2017 - Rationality and Reasonableness in Textual Interpretation

Rationality and Reasonableness in Textual Interpretation Massimo Leone1 Abstract. What is the difference between interpreting a literary text during a university lecture and interpreting reality outside of the academe? And what is the difference between interpreting in natural sciences and interpreting in the humanities? Despite evident and known divergences, humanities too can rank their interpretations and aspire to guide the interpretations of society. Three alternative methods can be used so as to test interpretive hypotheses, depending on whether the author’s, the reader’s, or the text’s meaningful intentionality is primarily investigated. The third method is superior to the first two since it leads to the creation of a common meta-discursive space for inter-subjective exchange about meaning. Although adopting an appropriate methodology is essential in textual analysis, that which is even more important is supporting the creation of a community of interpreters that, sharing the same method, engage in the constructive comparison and ranking of interpretive moves. “Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.” H. P. Lovecraft, Hypnos (1922) 1. Introduction: the reluctant interpreter. If everyone were spontaneously inclined to interpret reality, be it nature or culture, in the same way, interpretation would not be needed. It would be pleonastic. In the relation between two different natural languages, an interpreter is necessary for she or he masters the language of departure and that of arrival better than any of the speakers of the two languages. That is why she or he is not only needed but also somehow admired for this capacity, which inevitably leads to power (Fawcett, Guadarrama García, and Hyde Parker 2010, part III and 147, 150-2). Analogously, the interpreter of a text is someone who, thanks to a superior methodological training, a wider encyclopedia, and a better acquaintance with the text, can provide insights on its meaning that are to be judged as deeper and more truthful than those that the interpreter’s audience might bring about. In other words, interpretation begets intermediation, but intermediation is inseparable from an idea of hierarchy. 1 University of Turin, massimo.leone@unito.it 2 The interpreter, for the fact itself of being an interpreter, will be situated at a higher sociocultural and pragmatic level than the community to which she or he addresses her- or himself. That is evident in the whole history of interpretation in the western civilization (Barnstone 1993). In the Jewish Bible, for instance, all those who are able to read the signs of transcendence better than their fellow human beings acquire a special status, often becoming the leaders of the community. The same happens to prophets and haruspices in the Jewish, Greek, and Roman culture (Struck 2016: 48, 221, 223). In a similar way, when the professor of semiotics addresses the audience of her or his students, and undertakes the task of describing, analyzing, and interpreting a text — a painting, for instance — immediately a topology of symbolical power materializes in the classroom, having often as its concrete counterpart also a spatial topology (the professor at the center of the amphitheater, the students all around) (Oblinger 2006: chapters 1 and 6). Lectures of this kind, however, constantly reach the bittersweet moment when the professor finally concludes the analysis and shows, with masterful assurance, that the meaning of a novel, a painting, or a song can be encompassed in such and such sentences of the meta-language. Through the rigorous application of a method, and the careful consideration of arguments and counterarguments, the analyst reaches the conclusion that the meaning of a text can be only that expressed through the analysis. Like in the final stage of the solution of a puzzle, all the pieces seem to come together and to find the most suitable place in the organic gestalt of the analysis (Danesi 2002, chapter 7). When the professor then invites the audience to ask questions, a couple of students might propose alternatives for the interpretation of such or such detail, or even point out that some aspects of the text were not taken into sufficient consideration. The masterful professor, though, will not be confounded by such objections but will welcome those additions that fit well within the general design of the interpretation and will, simultaneously, calmly but vigorously argue against alternatives that would disrupt the whole hermeneutic picture. At the end of the lecture, and even more at the end of the session of questions and answers, the interpretation will stand like a Doric temple in front of the minds of the audience, like a conceptual architecture wherein nothing, not even the smallest element of decoration, is now missing. On the one hand, this moment is sweet: the professor will have demonstrated her or his superior ability to decode culture and its texts, to extract the most coherent patterns of meaning from them, and to translate such meaning into a smooth meta-language, enhancing the students’ comprehension of what the Divine Comedy, or the Sistine Chapel, or the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven actually mean. Yet, to the professor who will not fall completely and blindly prey to the inebriation that accompanies teaching and, more generally, any display of a supposedly superior ability to interpret, this apex of the analysis will have a bitter taste too. The professor will mentally look at the tetragonal façade of the analysis, behold its cold splendor, but then she or he will inevitably be seized, in a moment of sincerity, by a tragic doubt: what if this is all wrong? What if I am just trying to convince myself, and my students together with myself, that meaning is something that can 3 be captured once and for all, transcribed into a formula, transmitted across the ages and the generations, agreed upon? The ‘reluctant interpreter’ will look at the poem, at the painting, at the song, and wonder whether that which lies in front of her or his eyes is not a living animal any more but a prey from whose corpse the last sparkles of life are nervously fleeting away. At the same time, she or he will not be able to suppress the intuition that, under that beautiful but cold