For Interpretation

In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag famously argued that interpretation has become “the revenge of the intellect upon art” (1966: 7) and concluded: “In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art” (14). Sontag briefly acknowledges that the concept of interpretation also has a wider meaning, but only to signal that she deals with interpretation in a narrow sense:

Of course, I don’t mean interpretation in the broadest sense, the sense in which Nietzsche (rightly) says, “There are no facts, only interpretations.” By interpretation, I mean here a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain “rules” of interpretation. Directed to art, interpretation means plucking a set of elements (the X, the Y, the Z, and so forth) from the whole work. The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A?

(Sontag 1966: 5; emphasis added)

But if we take seriously the broader Nietzschean conception of interpretation, does it really have no implications for our understanding of what it means to interpret art? In my view, it has wide-ranging ramifications both for how we understand engagement with art and for our understanding of narrative, subjectivity, and human reality in general.

My starting point in this article is the view that we should understand the notion of interpretation in both a broad and a nuanced way, and that interpretation and hermeneutics should acquire a more central place in the field of contemporary narrative studies than they have at the moment. Instead of assuming that we all know what these terms mean, we need more reflection on different conceptions of interpretation and hermeneutics. Integral to this task is the acknowledgment that there are different levels of interpretation and different kinds of interpretative practices. Currently, interpretation is an underexamined concept, particularly in narrative studies; nevertheless, it is something we do all the time, whether we like it or not. We always orient ourselves to the world in a certain way, and we thereby interpret it and bestow meaning on it. According to this broad conception, interpretation is mostly not a “conscious act of the mind” but rather part of the automatized interpretative practices that largely escape our awareness. Narratives themselves are interpretative practices, and when we read literature or watch a film we always already interpret it prereflectively; if we stop to think, talk, or write about it, we interpret it in a more conscious and explicit way. It is important to reflect on the interrelations between these different interpretative practices.

I suggest that a broad Nietzschean-hermeneutical conception of interpretation serves as a productive starting point for understanding both narrative in general and narrative fiction as a specific form of interpretative practice. It is a common misunderstanding that the concept of interpretation implies the idea of seeking a hidden meaning that waits to be discovered in the depths of the object of interpretation. We should move beyond linking interpretation to such an unveiling of deep meanings. Interpretation is an activity of sense-making, a mode of engagement and attachment, and a continuous process of (re)orientation. As Rita Felski puts it, rather than in terms of a “hapless and hopeless pursuit of ultimate meaning” (2015: 32–33), interpretation should be seen as a process of “coproduction” that focuses on what a text “un- furls, calls forth, makes possible” (15). Felski’s formulation captures well the ethos of philosophical hermeneutics, in which, as Hans-Georg Gadamer stresses, interpretation is “not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well” (1997: 296). Philosophical hermeneutics, however, emphasizes that such productive interpretative engagement takes place not only when we interpret texts; it characterizes our mode of being in the world in general.

The Nietzschean-hermeneutical approach acknowledges that interpretations are not mere representations; instead, they have a performative character and are always intertwined with relations of power. As interpretative engagements with the world, they have real-world effects. This is precisely what their performative character means: they take part in constructing, shaping, and transforming human reality. This performativity is...