works of imagination encourage interpreters, who respond in diverse and inventive ways. The variety of critical practices—indeed, the number of differing interpretations directed at the same works—can obscure the theoretical commonality that holds those practices together. We can draw an immediate distinction, however, between critical practices that do or do not aim to be interpretive: bibliographical studies and prosodic analysis, for example, typically discount their interpretive moves, if any are explicitly engaged.

With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen King Lear, never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever revolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would dash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita