We have already seen, in the chapter called “Why Literature Is Always Contemporary,” that however deeply rooted in a particular time period a work may be, it is always being read in “the present,” a shifting concept that is itself always open, never closed. The progressive tense of being read is a further tip-off, should we need one, since many readers may re-read, or reconsider, or re-discuss the novel, poem, or play in a class, in a reading group, upon revisiting the volume on a bookshelf, when a child or friend first encounters the same text, etc. If every production of a play is an interpretation, then so is every reading of that play. This is equally true for lyric poetry, for fiction, for sermons, for treatises, for political speeches, for any work in language that makes a claim upon our literary attention.
By attention, I mean to suggest not only a close analysis of language, rhetoric, grammar, figure, and argument but also the complex psychic process that has engaged the interest of modern-day observers from William James, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin to contemporary cognitive theorists. James defined attention as “taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form,” and he opposed it to “the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.”17
Walter Benjamin addressed the question of distraction, which for James was the opposite of attention, and found in it an alternative modern mode of cognition: art and architecture, he thought, were apprehended “much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion.” Indeed, “reception in a state of distraction” was “increasing noticeably in all fields of art” and was “symptomatic of profound changes in apperception.” But the preeminent modern genre for reception in a state of distraction was the film. At the movies, the public is put “in the position of the critic.” But at the movies, “this position requires no attention.”18
And yet “no attention” can also be a different kind of paying attention.
Freud, analyzing the dream state and the “preconscious,” distinguished between the application of attention to issues of conscious thought and the ongoing processes by which “the train of thought which has … been initiated and dropped can continue to spin itself out without attention being drawn to it again, unless at some point or other it reaches a specially high degree of intensity which forces attention to it.”19 Such preconscious or unconscious rumination, the train of thought running, so to speak, on a side track until it is ready to rejoin the main line—is how much intellectual work takes place: distraction, or sleep, or dream, or any other apparent act of inattention often accomplishes what conscious attention cannot, in reframing or rephrasing the issue or problem in order to present a different kind of attack upon it. This is another instance of “the impossibility of closure.” The way Freud describes a dream is closely analogous to how we might describe a work of literature, and the activity animating and energizing these mental artifacts or rebuses is what we have come to call, as in the English-language title of Freud’s own great book on the topic, interpretation.
Interpreting Interpretation
In early use, interpretation was a term applied to religious scripture, to writing of all kinds, and to law, but over time it also came to apply to the decipherment of human character, the assessment of military information, the translation from one language to another, and the rendering of a musical, dramatic, or artistic composition (a song, a play, a landscape). It seems important to distinguish interpretation from definition or any other “conclusive” practice; as the examples of artwork, law, spy photographs, and linguistic translation all suggest in their different ways, interpretations can be motivated, personal, fallible, opinionated, compelling, insightful, and/or brilliant. They may also be time-bound or time-linked. Biblical or scriptural interpretation (and the secular editorial practices that followed from it) was frequently cumulative: an interpreter’s views became part of the textual apparatus, to be read and interpreted, in turn, by those who came afterward. Biblical exegesis is one prevalent model for this practice, and it was, together with classical philology, the framework on which modern literary studies was based—and from which it has evolved. The expounding of an interpretation, once part of homiletics or preaching, is a matter of (learned) opinion, whether put forward by a cleric, a literary critic, or, as in the case of Freud and dream interpretation, a psychoanalyst. In any case, interpretation remains, as a practice, open-ended, always subject to revision, challenge, augmentation, change.
In 1937, long after the publication of his landmark Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote an essay that speaks even more directly to the question of closure. The essay’s title, translated into English, was “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” and it is one of the few papers on technique that Freud published this late in his career (he died two years later, putting closure of a different kind on a remarkable lifetime of work). Freud was seeing few clinical patients then; almost all the analytic sessions he conducted were training analyses—that is, the analysis of other analysts.
