H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 4 4preoccupations of our time, other than in the sense that any act of
reading is. It also claims to be true to the text as it stands, without
doing flagrant interpretative violence to it. It is not, in other words,
as daring or as radical as midrash. It does not argue that the black
sheep is meant to be Bono, or that the three bags of wool stand for
three reasons why neo- Keynesian theory is inapplicable to the
modern Hungarian economy.
One reason why we might tolerate such apparently exotic
accounts of texts is that when it comes to literature, not a lot is at
stake. Nobody is going to lose their lives, or even their livelihoods,
over the question of whether the narrator of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’
is surly and domineering, unless I teach this critical approach to
students who report me to the Dean for professional incompe-
tence and incurable frivolity. People may stand to lose their liveli-
hoods, liberties or even lives, however, if a legal document is read
in too free a way. Sometimes it is licence one wants and sometimes
not, depending on what one might call the regime of reading in
question. When it comes to roadsigns or medical prescriptions, a
strictly literal, unambiguous meaning is desirable; at other times, as
with jokes and modernist poems, playfulness and ambiguity may
be the point. There are occasions when meaning needs at all costs
to be nailed down, and other times when it may float triumphantly
free. Some literary theorists would claim that if you happen to find
this interpretation of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ rewarding and thought-
provoking, then that is enough reason to adopt it. Others would
insist that such interpretations must be cognitive, in the sense of
yielding us accurate knowledge of the work.
Literary works may best be seen not as texts with a fixed sense,
but as matrices capable of generating a whole range of possible
meanings. They do not so much contain meaning as produce it.