architecture, the swarming life of meaning is still going on, undetected by anyone except those who have not been entirely convinced by the professor, perhaps including the professor her- or himself. At the end of the analysis, indeed, only the arrogantly distracted, pompously boastful interpreter will be able to silence that inner voice that stealthily suggests that the beautiful architecture is not made out of marble but out of clay. Are the students really convinced, or are they just bored and eager to abandon the classroom? More disquietingly, do they accept the professor’s interpretation because it is objectively the best, or because they rather yield to the professor’s authority, to the social habit of respecting, or even fearing, her or his hierarchically superior level of judgment? Even more puzzlingly, the professor will ask her- or himself whether she or he too is actually not convinced either, and is simply faking to be persuaded of the soundness of the interpretive solution, for that is what the role of the professor implies; that is what the role of the interpreter implies. She or he perhaps does not fully understand what is being said or what has been written, but her or his role imposes the pantomime of understanding. 2. The big gap. What causes this excruciating doubt, however, is not the fragility of the method, or the suspicion of the students’ insincerity, or the idea that out there, elsewhere, some other professor might interpret the text in a better way. What causes the doubt, instead, is life. Life itself. The reluctant interpreter, indeed, will not be able to discard the sneaking idea that there is a close and poisonous relation between the practice of interpretation taking place in vitro, that is, in the artificial atmosphere created in the laboratory of a classroom, and the practices of interpretation that, instead, occur spontaneously all around the academic world, and that in many cases lead to tragedy and disaster. Is the approach through which a poem is analyzed perhaps so different from the approach that, day after day, leads a human being to completely misunderstand a friend, or to blindly fail to notice a partner’s infidelity, or to let the lies of a politician go totally undetected, or to be spectacularly mistaken about the future directions of society or economy? Every day, all around the world, people suffer or even die because they wrongly interpreted the environment in which they were immersed (Reason 2013: 10). That is why only the foolish human being will not have, at some stage of her or his life, the tremendous thought: I don’t understand anything; I have never understood anything; I had the 4 impression that I was able to decode life and reality but I was not; it was just an illusion, whose tragic price will be paid all of a sudden, and all at once. The contrast between what happens to interpretations in a classroom and what happens to them in life ‘out there’ is so striking that it must, at a certain stage, prompt a reflection on the status of the former in relation to the latter. The reassuring pedagogical currency of academic teaching is that education, and higher education in particular, exactly is that physical and conceptual place in which young minds, guided by more experienced minds, can learn how to produce those interpretations that will improve the quality of their life and that of other people. Young biologists, young doctors, young psychologists, young semioticians are familiarized with heuristic strategies and tactics that have proven effective in the past, and that are likely to prove effective in the future as well. Members of a cognitive élite, students will guide the rest of the population in its daily interpretations, influencing the way in which people build their houses, educate their children, cure their diseases, choose their novels, talk about their private life, and interact with other human beings. In other words, that position of hierarchically superior interpretive status that the professor currently holds in front of them will be the same that they themselves will hold in their social and professional environments, for the simple fact that they were exposed to and absorbed a series of methodological habits, whose mastery will be certified by their diplomas. Why, then, is the passage from the classroom to the street, or to the square, or to the world, experienced as increasingly painful by the majority of students? Why do more and more of them believe that what they have learned from university lectures does not prepare them at all to deal with what they will face as adult architects, or physicians, or lawyers? Is it just a matter of updating the information that students receive during their training? Or filling the gap between university and ‘reality’ through multiplying those experiences that students can gain across these two worlds, such as stages or internships? Will a generation of younger professors help in refreshing and sharpening the interpretive skills of students? Unfortunately, the semiotician that looks with satisfaction at the complex diagram through which she or he is explaining to students the meaning of a poem, or a photograph, or a theatre performance, will have to admit that the problem is not as simple as that. She or he might, of course, update the methodology, read the latest books in the field, attend symposia that deal with the most current developments of the discipline, etc. The feeling of dismay at the thought of the enormous distance between the epistemological atmosphere of the classroom and that of the world is destined to persist, or even to be embittered by the experience of how useless any effort of methodological upgrade turns out. 5 3. Methods of corroboration. The feeling of this distance, which is at the same time a cognitive, an emotional, and a pragmatic one, has to do with some central issues not only in semiotics, but also in any other discipline involving a systematic reflection on interpretation. Such issues affect the jurist as well as the medical scientist, the art curator as well as the journalist (Maitland 2017: “Introduction”). In a nutshell, such distance can be measured in relation to the following question: what are the acceptable procedures of interpretation that are usually adopted during a university lecture, and what are, on the contrary, those that prevail outside