"Against Interpretation" Revisited

"Against Interpretation" Revisited Brian McHaIe The Scholar's Art: Literary Studies in a Managed World Jerome McGann University of Chicago Press http://www.press.uchicago.edu 208 pages; paper, $22.00 "In place of a hermeneutics," Susan Sontag notoriously wrote way back in 1964, "we need an erotics of art." If we needed it back then, just think how much worse we need it now, after forty-odd years in which interpretation, proliferating uncontrollably, ramifying into ever more resourceful, ingenious, and arrogant varieties, has obtained a stranglehold on reading. 1 think Jerome McGann would endorse Sontag's "Against Interpretation." Indeed, you might regard his latest book, The Scholar 's Art, as an extended gloss on her anti-interpretative slogan (though he never actually acknowledges it, or her). McGann certainly shares Sontag's suspicion of interpretation's power-play, the way it guts the art-work, evacuating and effacing it, leaving in its place an alien, naturalizing, and idealizing discourse. "We descend on the texts with shocking eagerness," he writes, "teasing or tearing out meanings their makers... might or might not have wanted anything to do with." Elsewhere he speaks of-the "wickedness of the interpreters": "Interpreters lust for the fleshpots of meaning; it is their characteristic, their besetting sin," a sin that twentieth-century academic scholarship only aggravated and amplified "when it began to place interpretation before imagination, the clever and self-conscious reader before the artist ...." McGann also seems to share Sontag's sense of the erotic relation as an alternative to the model of interpretative mastery of the text. He finds this alternative model exemplified in Byron, whose undisguised attraction to the female figures of his own poetry mirrors the flirtatious and frankly erotic relation between that poetry and its readers. In place of interpretative mastery, flirtation; in place ofpower/ knowledge, eros. Now, McGann knows about as much about Byron as anyone on the planet, having produced the definitive scholarly edition of his works, as well as many hundreds of pages of criticism about him and other nineteenth-century writers, including Tennyson and Rossetti. You might think that his career of textual scholarship placed McGann firmly in the camp ofthose who seek meaning, the hermeneuts, as opposed to those who love. Not so, or not exactly so, for, according to McGann, "the poets' greatest scholarly friend is probably the pedant, and their greatest enemy the interpreter," and he clearly aligns himself with the pedants. "Pedantic" scholarly editing serves poetry ("Scholarship is a service vocation," McGann writes), whereas interpretation aims to subdue and assimilate it. Where interpretation sublimates and idealizes poems, literally evaporating them into ideas, a scholarly edition makes poems' materiality appear. It returns them to what Yeats called the "foul rag-and-bones shop," which (as McGann reminded us in an earlier book) is precisely where the makings of rag paper for the fine editions of Yeats's era were scavenged— in other words, the place where books arc made of matter. Finally, where interpretations naturalize and domesticate texts, scholarly editions estrange them, make them strange: "nothing strips away the veil of familiarity from an aesthetic work so much as an elaborate scholarly edition." Scholarly editing isn't the only alternative to interpretation, of course. McGann endorses a whole range of noninterpretative practices of literary reception , including translation, parody and pastiche, hoaxing, book design, and, shamefully neglected in our era, the lost art ofrecitation: "ifyou want to know what the poem means," he writes, "recite it"; and "When we 'teach' poetry, probably the most useful service we can render our students is to help them learn to articulate the words, to play the instrument of language with as much skill as care can bring: simply, to make them recite." (On the secret history ofpoetry recitation, see Peter Middleton's admirable recent book, Distant Reading [2005], which complements McGann's.) All of these are forms of what McGann calls performative criticism, and even deformative criticism. Deformance is a positive term, not a negative one, in McGann's critical vocabulary. McGann traces a whole genealogy ofcountercultural resistance, an alternative literary tradition ofplayfulness and artifice. "Scholarship, in short, is itself performative." McGann writes, though some types of scholarship pretend otherwise...