Summer 1999
Volume 25, Number 4

JP: With our choices framed this way, I'll go for what's behind door number 3. Not even the most ardent ecopantheist would argue that we owe something to inanimate marks on paper--and I have deep doubts about divinity of any kind. But the trouble with picking door number 3 is, of course, that there's nothing behind it: no controversy, no debate, no interest. Of course we donŐt owe texts anything. Turn the page.

But there is something behind the question--a debate about how we should conduct and assess interpretations. What we need to avoid in this debate, though, is the assumption that there is one true path. Methods of interpretation are subordinate to the purposes of interpretation, and those purposes are multiple. If I want to know something about the structure, organization, and design of, say, Middlemarch, I will do one sort of analysis, whereas if I want to know how the novel's discourse about a given cultural issue fits with or runs counter to the discourse about that issue in other arenas--the law, the popular press, government documents--I will do a very different kind of analysis. Furthermore, I may decide that in my own cultural circumstances the best approach to some literary icon is irreverence: enough already about Thomas Pynchon; what he needs is a good debunking. In all these cases, the purpose of the interpretation is the production of a certain kind of knowledge--of form, of culture, of what's wrong with our adulation--but the purposes of interpretation can also be political (marxists, feminists, queer theorists, and others frequently invoke the goal of changing the world), aesthetic (the critical act as homage to the creative one), affective (the critical act as a way to touch the emotions generated by the creative one), and other things as well. And, of course, these purposes are not mutually exclusive; some often overlap or get synthesized in a variety of ways.

I realize this endorsement of multiplicity may appear to be moving toward another door behind which lies no debate. Not even JK is likely to argue against letting more than one kind of flower bloom, even though I'm sure I can count on him for some witty sallies against pluralism. And I also realize that in answering the initial question as "nothing" and in advocating multiplicity, I'm not fulfilling my prescribed role in this debate: defending respect for texts. But endorsing multiplicity is not the same as saying that anything goes, and, in fact, I would argue that endorsing multiplicity makes both the conduct and the assessment of interpretation more difficult--and, therefore, more interesting. Among other things, it raises questions about the identity and boundaries of the text, questions that JK and I will no doubt get into before we're through. Furthermore, when I move from the metalevel of considering the relations among interpretive methods to the level of interpretive practice, I find myself especially drawn toward a rhetorical criticism that seeks to understand the interrelation of textual phenomena, authorial agency, and reader response. And this effort at understanding does require, among other things, what I am content to call respect for the text.

Let me illustrate briefly with a few remarks about Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Although I might start with questions about reader response (why am I both horrified and touched by Montresor's narrative?) or about authorial agency (why does Poe initially call attention to Montresor's narratee and then do nothing to characterize him or her?), I will start here with questions about textual phenomena. In the concluding paragraph of his narrative, Montresor reports, as he is on the verge of completing his revenge against Fortunato by walling him up in the catacombs, that "my heart grew sick--on account of the dampness of the catacombs." Then, after reporting that he completed the job, he comments, "For the half century no mortal has disturbed [the spot]. In pace requiescat!" Respecting the text in this case means recognizing that (a) the last paragraph of the narrative is a place of great emphasis (see Rabinowitz on Rules of Notice); (b) Montresor's report of his heartsickness doesn't fit with most of the rest of his narration; and (c) the revelation that he is telling the tale fifty years after the events demands explanation. Respecting the text also means seeking a coherent account of it, even as it means recognizing that some texts may be incoherent.

In this case, the two phenomena inform each other and, in turn, require us to reconfigure the whole story. Montresor's explanation of why his heart grows sick is unreliable, a case of denial on his part. It is not the dampness of the catacombs but his own instinctive revulsion at what he is doing to Fortunato that makes his heart grow sick. But his commitment to his code of revenge--announced in the first paragraph, another place of emphasis--means that he will not admit that revulsion to himself. On the verge of carrying out the dictates of the code--punishing Fortunato with impunity and with Fortunato's knowledge that he is the avenger--Montresor cannot stop. But the detail about Montresor's heart growing sick as he completed the revenge sheds light on why he is telling the tale fifty years later. The events are still vivid for him; he finds himself reliving the long ago experience because he is not at peace with it. Thus, the point of his narrative is not to boast but to confess--or rather to confess under the guise of boasting. Once we recognize that, then we also must recognize that he has not been successful in following his code of revenge: he has not punished with impunity because he has not been at peace for these fifty years. His telling the story is a sign that his retribution for Fortunato's wrongs has "overtake[n] the redresser." The "requiescat," though in one way an ironic remark about Fortunato, is also an earnest wish for himself. Strikingly, though, this recognition of Montresor's failure to carry out the revenge works to humanize, although not redeem, him. It also doubles our attention, asking us to focus not only on Montresor the brilliant plotter who carried out the murder of Fortunato but also on Montresor the elderly narrator living with his uneasy knowledge of what he's done and no doubt contemplating his own death.