of the academic laboratory? In order to answer such question, one should posit an epistemological, methodological, and analytical distinction between rationality and reasonableness. As has been pointed out by most modern philosophy of science, a great divide separates the procedures through which natural scientists reach their conclusions through interpreting the data deriving from the observation and analysis of reality and the procedures through which ‘human scientists’ do the same with both sociocultural reality and the texts that it produces (Popper 1935, ch. 4: “Grade der Prüfbarkeit”). In the first case, the replicability of the experiment allows scientists to test hypotheses in order to either corroborate them or falsify them, so that they might be replaced by better, more encompassing speculations about the nature of nature. When a semiotician describes, analyses, and interprets a text, her or his hypotheses cannot be tested in the same way. In a recent article of mine, for instance, I have claimed that one of the most famous and discussed upon sequences in the history of cinema, the “sequence of the vase” in Late Spring by Ozu (1949), should be interpreted by taking as a point of departure not only the famous vase that all previous interpreters had exclusively focused on, but also the strange object that appears, unnoticed by all, in a shadowy corner of the same sequence (Leone 2016) (Fig. 1). [Place Figure 1.] Figure 1 – Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) I have proposed this interpretation to my Japanese colleagues, to my Turin colleagues that are experts of Japanese cinema, and, last but not least, I have discussed about my reading at length with the students of my master course of semiotics. I have also published this interpretation online and in journals, both in Italian and in Japanese. All the concerned audiences seemed to be convinced by my interpretive move, and no major objections have been leveled at it. But how can this semiotic hypothesis be corroborated, and how can it be falsified? According to the theory of semantic intentionality formulated by Umberto Eco, there are three different ways to test the hypothesis above (Eco 1990, ch. 13: “Semantics, Pragmatics, and Text Semiotics”). 6 3.1. Asking the author. The first is to contrast it with the semantic intentionality of the author, that is, what the author meant to signify and communicate through the sequence. This modality of verification, however, is not the most effective, for two reasons. A contingent reason is that, since Ozu is no longer alive, we cannot ask him what he meant by the sequence of the vase. He might have left some meta-texts, such as notes, interviews, etc., explaining the meaning of the sequence. One could not rely on these meta-texts, however, in the same way as one would rely on Ozu’s own words. Determining in what way these meta-texts explain the meaning of the sequence, indeed, would require further interpretations, some of them being as, if not even more, speculative than the one seeking to interpret the sequence in the first instance. The second reason for the unviability of this procedure is that Ozu himself cannot be regarded as the highest possible authority on the meaning of his movies. He might have had an idea of what the sequence of the vase might signify, or rather of what he wanted it to signify, and he might have tried to arrange all the elements of the sequence so as to signify it. Given the nature of the cinematic language, however, which does nothing but magnifying the nature of language tout court (Aumont 1990, chapter 6: “Les pouvoirs de l’image”), the sequence itself signifies despite and beyond Ozu’s intentions. There is no signification without the potentiality of alternative interpretations. Even those texts that are constructed so as to reduce such alternatives, like the instructions of a drug’s leaflet, for instance, can generate diverging interpretations, exactly because of the intrinsically undetermined nature of verbal language (Eco 1976, chapter 1: “Signification and Communication”). Such indeterminacy is even higher when images, instead of words, are used in order to assemble the signification of a message, especially when such images are not meant to refer to reality but to tell a story and, even more ambiguously, to convey a moral message about abstract human values. To this difficulty one should add that even if Ozu could perfectly explain to us the meaning of the sequence, the explanation would be a fragment of verbal meta-discourse and, therefore, adopt a different expressive substance, syntactic structure, and semantic behavior than the sequence itself (Calabrese 2000). Ultimately, that which Ozu might say on a sequence of one of his movies cannot be considered as its definitive interpretation because that which Ozu really wished to signify with that sequence, he signified it precisely through it, whereas, when requested to explain the same signification by translating it into a verbal metalanguage, he would face the same difficulties that most critics do, and without even the benefit of detachment. 7 3.2. Asking the reader. A second viable option to test my interpretive hypothesis might be to compare and contrast it with those of other spectators. That in a way happens every time that an interpretive hypothesis is communicated: in my case, the reading of the sequence was put to the test of its reception by Japanese colleagues, by Turin Asian cinema specialists, even by a historian of Japanese pottery, and, of course, by students. In all of these circumstances, as it was pointed out earlier, no objection was made. Is that sufficient as a means to corroborate the reading of the sequence as the best possible interpretation? The problem here arises to designate the community of interpreters that would exert the highest authority in matters of judgment over the extent to which an interpretation of the famous sequence of the vase in Ozu’s Late Spring might or might not be correct. How and by whom is this community going to be shaped? Perhaps by Japanese spectators, since they are supposed to be those whose interpretive encyclopedia is geographically and culturally the closest to that which Ozu referred to in creating the sequence itself? But, then, how should one select and shape such cohort of Japanese spectators? What age should they be, from