Hello everyone,
I decided to make this chapter FREE since it pertains to literary criticism, and I know there are a lot of literary folks on Substack.
Thanks for reading!
—Neal and Tina
“Unchecked generosity, because it wants to maximize the sense, intelligence, and truth of authors, will want to attribute unity to the largest possible whole.”
14
Generosity Beyond the Sentence
MEANING DEPENDS ON CONTEXT, and context is a series of ever-more-encompassing wholes. The word-sentence relationship is but one part of the series. Below it are the mere sounds—prefixes and suffixes, for example—which have the word they belong to as their context (consider: ing means different things in bring and chopping). Above this stretches a long sequence of ever-larger wholes in which the same sentence can have more or less plausible alternative meanings. First the paragraph, then the chapter, the section, the book, the author’s other works, the author’s life during that period, the totality of the author’s works, the totality of the author’s life, the library in which the works are stored, the culture of which the library is but a single institution, and the sweep of world history in which that culture is but a small part, not to mention the universe itself. Something like the relation between word and sentence repeats itself on a larger scale, though in some cases the connection seems so tenuous as to be nil. Many disputes in literary theory, and perhaps in human studies generally, come down to where to draw the line. Should we interpret Marx’s earlier writings in the context of his later work? Should we interpret politicians by their actions or should we take their promises at ‘face value’?
The holistic relationship between word and sentence reappears between sentence and paragraph as well, although the sentence’s dependence on the paragraph is weaker than the word’s dependence on the sentence. We have already touched on part of the reason—words have no real purpose by themselves. They are incomplete thoughts with no reason for existing aside from their use in the sentences from which they are distilled. But sentences are complete thoughts and so do not need contextualization with equal desperation.
Even so, we know a sentence ripped out of a paragraph, taken ‘out of context’, and treated as a standalone statement can have a completely different meaning. The principles by which this holistic determination works do not seem essentially different from those at play in the dynamic between word and sentence. Generosity is again the guide, though here the consistency and coherence of thought—its unity or logical validity—must play a much larger role than they did for a single sentence. Still, there are sometimes several equally generous readings of a sentence, and sometimes it is the less generous interpretation that is the most plausible. The deciding factor is the context.
The paragraph is the next level up. The paragraph has a central point—often expressed in what grammarians call the topic sentence, though this need not be explicit—and it is through its relation to the topic that an ambiguous sentence gets its determination. If my topic were writing pens and I said, “Let’s put pigs in the pens!”, a sentence-level interpretation would yield an unsatisfactory result. It would be far more plausible and more generous to override the ‘normal’ atomistic interpretation of the sentence.
All of this is to say, generosity is a multi-faceted principle that operates in many ways at many levels. The overall sense of the paragraph must frequently adjudicate between alternative interpretations of component sentences and/or the relations between them. Sometimes it works the other way around; sometimes an especially cogent atomistic reading of the component sentences determines the point of an ambiguous paragraph. The multi-dimensionality of generosity can result in considerable uncertainty, but there is no question about the influence that a clearly-grasped whole can have on the interpretation of its parts.
How far up does it make sense to go? Clearly the relation of paragraph to chapter and of chapter to book is similar to that of sentence to paragraph, although presumably the dependence of the part to the whole grows weaker the further up the line we go. The more a part can stand on its own, the less likely it is to be ambiguous. The conclusion we can draw from this is that the assumed sense of an entire work adjudicates between alternative or competing meanings of its components, if and when there are such possibilities, all else being equal. In other words, interpretations must equally avoid conflict with facts, historical knowledge, common sense, and the like. After all, it is an empirical matter whether or not Homer was one person or many. No interpretive principle can dictate that whatever has come down to us as a ‘book’ must have a highly unified construction, though the principle does tell us to presuppose truth and unity while solving for meaning to the extent possible or plausible.
How much unity it is reasonable to expect at various levels of organization often boils down to just how much intelligence and control it is appropriate to attribute to the creative energy that brings into being the whole in question. The more a single unifying intelligence controls the creative process—the more unity of purpose, foresight, care, planning, and skill we attribute to the creative energy, and the more power and control that energy is assumed to have over its work—the less we accept explanations of the parts based on accident, circumstance, or external influences. We are entitled to use generosity precisely to the degree that intelligence and power govern the relevant literary whole. At the extreme limit of generosity, we assume the intelligence determines and explains absolutely every detail. At this extreme, the divine inspiration of the poet returns as an homage to the power of the unconscious creative process. Where there is intelligence, generosity is applicable—the more so the greater the intelligence.
In the case of writing, the intelligent or creative force is an author’s mind. But we are unsure that an author’s mind is capable of having a unity of purpose over the span of a lifetime’s output. In the case of a library, even if we assume a single intelligence gathers all the books into a unity and the library’s purpose is constant, that unity has to be comparatively weak compared to the authors who wrote the books. All of which belabors the obvious point that the librarian does not create the books collected.
