<p> APPROACHES TO POETIC INTERPRETATION AND THE ROLE OF THE READER</p><p>BY</p><p>ALADDIN ASSAIQELI</p><p>FEBRUARY 2010</p><p>Abstract In interpreting a poetic text in an attempt to search for significance, individuals, resort to one of three possibilities or approaches. They either look for significance in what the author intended the text to mean, or what the text itself in dissociation from the author means, or what the text means to the reader, as a unique individual, regardless of what the author may have intended or what the text alone may seem to mean. It is this third view or approach to poetic interpretation that is advocated in this paper. </p><p>Approaches to Poetic Interpretation and the Role of the Reader </p><p>2 In a sense, learning to read poetry is the discovery of significance without certainty. So interpreting a poem does not, and indeed cannot, depend on the knowledge of cultural allusions, or of the individual or social circumstances of its composition. What a poem means is what it means to its readers. They make it their own. Widdowson, Practical Stylistics (1992: 115) </p><p>To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author (1968; quoted in Montgomery et al., 1992:237) </p><p>In interpreting a poetic text in an attempt to search for significance, individuals, according to Widdowson (1992), resort to one of three possibilities or approaches.</p><p>They either look for significance in what the author intended the text to mean, or what the text itself in dissociation from the author means, or what the text means to the reader, as a unique individual. For those who look for the author’s intention, then “what is significant is what the writer means by the text” (ibid.: viii). On the other hand, for those, such as the New Criticism, who view significance as stemming solely from the text, then “what is significant is what the text means” and nothing else (ibid.). Finally, for those who deem the reader as the activator of meanings that are immanent in the text, then “what is significant is what a text means to the reader, whatever the writer may have intended, or whatever the text itself may objectively appear to mean” (ibid.).</p><p>It is this third view or approach to poetic interpretation that I advocate here.</p><p>Poetry - this largely Corinthian and ciceronian type of discourse - is a form of art, an unusual art though that defies conventional or canonical ways of linguistic expression. This feature about poetry being an art qua art in the first place and an unusual art in the second makes it open to a wide array of interpretations or what</p><p>Sperber and Wilson (1995) call weak or indeterminate or less determinate implicatures.</p><p>Therefore, in poetry, as an art, there is no definitiveness or certitude in interpretation.</p><p>3 Thus there is no one single exegesis or meaning. There are interpretations. There are many interpretations, as many as there are readers. There is no right or wrong, or valid or invalid interpretation as such. </p><p>Poetry with its characteristic linguistic deviation, dispersion of meanings, and disruption of accepted or established ideas and rules, divergence and convergence, art and artifice, and unusual and abnormal (linguistic or poetic foregrounding of) lexicogrammatical features, a source for aesthetic beauty and thus jouissance, is not scientific but allegorical; hence its intrinsic openness to interpretation. In the words of</p><p>Widdowson, “we can come to no conclusions. All poems, and indeed all forms of art, contain within their very design the potential for multiple significance” (p. 24). </p><p>According to Blakemore (1992), literary or metaphorical works do not have one single meaning. Therefore, Widdowson stresses that “poetic meaning is, of its very representational nature, unbounded...People with different linguistic and literary experience will read different meanings into a text” (p. 59).</p><p>Thus, as an art that is far from the mainstream and close to all that is avant- garde, poetry is open to a wide range of interpretations and meanings. Getting meaning out of a poem, or rather reading meaning into a poem as Widdowson states (1992: xi) depends on the perception of the individual, and since we are likely to view the same thing differently, depending on, among other things, the kind of schema, or world knowledge that we bring along in our interpretation process of reading meaning into a poem, then it is logical that each individual may come up with potentially different interpretations. </p><p>Though we have other types of arts such as the novel, drama, sculpture, choreography, etc., poetry is strikingly different from all other types of art. It is, as</p><p>4 Widdowson (1992) argues, cut off from normal social practice, and thus different from any other type of art or discourse:</p><p>Poems are uses of language, but in many ways they are peculiar uses of language. Their meanings are elliptical and elusive, deflections from the familiar. They seem often to be perversely obscure in their flouting of conventional