One of the discussions that periodically restarts itself is that of the role of the reader in interpreting writing (or speech or film or…) and to what extent that role should be (and if so, should be acknowledged to be) individualist. Here’s what I wrote a colleague today:
Today I had a junior ask if he could use first person in his out-of-class paper due tomorrow, the topic of which is to argue for a position somewhere on the continuum of “America is God’s gift to the world” and “America sucks” (loosely paraphrased, of course). I said of course.
I suppose the idea of not using first person gained currency to emphasize the point that while there are multiple reasonable interpretations of many works of literature, not all are equally generally appropriate. And since as teachers we are trying to get students to cultivate a perspective larger than themselves, we want them to see that their initial personal reaction is not necessarily one that will be shared by other readers. Somewhere along the way, however, we seem to have equated “perspective larger than self” with “objective perspective.” The problem with the latter is that there’s no such thing. I try to get students to see that the same piece of writing can evoke different reactions from different audiences and then try to get them to correlate different reactions with different audiences. Unless we retreat into total isolationism (“everyone has her own individual reactions and there’s no point trying to explain them because they’re all different since we’re all different people”), I think getting people to see how different “I”‘s are likely to react in different ways AND WHY is what we should be doing.
There’s a natural presumption that the teacher’s perspective is “better” than the student’s in the sense that the teacher has more experience and a wider context of life and has read many more differing ideas about the literature than the student. I don’t think, if you hire good teachers, that such a presumption should be invalid. But to move from there to the common position that a student is wrong if s/he disagrees with the commonest cultural context is taking it too far–and that’s what many teachers used to do, probably many still do.
To me, we expand our perspectives when we include many other I’s in the interpretation; we narrow it when we exclude all. And in the latter case we deceive ourselves as well, since there’s no such thing as an interpretation unaffected by experience….