IVIV20: Gateway to the past, 351-352

[Paul Nightingale]

>From Mike:

<<hearkening back to Susan Sontag's essay "Against Interpretation"
(which it's quite possible you're alluding to here, anyway) which might be
apropos here - "instead of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art">>

I wasn't in particular, but you might consider the following online extract
from Sontag's essay:

The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected
another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of
interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs "behind"
the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and
influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to
elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of
interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase,
as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside
to find the true meaning -- the latent content -- beneath. For Marx, social
events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives
(like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a
dream or a work of art) -- all are treated as occasions for interpretation.
According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible.
Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to
interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find
an equivalent for it.

http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/againstInterpExcerpt.shtml

And back, a return to, my original post:

However, before taking the bait, we might consider the context and
acknowledge the failure of interpretation: the "glittering mosaic of doubt"
is "[s]omething like ... inherent vice", and then "like original sin", or
even "[l]ike the San Andreas Fault". A few lines further Sauncho's "boat"
has become Doc's "ark", which is how, over the page on 352, Doc describes
California itself. Meaning is always elsewhere, and this explanation of the
novel's title provides little satisfaction if intended to provide closure.

Against modernist interpretation? Allon White's The Uses of Obscurity has
long been a text I admired: he discusses the way in which modernist writers
like James tried to resist what White calls "symptomatic reading".