standards of clarity and commonsense. They are frequently eccentric in choice of words and turn of phrase (12). </p><p>Widdowson (1992) further adds that “poetry is always in some sense perverse and its relevance lies somewhere in its perversity. It is significant because it signifies in unusual and devious ways” (12). Indeed, much of significance in poetry and art in general consists in deviance and much of artistic beauty lies in abnormality. Just as semantic or linguistic foregrounding or violation produces aesthetic images in a work of art, so are departures from the normal and the expected. </p><p>Given such unconventional nature of poetic discourse, its interpretation should not depend on the customary “procedures of interpretation” employed in our understanding of such discourse. Since poetic discourse lacks normal contextual connection or the presence of a certain context or reference, whether anaphoric, cataphoric, or even exophoric, then resort to customary procedures of interpretation is futile. A poem that is contextless or decontextulised – given the physical and temporal distance from its creator - necessarily lacks reference, and pronouns that seem indexical or deictic turn out to be non-deictic. </p><p>This non-deicticality or lack of a context or known or normal reference in poetry, in general, leaves nothing to the reader in his or her attempt to decipher such contextlessness save the poem itself as it is represented and his/her own command of linguistic and literary perception. In this case, interpretation of a poem does not depend</p><p>5 on it being referred to a particular external situational context since such a context is either unknown to the reader or does not exist in the first place. Therefore, interpretation here should depend on what the reader brings into the text, in collaboration with the representational features of the text, and in dissociation from whatever context or reference the text at the time of composition might or might not have had. </p><p>The way poetic texts are written: odd and perverse, and without any manifest context, makes the role of the reader central in contextualising the text and thus relevant to him or her in a way or another. Widdowson (1992) states that</p><p>“unconstrained by the usual communicative requirement to shape language to fit contextual conditions or a conventional pattern of accepted sense, the mind is free to exploit the possibilities of meaning” (23). </p><p>Following, there is a poem. In light of what has been discussed so far, you may want to scrutinise it and observe what kind of significance and potential meanings you can read into it, informed by your schema, or your experiences and “encyclopaedic knowledge,” and the way the text is represented. Away from the creator who is dead, see what impressions you can have (Barthes, 1967). Observe also how the text represents the “transfiguration” of what may seem “trivial” (Widdowson, 1992: 31).</p><p>“You Stole My Photo!” You accuse me of stealing your photo I swear I didn’t. I kept the original & returned the scanned, With your mum’s unequivocal consent. But even if I “stole it” to use your words, What is your loss compared to mine? If I stole the photo, you stole my HEART, Long before. What were the Greek ships on fire Compared to this loss?</p><p>6 (Aladdin Assaiqeli, 2007: 54)</p><p>Features such as the “lexical choice,” “syntactic structure,” uncanonical word order,</p><p>“prosodic shape of the verse,” “metrical movement” or tempo, verbal devices,</p><p>“intertextual associations,” or “verbal echoes,” and weak implicatures are all important features to be subjected to close scrutiny in our search for representational (rather than referential) significance (Widdowson, 1992: 45, 51, 56, and 202, respectively). </p><p>With this in mind, contemplate the following two sonnets, read and make them your own; read and “disentangle” rather than “decipher” (Barthes, 1967) multiple layers of manifest and latent meaning, of “divergent” meanings, and “convergent” patterning, as conditions for aesthetic and artistic quality; (Widdowson, 1992: 62) and last but most importantly, remember that a poetic text is like a dormant being or a defunct phoenix whose renewal or regenerativity lies in your hands; therefore, it is you and what you read into the poem, inspired of course by “the representational use of language” (ibid. p. 37), or the abovementioned features that reveal relevance: </p><p>The Nativity vs the Birth</p><p>Unstained, like a bride in her nuptial suit, Oblivious of fame, the moment of birth, The seeds of Time, a new life, a fine root,</p><p>The Maid was, a harbor ’gainst loss, a berth;</p><p>With shrines uncharted, moors undefiled;</p><p>A maiden chaste, virgin encèinte, a ma, Withdrawn, bewildered, parturient, a child, A flame of light, a sap for man’s memoir, Constricting, increased, contracting, decreased, Within, without, the gush, the pains, the flesh,</p><p>7 A vestal, mounting pressure, west and east, A rising star, a sea unleashed, a crèche;</p><p>The fall, the rise: the birth of the Quran:</p><p>Abram’s call, Daniel’s vision1: Son of man.