| Chapter 1: | What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage |
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Judgements, in contrast, depend upon establishing a distance between initial responses and subsequent ideas about them; between an immediate perception and a consequent conceptual ordering of that perception; and then maintaining that position in reason, insofar as this is possible. In terms both of the poetic and critical reading impulse, whatever informs our logic is inferior to an initial impression, in both senses of the word.
Wallace Stevens acknowledges that we are bound to reason even as we muse on how we might escape reason’s strictures. For him, the game of meanings intuited on the very edge of signification is no nervous agitation between heaven (immediacy) and hell (thinking too much). It involves a moving among concepts which generates the expectation of a plenitude beyond any conceivable certainty of realisation. Whatever the approach chosen to facilitate a reading, it is the broadly experienced impulse to take a text in one way, rather than another, which precedes the subsequent finding of reasons for those initial choices we make. Any system of reading should defer to this natural order of things.
3. Differences
Difference of interpretation involves an often unrecognised difference of text type generated by the ‘same’ form of words, whereby a single lexical and grammatical sequence takes the reader in various—and sometimes opposite—directions.
For instance, in terms of the three-part pattern of reading here proposed, a single text—“Little Red-Cap” by the Brothers Grimm is taken as a case in point—may incline one reader to a realm of suggested or underlying meanings. (Once it has been noticed that this is the trend and tendency of the moment, the ‘surface-to-depths’ approach, the first described in the next section, is likely to prove most useful.)
Or, a second reader taking the same text from the first reader’s hands might find himself responding to it as a series of lacunae requiring his intervention to retrieve a plausible unity of sense from a patchwork of isolated meanings. (In this case, the second, ‘discontinuities’ approach I describe might prove most useful.)