The Process of Interpretation

We have just seen that the same sign or more precisely, the same set of signifiers observed as a text, will behave for us in many different ways, depending on the environment, the context in which we see it. This is because we always relate to reality in general, and to signs in particular, on the basis of a horizon of expectations which will determine what kind of codes we can activate to understand the sign. This horizon of expectations has two aspects:

1. As we have just seen, we are determined by the actual environment. It is very unlikely that we try to understand something as high poetry if it is on the wall of a metro station, and we will much more probably make an attempt to understand the same sign as poetry if it is in a literature class, provided with a title and an explanation.

2. Our entire cultural, social, historical environment also determines the way we relate to things. Nobody in the Middle Ages would have tried to understand this sign as poetry, and it would probably say little to an Australian aboriginal, since the pieces of information (Greek, burial urn, E. E. Cummings, parentheses) are very culture specific.

In the above process of reading, we started out from a position, a situation where the sign looked very strange and arbitrary to us, and it did not function as a text that can be understood. We did not see that these are two parentheses, and we did not understand why they are turned inside out, what they have to do with E. E. Cummings. Then we considered the sign in a “literary” context, and we started to deprive it of its arbitrariness. It gradually became a more and more complex text to us, and on the basis of the interrelationships in the text we established a complex reading, a system of signifieds, that is, an actualized LWA in our consciousness. In the process of understanding, we arrived at more and more abstract, symbolical, connotative levels of meaning, and on these levels all the elements of the text and all the relationships between its elements became meaningful. The text and its composition were no longer arbitrary: this procedure is called interpretation.

In the act of interpretation, we deprive the text of its arbitrariness, we explain and understand every element in the text, and we build up in our consciousness a coherent possible world on the basis of the text. This possible world can correspond to the actual world, but, in the world of literature, it does not have to. Literary texts do not have to meet the requirements in the correspondence theory of truth conditions, which would be the Aristotelian argument that statements are valid if they correspond to the actual world. Literary texts only have to meet the requirements in the coherence theory of truth conditions, that is, the text has to be inherently coherent, without any contradictions or inconsistencies. This means that in a literary text we can read in the first chapter that seven-headed pink elephants are playing baseball on the planet Mars, but then the second chapter cannot claim that there are no elephants on the planet Mars and that elephants never play baseball, because this would be incoherent, and we would not be able to build up a coherent possible world in our interpretive consciousness on the basis of such inconsistencies.

We also realized in practice the earlier theoretical considerations: whether a text is considered to be “literary” is always determined by the horizon of expectations in the reading community. Literature, literariness are qualities and not empirical, objective realities: they depend on the particular physical environment of reception, and on the broader, culturally determined horizon of expectations.