what sociocultural background, of what gender? The major problem in adopting a corroboration strategy based on the notion of ‘intentio lectoris’ (the meaning that the reader of a text, or the spectator of a movie, attributes to such cultural artifact) is its representativeness. In other words, against what kind of range of subjective interpretations should mine be tested? The answer is not clear and might even lead to solutions implying intolerable ethnocentrism. Should only Italians interpret Dante, and only the French Molière? Is the native command of a natural language enough to determine the circle of those who are supposed and entitled to correctly interpret a text? And is this applicable also in the case of predominantly non-verbal texts, such as the famous sequence of the vase in Ozu’s movie? The major difficulty of this second method, however, resides in the fact that one should clearly establish beforehand the criteria according to which a subjective interpretation is going to be judged as more apt to falsify or corroborate a hypothesis than another. Statistical methodologies would not be a solution either. Should one conclude that, let’s say, since in a survey more than seventy-five percent of spectators have declared that they interpret the famous vase as symbol of the solitude of the male protagonist of the movie after the demise of his wife, this should be considered as the correct interpretation? And would this statistical argument imply that, should a subsequent survey show different statistics, the correct interpretation should change accordingly? Such way of testing, falsifying, and corroborating interpretive hypotheses would be unacceptable for most scholars in the humanities, although some of them are exploring these procedures in the field of quantitative aesthetics (Kreuz and MacNealy 1996). What is particularly problematic in this statistical methodology is that it would export a method of political determination (the majority wins) in a field where the opinion of the majority is not necessarily 8 the lesser evil. On the contrary, one could claim that one of the objectives of the critical analysis of artworks is not to comply with the average opinions expressed by a community of receivers but rather to alter this average through showing that more complex and all-encompassing interpretive hypotheses are possible, and potentially lead to farther exploit the moral content of an artwork. In the humanities, art historians and literary critics have not been usually seen as those who certify the interpretations of the average receiver, but rather as those who, through engaging with the artwork at length, discover in it paths of meaning that the most were not able to detect. 3.3. Asking the text. The third major strategy for testing an interpretive hypothesis does not consist in asking directly or indirectly the author (which, moreover, is impossible in some cases; think about the supposedly transcendent authorship of most ‘sacred’ texts) or in seeking to determine a majority of readers but in comparing and contrasting different interpretations in relation to the artwork itself. In our example, this heuristic consists in comparing my interpretation of the sequence of the vase with other interpretations that different spectators might have produced about the same sequence. Although this strategy seems similar to the second one, it is, indeed, a completely alternative one. In the subjective method, different interpretations are compared and contrasted, but there is no rational standard for doing it, save for that of ethnocentric or similar conventions (someone is Italian, so her or his interpretation of Dante must be better; someone is a Japanese man, so his interpretation must be better than that of a Japanese woman), or that of statistical measurements. In the third way, instead, different interpretations are compared and contrasted not subjectively but inter-subjectively, not in relation to a supposed primacy of a certain sociocultural category of readers or to that of the majority, but in relation to the text itself. That is why this method leads to a rational comparison of interpretations: the way in which they differ can be articulated and measured in relation to the text, that is, to features of the texts that are visible to everybody. To give an example, one thing is to say: “let us compare the Japanese interpretations of Ozu with the Italian ones”, which is a comparison that makes reference to extra-textual and quite slippery elements, such as the nationality of spectators; another thing is to say: “let us compare the interpretations of the sequence that only consider the vase, with those that consider both the vase and the mysterious object appearing in a shadowy corner of the scene”; or, “let us compare the interpretations that explain why the vase is shown twice in the sequence, to the interpretations that do not”. In relation to the first two methods, this third one implies a significant advantage, which is the possibility of rationally ranking interpretations. In the first method of testing, there was no particular reason to believe that Ozu’s interpretation of his own sequence was superior to those of his spectators, unless one relied 9 on a naïve idea of signification, an idea whose weaknesses have been exposed supra; similarly, there was no particular rational argument to believe that an interpretation be superior to the others because of its ethnocentric or statistical force. The third method, instead, introduces a simple but irrefutable logic of ranking: since the whole of the text signifies, those interpretations coherently taking into account more elements of this signification will be preferable to those that take into account only a part of them (Hjelmslev and Uldall 1957). That is an axiom, but it is one that is difficult to refute. It rests, indeed, on the concept itself of semiosis. In verbal language, for instance, given a sentence, or even a complex assemblage of sentences, such as a literary text, it is hard to demonstrate that an interpretation that takes into account only its incipit is better than that which, on the contrary, describes, analyses, and interprets the totality of verbal signs woven within the text. Similarly, it is hard to prove that a reading of a painting of Piero della Francesca explaining only the meaning of the characters