</p><p>(Aladdin Assaiqeli, 2010: 18)</p><p>Heaven or Hell</p><p>Espied undraped, in that spa, in that pousada, Old flames erupted, with hybrid jouissance, The zest of past, the pangs of saudade, </p><p>The lushness, the embonpoint, the response,</p><p>Le dernier cri in the language of flesh;</p><p>Her steps, a piece of music played adagio,</p><p>Nature’s grace incarnate, man’s ult’mate crèche,</p><p>The Bard of Avon’s muse, Dante’s Inferno; An ex-virgin, annexed, with flesh aglow, Unlike terra incognita, known, explored; Yet it begs for further quest, deep and slow: A quest: pen’trative, avant-garde, controlled.</p><p>Unclad: Lost Paradise, pleasure ephemeral,</p><p>Unclad: Regained Paradise, pleasure eternal. </p><p>(Aladdin Assaiqeli, 2010: 20)</p><p>1 Dan 7:13/ Mat 26:64</p><p>8 As stated earlier, poetry is strikingly different from other types of art. It is strikingly different in the sense that it is elusive, another common feature of poetry that makes it again susceptible to various interpretations. It is this elusiveness or elusive reality or quality of the nature of poetry that makes it poetry in the first place and that increases what Widdowson (1992: 78) calls “poetentiality”. If poetry is not elusive, that is if poetry is exegetic in nature or definitive in interpretation, poetentiality, that is “the potential of the poetic text to activate a wider range of possible interpretations” (ibid. p.</p><p>115), will cease to be. This in turn will make poetry no longer admit of a range of meanings or measure up to the aesthetic beauty associated with it, and thus no longer poetry, indeed, not even doggerel. </p><p>This artistic and elusive nature of poetry makes it, from the reader’s perspective to lack any immanent or inherent context upon which he or she is to rely in the process of interpretation. Thus the reader is urged to explore, in light of his or her schema and the patterns in which the text is represented, the poetic text to unfold meanings and relevance. The nature of poetic discourse dictates upon the reader to find significance in how (rather than what) the text means or could mean to him or her. Widdowson (1992) observes that “what poems mean cannot be explained, but how they mean can be, and such explanation, I would argue, provides the general conditions for individual interpretation” (71). </p><p>Therefore, it is the poetic text in interaction with the reader’s experiences that are or should come into play here. It is these two aspects of the poetic text and reader’s experiences combined that make certain images to be formed in the mind of the reader.</p><p>It is this interaction between the reader, as a unique individual with different</p><p>9 perceptions and the poetic text with the way it is sculpted and represented that would yield or evoke certain meanings and images. </p><p>Relying on the text alone, or getting preoccupied by the author’s intended meaning in attempting to get meaning, without the reader being an active agent in the process of searching for significance, as a result of the interaction between the reader’s schema and the poetic text, would certainly reduce the potential poetentiality of the text. This would deprive the poetic text of vitality and poetentiality. So it is the text and the reader’s response to it or the manner in which he or she responds or interacts with it that generates a certain or certain meanings. In this connection, Widdowson (1992) asserts that “the only meaning that a text can have is what is read into it by the receiver.</p><p>On its own it is simply an inert object. You cannot eliminate the reader, for the reader is the only agent whereby meaning can be activated” (x). </p><p>Therefore, limiting significance of a text to what the text intrinsically means or what the author intended it to mean (authorial intention), in isolation of the reader inhibits interpretation, and makes a particular interpretation to sound exegetic or more authoritative than any other, and thus discourage other attempts at interpretation. “And that is,” according to Widdowson (1992: xiii) “is precisely the problem. Students are likely to be convinced into conformity and to accept” certain “interpretations as definitive, or at least more authoritative than their own,” thus depriving them of or discouraging them from exploring the text on their own and availing themselves from the elusiveness rather definitiveness of poesy. Such a view, as Widdowson (ibid.: xi) states, deprives or denies “the divergence of individual interpretation and defer (s) the judgement of an informed élite. The essential elusiveness of poetic meaning is thereby fixed, and falsified”. Consequently, as has already been stated, such approaches would stunt or hamper individual exploration and thus creativity in interpretation. Such</p><p>10 approaches, “instead of inspiring an exploration of individual experience...will simply confirm that which is established by authority” (ibid.: 6), and thus discourage new readers