Some of My Best Friends Are Interpreters

DON'T AGREE entirely with Susan Sontag when she calls interpretation in our culture reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling and revenge of the intellect upon art. In fact, some of my best friends are interpreters. And I make my living by committing frequent acts of literary interpretation and aiding and abetting my students to do likewise. There are deadlier things to be done with lives and voices. If for no other reason, I cannot fully agree because Miss Sontag utters her pronouncements in a tone as unpleasant and presumptuous as that of most interpreters. Still, I become increasingly troubled by the blind growth of the industry of literary interpretation and by the unselfconsciousness and lovelessness with which the act is usually performed. I am speaking, of course, of formal acts of interpretation, not the natural and inevitable engagement with meanings which is part of the experience of reading. I suppose if one focused for long on the number of items in existence of any sort, from pairs of pants to hamburger patties, the sheer quantity would be terrifying. But there is something peculiarly disturbing about the spread of interpretive activity. Sometimes it seems to me as though the entire body of creative work is becoming smothered beneath a blanket of interpretive snow so thick that only the blurred outlines of the original works remain. In my office alone, the critical quarterlies, the learned journals, the anthologies of critical essays, the abstracts of critical essays, my friends' offprints, the casebooks, the books on understanding this and the meaning of that and the shape of this and the approaches to that, the twentieth-century views of this and that, the how-to-analyze books, and the how-to-write-critical-paper books are crowding the poems, plays, and novels off the shelves and crowding them out of my mind. I exaggerate a little not so much. Think of the thousands upon thousands of anthologies and teachers' manuals and millions upon millions of dittoed sheets with questions like: I. What is the dominant image in the poem? Is the image consistent throughout? 2. What is the meaning of but in line io? Is this meaning ap

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