appearing therein but not that of the background is preferable to an interpretation where both receive an analytical reading. This axiom also relies on the principle that culture is made not only of texts but also of para-texts, that is, meta-signs that are supposed to tell readers (observers, listeners, etc.) where a text starts and where it ends, from where the analytical effort must be exerted and where it can stop (Genette 1987). Postmodern artists and texts can play with such para-textual meta-signs, producing, for instance, artworks whose frontiers are not neat but blur with that of their contexts. This blurring effect, however, is possible only for, in most circumstances, culture clearly signals the limits of a text. Since culture tells us how and where to look at in order to understand where and when a text begins, and where and when it ends, it is reasonable to believe that culture also requires to exert our interpretive attention throughout the text, and not only through part of it. 4. Interpretive temporality. This criterion of exhaustiveness is in a way superior to any criterion adopted either in the objective or in the subjective methods of testing, because it is an intrinsically cooperative one. Whereas the first method implicitly affirms that only the author knows the meaning of a text, and whereas the second intrinsically claims that only a certain group of readers knows it, the third method leaves open the question of who might better interpret a text: it is not the author; it is not a certain category of readers; it is, on the contrary, the one or those who will look more attentively into the text and explain more carefully what they can see and read. The first method is oriented toward the past: the author conceived of a meaning, expressed it through an artwork, and it is now upon the reader to retrieve that meaning from the text, if possible by faithfully adhering to the author’s first communicative intention. The second method, on the opposite, is oriented toward the present: it is here and now that the text means, for a reader x or y, and its meaning is not to be 10 searched in the past intentions of an author — intentions that preceded the creation of the artwork — but in the current perception of a selected group of readers, whose features or number make them the artwork’s best interpreters. A farther reason for which the third method of testing is preferable to the first two is that it is, instead, open to the future: an interpretation is put forward, but if in the future someone will propose an interpretation that explains all the elements taken into account by the previous interpretation, and explicates, moreover, some farther elements, then this future interpretation will have to be judged as superior. In the first and in the second method, a better interpretation can also emerge, but not in relation to the text; in the first case, a better interpretation will be one that, for instance, relies on novel information concerning the intentions of the author, information that was hitherto ignored or neglected; in the second case, a change in the ethnocentric polarization of the semiosphere or in statistics will make a better interpretation emerge: now that women more than men interpret Hamlet, for instance, a feminist interpretation must be preferred to a macho one (on the weaknesses of this approach, Zhang 2016). The dynamic of improvement implied by the third method is intrinsically different and superior to the first two because it does not relate to extra-textual elements but to intra-textual ones; in other words, in order for someone to come up with a better interpretation, it is not necessary to look for it outside of the text, because such interpretation is already available to everyone inside of the text, and all that is needed is to better look into it. To return to the example given above, the sequence of the vase in Ozu’s Late Spring has always contained two objects, not only the vase. It was always possible for someone to notice the second object and to include it into the interpretation. For some reason, however, this second object was neglected, until someone took notice of it and included it in a coherent interpretation of the sequence. This new interpretation, which takes into account more elements of the textual manifestation than the previous ones, is better than them not because it better grasps the intentionality of the author, or because it fits better with the inclinations of a group of readers, but simply because it explains more and better that which all might have seen and interpreted in the text. Along this line, interpretations of King Lear that propose a coherent view of more textual elements of it are to be preferred to those interpretations that are sketchy, or partial, or neglect to fit some major portions of the text within the architecture of the interpretation. Similarly, interpretation of the Sistine Chapel that coherently read more visual details of it, without neglecting those that are placed at the margins of the visual scene, are also to be preferred. In a way, this strategy for ranking interpretations is not dissimilar from that which guides natural sciences too: if someone formulates a hypothesis that might explain more of that which can be seen in the image produced by a microscope, then that hypothesis must be preferred to that which neglects some of the elements of the image. 11 5. Textual laboratories. Something central, however, still distinguishes the third method for testing the value of a textual interpretation from Popper’s idea of scientific corroboration. All the interpreters of a text deal with the same materials. They can take into consideration a smaller or a greater quantity of them, but they cannot exit the perimeter of the paratext. Interpreters of Shakespeare’s King Lear, for instance, can propose different readings of some of the passages of the text, but they cannot add new materials to it. In natural sciences, instead, the fact that an experiment can usually be replicated allows scientists to control the changing of conditions that surround the interpretation of reality. In a textual reading, an interpretation can improve a previous interpretation by taking into consideration neglected elements of the text, but not by adding new elements to it; in natural reading, since the experiment is supposed to