from engaging personally with the text, an attitude that might nip the opportunity of a dilettante from becoming a professional in the bud for it precludes the possibility of any efflorescence or growth or even appreciation of what the reader might uncover if he/she is to engage personally with the text. </p><p>Therefore, unlike those approaches which advocate seeking significance from either the authorial intention or the text as an “autonomous artefact” as the means to poetic interpretation, here the reader in our approach in his/her attempt at interpretation, is free from the trammels or dictates or views of what the original author, whose bones might have decayed hundreds of years ago anyhow, might have intended the text to mean, or what the text as a text would solely mean. Here, the reader is active in trying to construct meaning as he/she sees it. </p><p>Instead of being tied down otiosely assaying or trying to discover or decipher what the author precisely intended: the “single theological meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God)” (Barthes 1967), or what the text as a self-contained entity means, the reader is free to explore the wealth or “multi-dimensional space” (ibid.) which creative writing provides. He or she is free to move, from the inhibiting authority of either authorship or textship, to that of readership, to explore and engage his/her own creativity, aided by the text itself and the way it is represented, in constructing meaning. Away from such constraints, such freedom and personal engagement would make the interpretation process stimulating and rewarding rather than vapid and limited.</p><p>11 Thus the reader’s role here is not seen “as a matter of submitting to the authority of the text so as to provide an exegesis of its integral meaning, but of asserting an interpretation on the reader’s own authority” (Widdowson, 1992: xi). Nor is the reader’s role here is seen as an endeavour to detect what the author precisely intended.</p><p>So it is not a matter of exegesis where the text is significant and nothing else. Rather, it is an interpretation where the reader and what he or she reads into the text is what is significant or more significant. </p><p>This view clearly does not treat the text as an “autonomous artefact” (Cox and</p><p>Dyson 1965:13; quoted in Widdowson, 1992: ix) whose significance stems merely from such autonomy but rather as an artefact whose significance and worth are captured in light of the reader’s engagement in a process of exploration or what</p><p>Widdowson calls “the process of rumination”, “the process of understanding, of discovering order” (ibid.: 23), of what the reader can read into it (assisted or titillated by such exploration). </p><p>The beauty of such approach to poetic interpretation is that it gives an ample room for individual creativity in exploring a poetic text in search for significance.</p><p>“What is to be valued, therefore, in this approach is sensitivity in response and direct personal engagement with the text, recreating the text in a new form in the reader’s own experience” (Montgomery et al., 1992: 9). In the words of Widdowson (1992), such approach “seeks to stimulate an engagement with primary texts, to encourage individual interpretation while requiring that this should be referred back to features of the text (xiv)”. He further adds that “what is important here is not the interpretation itself, but the process of exploration of meaning; not the assertion of effects but the investigation into the linguistic features which seem to give warrant to these effects”</p><p>(ibid.). </p><p>12 Therefore, our approach, unlike the other two approaches, does not limit the perception of individuals or foist on them a particular exegesis that would discourage them from further trying to plumb the depth of a poem, and that is precisely the danger or drawback of the other two approaches, hence the importance of our approach which embraces Barthes’s (1967) notion of the death of the author, Freund’s (1987) notion of the return of the reader, and Widdowson’s (1992) emphasis on the reader and his or her interaction with the text. </p><p>References</p><p>13 Assaiqeli, Aladdin. (2010). The Débris of a War and Other Poems. Kuala Lumpur: IIUM Press.</p><p>Blakemore, D. (1992).Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing. Barthes, R. (1967). “The Death of the Author”. In Aspen, no. 5-6. </p><p>Freund, E. (1987). The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. London: Methuen.</p><p>Leech, G. N. (1969). A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. Longman</p><p>Montgomery, M., Durant, A., Nigel, F., Furniss, T., & Mills, S. (1992). Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading Skills for Students of English Literature. London and New York: Routledge.</p><p>Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd edn.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.</p><p>Widdowson, H.G. (1992). Practical Stylistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. </p><p>14 15</p>