I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 1 9the situation narrows down the range of possible meanings to a
manageable few. When I see an exit sign over the door of a depart-
ment store, I know from the context that it means ‘This is the way
out when you want to leave’, not ‘Leave now!’ Otherwise such
stores would be permanently empty. The word is descriptive
rather than imperative. I take the instruction ‘One tablet to be
taken three times daily’ on my bottle of aspirin to be addressed to
me, not to all two hundred people in my apartment block. A driver
who flashes his lights may mean either ‘Watch it!’ or ‘Come on!’,
but this potentially fatal ambiguity results in fewer road accidents
than one might expect, since the meaning is usually clear from
the situation.
The problem with a poem or story, however, is that it does not
arrive as part of a practical context. It is true that we know from
words such as ‘poem’, ‘novel,’ ‘epic’, ‘comedy’ and so on what sort of
thing to expect, just as the way a literary work is packaged, adver-
tised, marketed and reviewed plays an important part in deter-
mining our response to it. Beyond these vital signals, however, the
work does not come to us with much of a setting at all. Instead, it
creates its own setting as it goes along. We have to figure out from
what it says a background against which what it says will make
some sense. In fact, we are continually constructing such interpre-
tative frames as we read, for the most part unconsciously. When we
read Shakespeare’s line ‘Farewell! Thou art too dear for my
possessing,’ we think to ourselves, ‘Ah, he’s probably talking to his
lover, and it looks as though they’re breaking up. Too dear for his
possessing, eh? Maybe she’s been a bit too free with his money.’ But
there is nothing beyond the words themselves to inform us of this,
as there is something beyond a cry of ‘Fire!’ to tell us how to make
sense of it. (The smouldering hair of the person doing the shouting,