be not the ultimate object of interpretation, but a controlled simulacrum of reality (nature), then its para-textual frontiers are not as clear: through varying the frontiers of the simulacrum and, therefore, its semiotic relation with reality (nature), better interpretations can be formulated, interpretations that are preferable not simply because they explain neglected elements of the experiment, but also because they introduce neglected elements into it. Mutatis mutandis, one might affirm that a textual reading cannot be compared with a scientific reading, but rather with the designing of an experiment leading to a scientific reading, the only but crucial difference being that the humanist’s experiment cannot vary, because the laboratory coincides with the object that is to be interpreted. The frustration of the humanist interpretation in relation to the scientific one derives from the fact that the textual materials that Eighteenth-Century scholars had at their disposal so as to interpret Shakespeare’s King Lear are actually the same as those that contemporary interpreters have. Shakespeare’s text is both the object of the reading and its laboratory, and the same syllables, the same words, the same sentences, and the same rhymes constitute the perimeter of that which the interpreter can read and to which she or he can attribute meaning. If the para-textual perimeter of a text does not vary, though, in the sense that it offers always the same elements to any interpreter who might come across the significant surface of the text itself, the lenses of the microscope through which these elements are observed might indeed vary. The psychoanalyst of literature and the semiotician look into the same text, but they see different elements in it. 6. Interpretive lenses. The way in which readers, spectators, listeners, etc. look at the significant surface of a text is never completely casual, or merely guided by personal taste. It is, on the contrary, shaped by a series of patterns, some of which derive from the histori- 12 cal and sociocultural coordinates of the reader, whereas others stem from her or his subjective training as reader and interpreter. It is known, for instance, that being an assiduous reader of the literary works of a certain author turns one into a different kind of interpreter of that author, one who is able to detect, within that author’s texts, elements and nuances that less accustomed readers tend to ignore. In this case, it is not the text that varies, but the cognitive and emotional filter through which its significant surface is sifted. A novel invests the readers with a myriad of words, sentences, and stories; a movie solicits the beholder with a frantic sequence of images; etc. The novel and the movie are the same for everyone, meaning that they present all readers with the same significant surface, and yet not the entirety of it can be retained and deciphered on the spot. Exiting a movie theater, or closing a book, some more attentive and perceptive interpreters will have retained a greater amount of information, and some of them will have almost naturally conflated this information into a coherent interpretation. The value of an interpretive method, therefore, can be measured in relation to the extent to which it leads interpreters to discover, within the perimeter of a text, elements that they would not have otherwise detected. If Greimassian semiotics has a merit, for instance, it exactly consists in working as a lens that, pointed at a certain text, allows one to see elements within it that would have been otherwise gone unseen and neglected (Greimas 1976). That is possible because every interpretive method essentially is a translation. In the Greimassian method of textual interpretation, that which matters the most is not the exactitude of the theoretical proposal, many aspects and nuances of which are both debatable and, indeed, debated. Just to give an example, this method imagines the meaning of a text as though it was generated through a series of logical operations, whose dynamics and results can be ranked at different levels of abstraction. Despite what Greimassian fundamentalists tend to affirm, there is no intrinsic motivation for singling out a certain number of such logical levels (that of deep values, that of narrative grammar, that of discourse, and that of figuration). This largely depends on the accidents of the history of the elaboration of the semiotic method, for instance, on the fact that some aspects of the theory were developed more than others. The major usefulness of the Greimassian method, instead, emerges from the fact itself of translating the features of a (literary, filmic, visual, etc.) text into a new analytical simulacrum, whose features coherently derive from the interdefined meta-language that the analysis adopts. In other words, when the Greimassian method translates the meaning of a text through rendering it into a metalanguage, that which matters is not as much the meta-language itself, which could be replaced by other meta-languages, but the coherence of the analytical translation. Translating the meaning of a text into the code of a meta-language, indeed, allows the analyst to see, within the perimeter determined by the text’s paratextual marks, new elements and new dynamics. A lay reader will see, when reading Shakespeare’s King Lear, a complex array of syllables, words, and sentences; she or he will also see a protagonist, perhaps a co-protagonist, some secondary 13 characters, and the line of a narrative plot. When a semiotician trained in the Greimassian method looks at the same text, she or he will see the same elements, but she or he will simultaneously detect also elements that the lay reader does not perceive, exactly for they emerge from the application of the meta-language to the text itself. The Greimassian semiotician, for instance, will see not only characters, but also macro-narrative functions that complexly intertwine with them. That is why the application of a method enhances interpretation: not in the trivial and somehow misleading sense that such method leads to the discovery of a textual truth that non-trained approaches are unable to spot, but in the sense that, through the operation of meta-linguistic translation, the method multiplies the possibilities of elaborating interpretive hypotheses concerning