What would be meant by the end of an analysis? Freud asked rhetorically, and he then proceeded to offer a range of possible answers. An analysis could be ended because the patient felt he was no longer experiencing symptoms, or because the analyst felt that “so much repressed material has been made conscious, so much that was unintelligible has been explained, that there is no need to fear a repetition of the pathological processes concerned.”20 But there was also what Freud called a more “ambitious” meaning to the end of the “end” of an analysis. “In this sense of it, what we are asking is whether the analyst has had such a far-reaching influence on the patient that no further change could be expected to take place in him if his analysis were continued. It is as though it were possible by means of analysis to attain to a level of absolute psychical normality—a level, moreover, which we could feel confident would be able to remain stable, as though, perhaps, we had succeeded in resolving every one of the patient’s repressions and in filling all the gaps in his memory.”21
There are so many differences between the psychoanalyst-patient relationship and the literary analyst–literary work relationship that it is easy to jettison the analogy completely. For one thing, why not imagine that the literary work is the analyst, rather than the patient? Surely it reads us as much as we read it. And even if we were to agree with the suggestion that there is something called “normality” attached to the psychic health of human beings, there seems no possible equivalent in the realm of literature, where works are, like Tolstoy’s famous families, each, happily, unhappy in its own way. But the idea of repressed material and things that seem unintelligible does seem related to the kind of questions we ask of literary works.
Freud may help us out a little by proceeding, in his argument, to draw a textual analogy of his own as a way of describing what he means by repression. The analogy he offers (“though I know that in these matters analogies never carry us very far”)22 is one that may strike a modern readership with an uncanny familiarity, since it is the image of a book, a historical record, that has been defaced and blotted out like a security file. I will quote his long passage, which reads rather like a dream narrative:
Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times we regarded as undesirable—as, for instance, according to Robert Eisler (1929), the writings of Flavius Josephus must have contained passages about Jesus Christ which were offensive to later Christendom. At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case the book could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexce
ptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all, the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified. It no longer contained what the author wanted to say; and it is highly probable that the corrections had not been made in the direction of truth.23
With this dispassionate and chilling, proto-Orwellian vision (1984 would be written ten years later), Freud presents his analogy, one he wants to insist should not be pursued too strictly, between the operations of repression and the operations of literary censorship, forgery, and bowdlerized editing. The text conceals a secret, or a series of secrets, that have occurred as a result of a process of concealment. The censor is the pleasure principle, which does not want unpleasure to be experienced, and so overwrites, deletes, or defaces the text.
Can we use Freud’s analogy to understand the way in which closure is both sought and deferred, claimed and mistaken, in literature and literary interpretation?
The objection that psychoanalysis is not like reading and writing is answered in a way by Freud’s own text, which takes as its image for psychic repression or withholding the idea of a defaced or edited book. Although for Freud, the main topic is repression, and the image of the book occurs only as a comparison, a metaphor, or an illustration, the process he is describing can be turned on its head, since the image of unconscious rewriting is at once the story of literary history and the story of reading and interpretation. But where Freud is trying to account for a psychic economy of pleasure for the individual, an allegorical understanding of his analogy might point toward the inevitability of a reading and a writing that not only overwrites and defaces but also continues the editing process until it is newly “legible.”
Writing on the Wall
When texts and authors bring this practice to consciousness, the activity of rewriting and defacement is not always or reliably in the direction of pleasure. The most striking example from George Orwell might not be 1984 but, rather, Animal Farm, in which the apparent victory of the animals over their human oppressors leads to the painting on a wall “in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away,” the Seven Commandments that “would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live forever after.” These were the commandments:
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.24
One by one, as these commandments are breached or broken by the animal leadership now in power, the commandments are mysteriously rewritten. Pigs begin to sleep in the beds left vacant by the previous human occupants, and the Fourth Commandment is found to say, “No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.”25 After false confessions of treason are forced from some of the animals and they are summarily executed, the Sixth Commandment is discovered to read, “No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.”26 When Napoleon, the tyrant pig, develops a taste for whiskey, the animals come to realize that they must have misremembered the Fifth Commandment: “there were two words that they had forgotten. Actually, the Commandment read, ‘No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.”27 At the end of this truly disturbing “fairy story” (Orwell’s subtitle for the book), when every ideal has been lost, the animals find that instead of the Seven Commandments, only one now appears on the wall, the commandment that most readers remember (though often not in context): “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”28 The animals on the farm are bewildered: some, at least, believe that their own memories are faulty and that they have misread, or misremembered, or misunderstood the commandments.
