Interpreting Texts

Kim Ballard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134313914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge A Level English Guides equip AS and A2 Level students with the skills they need to explore, evaluate and enjoy English. Books in the series are built around the various skills specified in the assessment objectives (AOs) for all AS and A2 Level English courses.
Focusing on the AOs most relevant to their topic, the books help students to develop their knowledge and abilities through analysis of lively texts and contemporary data. Each book in the series covers a different area of language and literary study, and offers accessible explanations, examples, exercises, summaries, a glossary of key terms and suggested answers. Interpreting Texts: * breaks down the barriers which often inhibit the interpretation of texts
* explores a wide variety of literary and non-literary examples
* covers key skills and topics including discourse, intertextuality and theoretical approaches
* guides the reader through the literary, social and cultural aspects of text
* can be used as both a course stimulus and a revision tool.Written by an experienced teacher and AS and A2 Level examiner, Interpreting Texts is an essential resource for students of AS and A2 Level.

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Interpreting texts is essentially what A Level studies in English are all about. Whether you are studying language, literature or both, the central activity in which you will be involved is looking at examples of speech and writing with the purpose of arriving at a fuller understanding and appreciation of their meaning. The primary purpose of this book on interpreting texts is to explore how a range of approaches can be used to establish those meanings, and how a text can disclose different meanings depending on the reader or the context.

When we refer to a text in English studies, we mean any stretch of speech or writing which can be regarded as a complete unit. A text is typically made up of any number of sentences, although a sign that simply states ‘no smoking’ is a text. By contrast, a 200,000-word novel is also a text. When studying texts at A Level, it is inevitable that you will sometimes be looking at extracts and sometimes at complete texts.

When students begin an A/AS Level course in English, they are often under the impression that there is only one ‘correct’ way in which to interpret any text they are studying. Whereas it is true to say that some texts are unlikely to provoke very much disagreement as to what exactly they mean, the accepted view is that there is no definitive interpretation of any text. Although it would clearly be inappropriate to offer maverick interpretations of a text simply to make this point, there is no reason not to accept different interpretations as valid, provided they are informed and logically argued. Literary texts in particular lend themselves to multiple interpretations and there are, theoretically, as many interpretations as there are readers.

Interpretation of all spoken and written texts, whether non-literary or literary (and the division between these is increasingly being seen as debatable or artificial anyway), is a complex process, often surprisingly so. Much of the time, our encounters with texts don’t seem to place any great demands on us. For example, a chat with a friend in the college canteen doesn’t usually leave us scratching our heads trying to ‘interpret’ what has gone on. However, there are as many processes operating in an everyday conversation as there are involved in teasing out the meanings of a poem you may be studying for your course. It’s simply that we are so used to interpreting some kinds of texts that we barely notice we’re doing so, while other types of text require more conscious effort. The chief purpose of this first chapter is to consider the complexity which interpretation of texts involves, and to identify the different levels on which interpretation occurs. Each subsequent chapter then explores these levels in more detail.

A ‘SIMPLE’ EXAMPLE

To begin thinking about what ‘interpreting’ means and to begin to appreciate the complexity of this process, we will start with what appears to be a very simple text:

three pints today please

Quite possibly, your first reaction to seeing this text is that it doesn’t need interpreting at all. In other words, its purpose and meaning are transparent: it’s a note (probably left by a resident in an empty milk bottle outside their house) for the milkman to deliver three pints of milk when he receives the request. (For the purpose of this discussion, we will assume the resident is female and the milkman is male.) It’s a very short text consisting of only four words: does it really need ‘interpreting’?