the text itself. As was stated earlier, unlike in natural sciences, in human sciences, the text is both the object under investigation and the investigation laboratory; its perimeter must remain the same. The application of a new method, that is, of a new way of metalinguistically translating the text, introduces new possibilities for the analysis. The text is always the same, but now the meta-text allows one to peruse it under a different angle. This meta-linguistic translation is not without problems: it must be faithful to the significant surface of the text and, at the same time, render its structures in a creative way. If one looks at this matter with unbiased eyes, however, one must admit that the so-called “lay” approach to a text is not naturally unproblematic either. The fact that we recognize “sentences” in a literary text might appear as a spontaneous operation, but such spontaneity actually is the result of interiorizing a grammatical analysis whose evolution required a long and sometimes conflictive elaboration. The fact that we recognize a subject, a verb, and an object in King Lear’s sentences is not less conventional than the fact that we recognize an actant subject, an actant object, or an actant observer in the narrative plot of the text. The difference between the two approaches is not as much a question of abstractedness as one of centrality, within the semiosphere, of such or such method of interpretive reading. In most contemporary societies, readers are trained to analyze the syntax of a text, not its semantics, which is usually still dealt with through impressionistic methods. Nothing, however, intrinsically prevents a structural method of semantic analysis to become equally central in the semiosphere, to be taught and learned in schools, and to become a ‘second nature’ of most readers and readings. 7. Towards an interpretive liturgy. That leads one to consider the major advantages of this third method for testing the interpretive hypotheses concerning a text, which is the possibility of sharing and inhabiting a common space for inter-subjective discussion. In the first method, there is no need to debate about interpretations: those who have the closest access to the supposed mind and intentionality of the author occupy the highest hierar- 14 chical rank in the sphere of interpretation. Such method is dangerously inclined to authoritarianism, especially in those cases in which the identity of the author is not clear or is mystified. In the “religions of the book”, for instance, power can be held also as a consequence of the claim that one, be it a scribe or a priest, is closer to the intentionality of the author, the problem in this case being that there is no way to prove or disprove such pretense of proximity (Leone 2013). In the second method too, discussion is not a viable option, because diverging interpretations are not meant to reconcile their differences and converge toward a negotiated version of them, adopting those tenets that better fit the reading of the text at stake, but to coagulate into statistical clusters: as long as an interpretation is shared by a majority of readers, it is to be considered the correct one, no matter what. In the third method, instead, which is the one that targets the intentio operis, discussion is not only an option but is the natural outcome of how this approach works. When the meaning of a text is translated into a diagram that renders it through a specific meta-language, then competition must arise among all the beholders of such diagram, in order to determine who is able to see more elements into it and, more importantly, who is able to connect the greatest quantity of such elements into a coherent interpretation. There is no more exciting moment, in academic seminars, of that magic atmosphere that takes shape when the analyst has delivered her or his interpretation, for instance, the interpretation of a painting by Rembrandt, and all the attendees are left with the image, the method, and the proposed reading, implicitly challenged by the speaker her- or himself to further improve that which has been proposed. Typically, at this stage two different kinds of questions are raised: on the one hand, someone points at an element of the painting that has not been taken into account by the meta-linguistic translation. Objections of this kind are interesting, but somehow fail to work as devices of corroboration. That happens, on the contrary (second kind), when some of the attendees not only point out at a neglected element in the painting and its meta-linguistic description: in addition, they are also able to reformulate the proposed interpretation in a way that encompasses all the elements that such interpretation takes into account, plus the neglected one. Confronted with remarks of this kind, the analyst will have to rejoice, since cooperative interpretive work has actually achieved more than a single analyst, albeit a genial one, could. In the third method, indeed, the community of scholars sharing the same method is more important than the single scholars, and it is actually more important than the method itself. What matters, indeed, is sharing, meaning that familiarity with the same meta-language, albeit at different levels of precision or sophistication, allows the analytical work to become a liturgy of interpretation, which etymologically means “work of the people”. This liturgy will be guided by an expert, but necessarily followed by a series of practitioners of the analysis that share the same methodology and can advance each other’s perception of the text. That is the way in which the Greimassian seminar in Paris, or Eco’s seminars in Bologna and Urbino, or Lotman’s seminar in Tartu worked in their halcyon days. 15 But why, then, — given that focusing on the intentio operis allows one to create an inter-subjective arena where to debate, through the lenses of a metalanguage, about the meaning of a text and, more generally, about interpretations —should the analyst be seized by that bittersweet melancholy that, as has been described at the beginning of this paper, subjugates her or him when the suspicion arises that this laboratory of interpretation is actually an empty one, both because it does not resonate with the practices of interpretation that take place in the ‘real world’, outside of the academe, and because