We, as a species, often find ourselves in the position of interpreters. It is our nature to interpret - not simply on the most basic level of language, but on so many various sublevels. We read one another - body language, tone, expression, eyes. We interpret these extralinguistic cues on a daily basis - and we believe them, often more readily than we believe the language that accompanies them.
We are accomplished liars, but we are also accomplished interpreters. Often, we seek answers in places other than in language in our day-to-day interactions, reading things other than words.
And we reproduce these signs and symbols, both the linguistic and the extralinguistic, in art. Certainly, literature is the art of language. There is nothing more linguistically pure than literature (drama excepted - it gets its own category). It is composed entirely of words. Words that lie. Words that speak truth. Words that do both at once. Words that delve into the essence of human nature, rife with ambiguity and impossible layers. But these words so often invoke the other aspects of interpretation - descriptions of bodies, of voices, of colors, of all the sources of sensory input upon which we rely. All put into words. Limited. Exploded. Infinite.
No wonder we, as readers, are always interpreters. Even if unconsciously, we must interpret words on a page. Is this serious? Sarcastic? Sad? But, as interpreters, we also skew that which we choose to interpret. Stephen Leo Carr and Peggy A. Knapp write that as we interpret, "We make the text over, rewriting it in our own image so that it seems to anticipate and validate that image" (838).*
For so many, the act of interpretive reading - and all reading is interpretive, whether consciously done or not - is the act of assigning one's own value systems, one's own ideology, to the text. It is an act of penetration, of violation, that attempts to conform characters and themes to the familiar and, often, the agreeable. We grow disturbed by a text when we cannot force it to agree with our views. We choose to dislike it, labeling it as "bad," despite its probable virtues. This is a crime of which teachers are most often accused.
It is something we do not only to books, but to movies, to music, and to people. When a person does not conform to our desires for them, we dislike them.
I do not suppose that there is anything wrong with this. I dislike many things, and many people. But my dislike should not make them inherently "bad." While there are things that are inherently "bad" - murderers and Harlequin romances spring to mind - there are more that we simply dislike for their unwillingness to conform to our "image."
But, as has so often been said, variety is the spice of life. We would not like it - no matter how much we think we would - if everything in the world conformed to our "image." We might like it if everything were "good," we would still desire difference - or, in the Derridian sense, differance. We like conflict. We like the clashing of ideologies. What we do not like is their ultimate destruction.
So pause. Take a moment, the next time you dislike something, to determine whether it really is "bad," or whether it is simply an "image" in which you do not wish to see your own reflection.
*Carr, Stephen Leo and Peggy A. Knapp. "Seeing through Macbeth." Publications of the Modern Language Association 96.5 (1981): 837-847.
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