Let’s begin by considering the milkman for whom the note was actually intended. It’s certain he would have had no difficulty in identifying what the resident wanted, and he would subconsciously have made a number of deductions which are not explicit in the text. His full interpretation of the resident’s note would have been something like: ‘I, a resident of this household, would like you, the milkman, on receipt of this note, to leave three pint-sized containers filled with pasteurized cow’s milk somewhere near this building, and I am assuming this will be on the same day as I am making the note available to you.’ In other words, when the milkman saw ‘three pints today’ his interpretation was that

• It was a request for a particular service he offered

• Three pints of milk (not beer) were wanted

• A particular type of milk (cow’s not goat’s, and pasteurized) was wanted

• He should leave the bottles or cartons of milk near the house

• He should leave them on the same day as he received the note

Not only this, but the milkman may also have made other (subconscious) deductions from the note. The use of the politeness marker ‘please’ would suggest that the resident was appreciative of his services. In addition, the noun phrase ‘three pints’ and the adverb ‘today’ together carry the implication that three pints was not the normal quantity, with the resident typically having one or two pints of milk delivered. (If they normally had four pints, the likelihood is that they would have written ‘only three pints today please’.) Finally, although the note is referred to above as a ‘request’, the milkman may well have viewed it as a demand, given the resident’s expectation that he was obliged to deliver the milk. This shows that the intention behind the creation of a text is also open to interpretation.

Clearly, the milkman, who is the addressee or recipient of the text, was actually doing rather more interpreting than you might initially have assumed. What, however, about the resident who wrote the note? What choices did she make in composing the note, given its very specific purpose? Initially she chose to use simple, everyday words, because these were appropriate for an unremarkable everyday event. She knew the milkman would be able to interpret the full meaning of ‘three pints today’ and so she was able to use ellipsis. It would have been absurd for the resident to have written the ‘full’ version of the note given above. She also wanted to show that the note was a request for a service which she appreciated (not a demand she expected to be fulfilled), hence the use of ‘please’, as already discussed. Perhaps most significantly, she knew how to format the note – not as a letter, or a memo or news bulletin – but using the simplicity and brevity typical of notes of this kind. In fact, she chose a ‘note to the milkman’ schema: she adopted a form used by thousands of other people throughout the country every day – and it wouldn’t have occurred to her to write the note in any other format.

In terms of the temporal (or time) context in which the note was written, the resident knew that the milkman would be the interpreter of ‘today’ at the point of receiving the note. She may in fact have written the note the night before, in which case she was really wanting the milk ‘tomorrow’, but of course she was thinking ahead to the point in time when the milkman would read the note and how he would interpret ‘today’. In other words, she was aware (probably subconsciously) of the deictic properties of some words – the way their meanings shift according to aspects such as time and place.

This brings us (again) to the social context in which the text was written. As ‘outsiders’ studying the note, we made the initial assumption that it was indeed written by a resident for a milkman and the topic was milk. However, imagine the note in a different context, such as a garden centre, where the same words might refer to the amount of water an assistant should give to each of the saplings in the greenhouse. This shows that the social context in which a text is created and received is often relevant to its meaning.

On a historical note, imagine, in a hundred years’ time, visiting a social history exhibition presenting life at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the hall devoted to food, one of the exhibits is a milk float (now an obsolete vehicle) and a display of the various goods which milkmen used to deliver, as well as some examples of bills and other texts, including the very note we have just been discussing! One visitor remarks to another how this note is a good example of the patronizing attitudes of householders of the time towards tradesmen and represented a classist expectation (thankfully now disappeared) that some people were born to provide menial services for others which they were perfectly capable of performing for themselves. Now that absolutely everyone bought their milk from a supermarket (and this was increasingly becoming the case at the time the note was written) the bourgeoisie struggle to maintain dominance over the working class was over.

WHAT THIS EXAMPLE SHOWS

The discussion of the note to the milkman is designed to show you how interpretation of texts is a complex process. As well as considering both the author and the recipient of the note and their respective roles in composing and interpreting it, we have also looked at the conventions involved in constructing a text, the temporal and social context in which the text was written and received, and possible interpretations of the text by observers not involved in its original production but able to take a long view of its meaning. The result of these considerations is that we now have a much fuller interpretation of the text’s ‘meaning’, with this understanding functioning on a number of different levels. The fuller exploration of these levels is the purpose of this textbook, and the subsequent chapters will take you through them step by step.

Exercise 1

Look at the following example, this time a literary text. Read it carefully and then answer the questions concerning your interpretation of the text that follow.

Bermondsey

It aint like your regular sort of day.