students and colleagues themselves seem to just pay lip service to the ritual of interpretation, turned into a sort of cold liturgy to which no one any longer attach any faith? One could not answer this question without accepting the saddening hypothesis that, in interpretation, it is not the method that creates the community, but the community that creates the method. That does not mean that some methodological proposals might not be more articulated and sophisticated than others. Greimas’s proposal of a methodology for textual analysis was certainly more complex and rich than any method proposed by Roland Barthes, for instance. That, however, is not the point. The force of a method, like the force of a language, does not stem uniquely from the internal structure of the method, or from the internal structure of the metalanguage, but from the fact that a community speaks such languages. Italian can work as a language not because it is phonetically, syntactically, or semantically coherent, but because a community of speakers believe and interiorize the belief of such coherence. Similarly, Greimas’s method is effective not only per se, but because a community takes shape around this methodological proposal, and is willing to sacrifice interpretive idiosyncrasies in order to create a common arena for discussing interpretations. That is the real cause for the interpretive melancholia that, nowadays, strikes many academics, especially those who lived in cultural epochs and contexts where, on the contrary, a feeling of the existence and the activity of an interpretive community would be strong. Looking outside of the classroom, what is it that the professional analyst sees? A chaotic cacophony of narcissistic voices, each boasting itself not only as a voice but also as the ultimate method that everyone should adopt; the transformation of relativism into the absence of dialogue; the conflation of the subjective method of interpretation with the inter-subjective one, a conflation wherein each interpreter claims to own and dominate the entire arena of interpretation; the total inability to embrace a principle of humbleness, according to which one’s interpretive identity is at least partially sacrificed in the name of sharing a common space for discussion. In this interpretive semiosphere, it is natural that conspiracy theories, trolling, cynicism, and sectarianism thrive. Nobody wants to yield to a common method of interpretation for a fundamental mistaken is made, consisting in the inability to distinguish between accepting a common space in which to debate over interpretations, and accepting a common interpretation. The two options are completely different. A society in which all are forced to accept a single view is a dictatorial one. A society in which nobody accepts a space where a single view might arise, however, is an anarchist one. The two models are 16 dangerous because the two models entail the possibility of violence, meant as agency that resolves interpretive conflicts in non-symbolical ways, not through persuasion but through force. The melancholy of the interpreter arises even more when she or he sees that also in the purified atmosphere of the laboratory of interpretation, in the classroom, for instance, or in the conference hall, the pernicious cynicism that pervades society contaminates the instruments, disrupting any feeling of an interpretive community also among colleagues, or between professors and students. 8. Conclusion: reasonable manners in interpretation. Is there any antidote to such melancholy? Again, a viable solution seems to lies in what Umberto Eco has underlined all through his career, that is, the essential difference between rationality and reasonableness (Eco 1992). What is reasonableness, also etymologically? It is the potentiality of rationality. Something that is reasonable is not rational per se, but can be recognized as such within the continuous exchange and negotiation of a community devotedly sharing a public discourse. Claiming that an interpretation is the only rational one, especially in the field of humanities, dangerously resembles an act of authoritarianism. There is no single way to interpret the meaning of a novel, or that of a painting, or that of a film, and fortunately there will never be. Language is slippery and mutable, not a solid but a liquid substance, or even an airy one in the case of poetry or similar discursive formations. One should strongly object, however, that claiming that there is no single rational interpretation of a cultural fact is tantamount to claiming that there is no single reasonable interpretation of it. When I affirm the rationality of my interpretation, I impose my view, mostly by authority if not even by force. But when I affirm the reasonableness of my interpretation, I do not impose it; on the contrary, I offer it to a community to which I myself subscribe, by curtailing my cynicism, my narcissism, my envy, and by sharing a methodology that, although it might not be perfect, although it might be perfected, is nevertheless able to create a space of inter-subjective recognition, where the correctness of an interpretation might always be recognized. Admitting and preserving this difference is fundamental not only to protect an arena for the discussion and corroboration of interpretive hypotheses, but also because such an arena is essential also for their falsification. Claiming that reasonable interpretations do not exist, indeed, is tantamount not only to thwarting any possibility of ranking them positively, but also to undermining any opportunity to ranking them negatively. In a society that is unable to humbly turn itself into a structured community of interpreters, one can neither hope that a new interpretation of Shakespeare will be proven as more encompassing and satisfying than any previous one, and that a new conspiratorial revisionism will be disproven as less 17 reasonable and, therefore, less tenable than any preceding interpretation of history or society. Reference list. Aumont, Jacques. 1990. L’image. Paris: Armand Colin. Engl. trans. by Claire Pajackowska. 1997. The Image. London: British Film Institute. Barnstone, Willis. 1993. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Calabrese, Omar. 2000. Lo strano caso dell'equivalenza imperfetta. 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