CHAPTER IV LOGICAL AND EMOTIONAL MEANING It has been set down in earlier chapters that interpretation is one man's opinion or judgment of what an author means in his poem or story or dramatic scene. There can be no absolute meaning manifest from the page itself nor any magic by which the author's meaning can be extracted. The best you or I can do is to gather all the evidence we can, study its significance, and come to our own decision, and later, by trying our interpretation on others, check up on our success. Further than this we cannot go. We study and ponder, make up our minds, and then place our artistic reputation in the hands of those we face. We come now to the study of how interpretation is actually accomplished. Having asked what interpretation is and its relation to art in general and having made some observations as to what it is not, we now investigate what to do about it. We turn from the What and the Why to the How; and the study of the How of any art is always a study of technique. So now we study technique as applied to the art of interpretation. Some artists affect to be greatly frightened and disconcerted by this word technique, fearing that it necessarily and essentially makes for artificiality. Yet there is no artistry without artifices, no firm reliance upon being natural; and it does not follow at all that artifices and technique necessarily lead to dullness, insincerity, banality, or any other form of ineffectiveness. For the fact is that there can be no art without some indulgence in orderly process, and indulgence in orderly process is nothing less than a matter of rules, and rules are technique. That is all we mean by technique: rules. So in turning now to the actual task of interpretation we are confronted with the necessity for finding the rules by which we work. Before we can do this we must find the foundations on which our rules shall rest. We can read in the books and find all sorts of "do's" and "don't's" about interpreting the printed page. A very common and urgent "do" is, Put your soul into it. Another is, Feel it to your very heart's core. Another, Think the thought intensely. Still another, and a very good one, is, Know the meaning of what you are reading. Some common "don't's" are, Don't try to interpret while woolgathering; Don't let your emotions run away with you; Don't think of your technique while interpreting; Don't think about your voice or your hands. Whether these are good or not will be determined later. Let us be reminded again that there is no absolute standard for interpretation; there is no one meaning that the page perforce compels us to take. The elasticity of language and the complications of our own thought processes allow for such tremendous leeway in the interpretation of the letters on the page, that it is rare indeed when any given set of printed symbols can mean only one thing. The sentence "I am the man" can have at least ten different meanings and each of these ten meanings can be given in ten moods. Whatever meaning I get from a poem or a story, to repeat what has been said before, is the outgrowth of my life's experiences, multifarious and inextricably intricate. In other words, my interpretation of the page is always highly personal. In a way it is merely a guess; at any rate, a hazard or a venture. I may think I know what the page means and I may even be solemnly sure, but I may find nobody who agrees with me; and who is to be the arbiter to say whether I am right or wrong? So far as I and my own soul are concerned, nobody; so far as I and somebody listening to me are concerned that is quite another matter. The rest of the book concerns just that problem: how I can induce some one else to accept my own private opinion or notion concerning what my eye reads. The answer to this is found in a study of technique or of how interpretation is accomplished. |