I could (frighteningly enough) say a lot more about all these things, especially about the affective and ethical dimensions of Poe's narrative, but I'm already abusing the rules of turn taking, so I'll yield the floor to JK.

JK: That JP professes one thing and does another need not concern us. It's not that we--"we" here means me and you, who are on my side, cheering for me, not because you agree with what I say but because you are following your heart's dictates: I am the more comely of the two--it's not, I say, that we are after bigger game; we will, when it suits us, lay claim to the personal (JP does not, for instance, really know how to pronounce Amontillado).

It's rather that it's fun to watch JP's duplicity, his Chicago shell game. JP begins with an enthusiastic double somersault onto the bandwagon of indeterminacy--we owe texts nothing at all--and then tells us just what it is we owe 'em. In the name of coherence (oh, please!) he gives us Groucho Marx, which is, let me tell you, a lot more entertaining than the usual acts issuing from Chicago. You following me? (By "you" I mean all you readers, not Phelan, who will, of course, pretend to misunderstand.) JP first suggests we have nothing but marks on a page, then somehow assumes that our job is to "interpret" them, then says that we should honor multiple interpretations, then gives us, as an illustration of (get this!) multiplicity, a bullying bit of monism: "Thus, the point of his narrative is not to boast but to confess." As the layers peel off, Roland Barthes becomes Stanley Fish becomes ohmygod R. S. Crane.

Let's back up.

A text is like God. The question is not, How do we approach her? but, Why bother? In the name of openhearted generosity--JP is the Mae West of neoformalists--we are offered "multiplicity," which is nice. All creeds, all religions are welcome. Goody. But why? Why encourage superstition? JP is like my dean, who every year issues an ever-expanding list of religious holidays, urging us to respect each and every one and honor with stupefied silence and a slight bowing of the head students who ask for special consideration for one kind of woo-woo or another. Which, you see, is why I don't like starting this game inside JP's fences. If the issue is defined as ecumenical liberalism, it's like the Victorian notion of "doubt": it still assumes that the center of our world is God--or, in our more important dealings, the Text. Why take texts for granted? How about a bit of healthy atheism here?

Why grant the text independent authority? Why assume there are texts? Why assume, granting that there is some collective agreement on the illusion of texts, that texts are there to be interpreted? Whose interests are being served by such massive question-begging?

Why assume we are organized around a textual center, we being all of us in this game? I for one have no interest whatever in texts, and my interests should be your interests, too.

I thought I'd try bullying, since it works so well for JP. Put it this way: what is the end of Phelan's practice? Why does he do it? Knowledge, he says. Hard to battle that, but what kind of knowledge is it if texts are dots on a page and interpretation simply the forceful application of interpretive codes that are entirely contingent, determined not by the dots but by professional, historical, cultural accident?

Why do this at all, then? Why produce one more interpretation of dots when what's really at stake are the interpretive and professional discursive practices driving a master like JP. It's not what he produces but the machinery he puts in motion that should concern us. Let's say that JP's reading is fun, which it is, a lot of fun. It's fun because, I would say, he's so good at avoiding triviality in two directions: on one hand, reading the story as a mere bone-chiller (though, like you, I only pretend to sneer at mere bone-chillers), and, on the other, reading it as a dreary, moralistic fable. JP's reading is balanced, judicious, nuanced, and zinging. It's an A reading. It's publishable. It's the best we can do. He's damn good. But all that, though true, has everything to do with the standards of professional discourse and nothing whatever to do with the dots on the page. We applaud JP's reading, find it in its way persuasive, because it is so in accord with professional practices we have been taught to honor, not because it has anything whatever to do with the dots. I leave it to you to produce the 747 other equally persuasive readings available within our current professional paradigm and to imagine the infinite number of readings available to other paradigms. . . .

James R. Kincaid is Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the University of Southern California and author, most recently, of Child-Loving (1992), Annoying the Victorians (1995), and Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998). James Phelan, professor and chair of English at Ohio State University, is the editor of Narrative and the author of Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor and three books of narrative theory, the most recent of which is Narrative as Rhetoric (1996).