Deep Thunder- Macherey

Thank you, Macherey, for your lack of parenthetical distractions, your palatable syntax, and your solid hypothesis- I love you for that. What I cannot love you for, however (but do not hate you for) - Oh my god, now I’m doing it- is failing to point out that sometimes there is not a subconscious meaning in a work, or at least not a cookie cutter self fulfilling prophesy for every reader who insists on imposing their own context or ideology on a work (and fellow students). As an English Major, sitting in on roundtable discussions of literature are commonplace. Many evenings I have sat and listened as my colleagues form legitimate hypotheses on the implicit meanings of a work we have just digested. Many others, I have dug my heels into the carpet to avoid slipping down the slope of someone who is flat out stretching it. Although some literature is widely translatable, and meaning can sometimes be open to interpretation, this is not a carte blanche for manipulating the text in order to adapt the author’s implicit theses to their explicit ones. It is important, I think, not to impose your context on literature, and further, not to then attempt to impose that opinion on fellow students. And then there’s this: sometimes we think too much and flat-out read too much into literature (and many other forms of aesthetic art). At this point, at the point of reading-in, we are going beyond misinterpreting the silence to manipulating the voice. There is a universality to literature, don’t get me wrong here, its just that the universality is not absolute, and there is perhaps more danger in over or misinterpreting (or interjecting) a message than in just failing to not find it in the first place.