Orwell’s novel does supply some ironic closure, in the return of Animal Farm to its previous name, the Manor Farm, and the effective erasure of the entire rebellion and the brief-lived animal utopia. For an adult reader returning to this short novel so frequently taught to children, the untrustworthiness of writing is as disconcerting and as convincing as the untrustworthiness of man. (And since the novel is itself written and read—or misread—as a children’s story, it provides an instance of the very process that it holds up to critique.)
Animal Farm was published in 1946. Six years later, there appeared another book about writing and unwriting on an animal farm, this time with a distinctly uplifting tone: E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. Written by a major contributor to The New Yorker, this “children’s book” offered the story of a spider who labored to write messages in her web in order to save her friend Wilbur the pig from slaughter. From “Some Pig” to “Terrific” to “Radiant” and “Humble,” the words that “magically” appeared in the web caught the attention of farmers, fairgoers, and the national media. “Right spang in the middle of the web there were the words ‘Some Pig,’ ” Farmer Zuckerman tells his wife.
“A miracle has happened and a sign has occurred here on earth, right on our farm, and we have no ordinary pig.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Zuckerman, “it seems to me you’re a little off. It seems to me we have no ordinary spider.”
“Oh, no,” said Zuckerman. “It’s the pig that’s unusual. It says so, right there in the middle of the web.”29
It’s not necessary to see Charlotte’s Web as a deliberate response to Animal Farm in order to note the several connections between them: mysterious writing, a clueless pig hero rather than a manipulative pig tyrant and villain, a team of animals of various kinds working together, a frame story involving thoughtful rather than scheming humans. Both texts, to be sure, have formal closure: in Orwell’s powerful satire, the pigs and men become visually indistinguishable (“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which”),30 while in White’s book, despite the heroic death of Charlotte, her spider offspring live on, and so does Wilbur. “Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.”31 In Orwell, animals become more like men, to their detriment; in White, men become more like animals, to their benefit. What remains “open” rather than “closed” however, is not only the ambivalent power of writing but also the question of interpretation. Political satire? Children’s story? Moral fable? Through the presence in both novels of the manifest theme of writing, reading, and interpretation, each becomes itself an allegory of the dangerous activity it describes and enacts.
This Möbius-strip structure—the shape of a surface with only one side that can be formed into a continuous loop—is a familiar image from modernist art and sculpture. It was a favorite, for example, of M. C. Escher, as well as a recurring presence in science fiction and time-travel narratives. This image goes back to ancient times, when it was associated, as we’ve seen, with the ouroboros, the serpent or dragon swallowing its own tail. Is this a figure of closure, or of its impossibility? The riddling form suggests that the answer to both is yes.
For a literary practice that turns this set of ideas and concepts to brilliant account, we might look to the works of Jorge Luis Borges. His short stories, essays, and parables render the sense of history, and literary history, a mise en abyme (or, as the title of his collection puts it, a labyrinth) in which ends and beginnings, befores and afters, are put in serious, witty, and profound question. The opening paragraph of “The Library of Babel” sounds strikingly similar to the Pira
nesi vision of staircases leading ever onward: “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors.” Borges’s compelling story, which has been seen to predict the vastness of the information network and has been subjected to a philosophical analysis by W. V. Quine, concludes with a meditation by the narrator:
I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end—which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order).32
As André Maurois comments, “in Borges’ narratives the usual distinction between form and content virtually disappears, as does that between the world of literature and the world of the reader.”33 This does not necessarily mean that there is no distinction between them but, rather, that Borges plays with consummate skill upon the apparent differences. His stories end where they “ought” to begin; his narrators and heroes find themselves not only quoting other authors but, in the process, becoming them. In his works, characters discover that history copies literature and not the other way around. Here is a discourse—or, if you prefer, a fiction—of literature as a first-order phenomenon, offering readers a chance to rethink priorities, whether we understand “priority” to refer to chronology or to importance. Thus the short parable entitled “Everything and Nothing” closes with the voice of the Lord speaking from a whirlwind to a figure heretofore unidentified in the text: “I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.”34
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