H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 4 0its narrator is psychotic, but this is a reasonable implication to read
into it. We are not told by Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock that
Pinkie, its black- hearted protagonist, is en route to hell, but the
novel would make a lot less sense if this were not true. We assume
that Lear has two legs, two lungs and a liver, but the play does not
mention those facts. The problem is one of what counts as a
reasonable inference in a specific situation. And this is a matter of
judgement, which cannot be reduced to rules. It is something we
simply have to argue about.
I have already conceded that my account of ‘Baa Baa Black
Sheep’ is almost certainly not what its anonymous author meant by
it. Or, for that matter, what the children who sing it today imagine
that it means. My case is simply that the verses can be construed in
this way without sidelining some vital textual evidence, running
headlong into logical contradiction, or finding implications in the
lines which could not possibly be present. If, for example, one was
intent on trying to respect the original meaning as far as possible,
‘Baa baa’ could not be taken as referring to the sound of a motor-
bike starting up, since the rhyme long predates such machines. If a
reading of the piece depended on the little boy who lives down the
lane being the narrator himself, it would be seriously undermined
if there turned out to be a convention by which the phrase ‘the little
boy who lives down the lane’, when used in nursery rhymes, always
refers to the person who speaks it, rather as the phrase ‘Son of Man’
in the New Testament is among other things a conventional way of
referring to oneself in Aramaic. The sheep would then be giving
wool to himself, or (in another version of the piece) refusing to.
But there is no such convention.
So it is not that there is enough textual evidence to work against
this version of the poem. It is rather that there is not enough