Bernie pulls me a pint and puts it in front of me. He looks at me, puzzled, with his loose, doggy face but he can tell I don’t want no chit-chat. That’s why I’m here, five minutes after opening, for a little silent pow-wow with a pint glass. He can see the black tie, though it’s four days since the funeral. I hand him a fiver and he takes it to the till and brings back my change. He puts the coins, extra gently, eyeing me, on the bar beside my pint.

1. The extract is written in the first person (I/me). What picture did you form of this ‘speaker’ or persona, and why?

2. Did you think the persona and the author were the same person? Why/why not?

3. Who did you think the persona was addressing – you the reader or some implied addressee who is also a character in the novel?

4. What deductions did you make about the time and place in which this scene occurs?

5. What type of literary work did you think this was from? Did you form any thoughts about where in the text the extract occurred?

6. Although this is only a very short extract, did you form any initial impressions about any social or political standpoint existing in the novel?

Suggestions for answer

Your first impression was probably that the speaker is a working-class character, and the clue to this is in the use of two non-standard grammatical features – ‘aint’ and ‘don’t want no chit-chat’. If you know that Bermondsey is a place in East London, then you may well have assumed the speaker was from this area, hence these dialect features. You also probably identified the speaker as male (he is a white male, and his name is Ray), not just because he is wearing a tie but because of the traditional associations of working-class men with pubs and beer-drinking.

It is unlikely that you thought the persona and author were the same person. There are two reasons for this. One is that in first person narratives the storyteller is conventionally a fictitious character constructed by the author and who has a specific role in the story. The other reason is the cultural (although not entirely accurate) assumption that novelists are most typically users of Standard English while this speaker has a non-standard dialect.

It is quite difficult to establish who the character Ray is addressing. Clearly, he can’t be addressing you as a real person, as he inhabits a fictitious world in which you have no existence. You may have noticed that the extract is written in the present tense (Bernie pulls me a pint, That’s why I’m here) which creates the impression that the scene is unfolding as Ray speaks. It’s like a commentary of what is taking place at the bar. Clearly, the addressee is not also at the bar, as what would be the point of describing what they can see for themselves? The paradox is that Ray is addressing no one, and only by opening the novel and starting to read do we even bring the character to life. However, as readers we do develop some sense that Ray is speaking to us. The informal use of the second person ‘your’ in the opening sentence creates this feeling, as too does the explanation of Ray’s thought processes in ‘That’s why I’m here’, which is a contrast to the description which makes up most of the rest of the extract.

The scene is a pub in Bermondsey. The author is relying on the reader having shared cultural knowledge about pubs in order to understand what is going on. Ray never actually states that it’s a pub, but the second sentence (Bernie pulls me a pint) indicates this is the likely venue, as the pub is the place where pints are pulled. In the ‘note to the milkman’ example above, we discussed the assumption that ‘pint’ referred to milk. Here the clue to ‘pint’ referring to beer is in the collocation ‘pull a pint’. The expression ‘to pull a pint’ is used in the context of pouring beer, but never in the context of other liquids such as milk, blood or water. Other lexical items such as ‘five minutes after opening’, ‘pint glass’, ‘till’ and ‘bar’ reinforce our interpretation that the setting is a pub as they all belong to the semantic field of public houses.

If we know about pub opening-times, we will probably deduce that the time of day is late morning. This is supported by Ray’s comment that this isn’t a ‘regular sort of day’, which suggests we’re going to hear about the events of the day. The period itself is vaguely contemporary, as implied by ‘fiver’, and we are told a funeral has taken place four days earlier. (This is clearly setting up an expectation that we are going to learn more about this funeral, and we also may wish to know why Ray is still, or once more, wearing a black tie. In fact, he has arranged to meet some friends in the pub, and they are setting off to Margate to scatter the ashes of the deceased man, Jack Dodds, in the sea.)

As already mentioned, the extract is from a novel. The main clue to this is of course the construction of the character Ray and the narrative signals, namely the mention of the day which, not being ‘regular’, implies a story worth telling, and then the sequenti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Words and Sentences
• 3 Discourse
• 4 Intertextuality
• 5 Context
• 6 Representation
• 7 Theoretical approaches
• Suggestions for answer
• Glossary