Even the unity of a single work can be less than crystal clear. In some cases we question whether the work was written by a single author or, as is often the case with ancient texts, whether someone came along later and revised the original. Sometimes the author may deliberately choose not to have a unifying theme, which itself becomes the unifying theme. If nonsense is the point, then nonsensical parts are well suited to make it, and they must be arranged in such a way as to make the nonsensical point with force. But then nonsense becomes the point, which illustrates that even when writers struggle against the notion of unity, it does not really make generosity any less applicable.
Of course, not all literary works are entirely unified, and perhaps it is unclear whether they should be, but it is still true that whatever understanding we have of the whole guides us in the interpretation of the parts. Even when scholarship breaks down a work’s unity, it can do so only by attributing divided authorship to each of its component parts. Within each part, the author’s mind is assumed to reign supreme and that section of text becomes a whole that confers meaning to its own parts. Biblical scholarship is an excellent example of this. A contradiction is felt between the two creation stories of Genesis, which contradiction is thought too great to attribute to a single mind. The book once assumed to be unified and written by a single mind is now viewed as the product of several minds, but—and this is the point—each mind is assumed to have creative control over its own portion of the text. If we did not make this assumption, we could not interpret the text as the conjunction of the thoughts of two distinct minds, one with one viewpoint, the other with another. Thus the disunity gets broken up into two smaller unities, and it is the principle of generosity that tells us when a work is best understood as two works by two authors.
It is here that textual interpretation overlaps with the broadest possible application of the principle of generosity. Unchecked generosity, because it wants to maximize the sense, intelligence, and truth of authors, will want to attribute unity to the largest possible whole. Thus the principle of generosity will urge us to see Homer as a single person—the composer, if possible, or the editor of a collection if that fails. It will urge us to see the Critique of Pure Reason as having been guided by a single vision, even though it was written very poorly and over a long period of time. In order to achieve this unity it is willing and sometimes eager to go far in stretching the meaning of parts so as to eliminate contradiction. Different only is the degree of ‘greatness’ attributed by some interpreters to canonical authors like Plato, Shakespeare, or Joyce.
At the far end of the spectrum is the divine author, the infallible author of sacred scripture, and the need to preserve that infallibility by all sorts of interpretive devices, most of which come down to viewing as metaphorical what would otherwise have been taken literally. (The allegorical interpretation of the Bible was apparently pioneered by Philo in On Abraham and taken into the cannon of Christian hermeneutics by Augustine and Aquinas. It is truly the orthodox view. Fundamentalist atomistic literalism is a curious form of generosity—or piety—in which the interpreter seeks to surrender authority as arbiter of truth.)
There is, however, a crucial difference between the operation of the principle of generosity at this high level and its operation at the level of word and sentence. At the lowest level, the principle of generosity was not an option, but a necessity. When the relevant whole is larger, however, generosity becomes more a matter of choice. Generous-spirited readers will tend to attribute as much intelligence as possible to the author and will assume that whatever disunities they see are caused by their own deficiencies as readers. More critical readers will take superficial disharmonies at face value and attribute them to the author rather than the weakness of their own interpretive abilities. But so construed, the choice is a matter of character and the perceived fit between the details of a particular text and a particular interpretation of it. In such cases there is no hard necessity laid upon us to side with generosity.
Although there is no strict obligation to use the principle of generosity at the higher levels of interpretation, the principle retains even at higher levels a kind of ideal status that strongly compels us to grant more truth to the more generous interpretation, all else being equal. It is very important that this be understood as it has enormous consequences that go far beyond literary criticism.
Imagine we had two ways of doing a jigsaw puzzle, but didn’t know what it was supposed to look like when completed. One way yields a clear picture with a neat rectangular edge, and the other yields a highly irregular border with no discernible image at all. If neither solution to the puzzle has any forced fits of the puzzle pieces, who would deny that the former was the more likely interpretation? The bias is for order, all else being equal (no forced pieces). Although we do not know in advance whether a given work is highly unified or not, we do know in advance that the interpretation that reveals unity will be preferred to the one that does not, all else being equal. Thus the principle of generosity, which was at the lowest level of organization a necessity, reappears at the highest levels as an interpretative ideal—seldom, if ever, achieved, but always desired.
The truest interpretation is, all else being equal, the one that best fits the parts into a coherent whole. To the extent that we cannot make them fit, we cannot understand the work. And while it is true that in some cases the principle cannot be applied so as to illuminate every detail, this is not because there is something wrong with the principle, but rather it is because there is something odd about the work. If we can understand the text at all, the principle applies. Insofar as it does not, we do not have an alternate meaning that might be missed by an over-optimistic use of the principle—we have no meaning at all.
Table of Contents
Truth and Generosity: Chapter 14