I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 4 9Swift’s stance to his readers as ‘intimate but unfriendly’. There is a
touch of good- humoured sadism about the way Tristram Shandy
invites the reader to act as a kind of co- author, but in doing so
forces him to work excessively hard to make sense of the text. A
work may buttonhole the reader like an old crony, or maintain a
formal, perhaps rather frosty attitude to her. It may strike up an
unspoken pact with the reader, assuming that he is an erudite man
of leisure who shares the same civilised values as itself. Or it may
set out to disturb and disorientate those who pick it up, assaulting
their senses, defamiliarising their convictions or violating their
sense of decorum. There are also works which seem to turn their
backs on an audience, communing with themselves in private
while reluctantly allowing their meditations to be overheard.
* * *All knowledge depends to some extent on a process of abstraction.
In the case of literary criticism, this means being able to stand back
from the work and trying to see it in the round. This is not easy,
partly because literary works are processes in time which are hard
to see laid out as a whole. We also need to find a way of standing
back which keeps us in touch with the work’s tangible presence.
One way in which we can try to grasp a poem or novel as a whole
is by investigating its themes, meaning the pattern of preoccupa-
tions we find in it. In the analysis of Charles Dickens’s novel Great
Expectations that follows, this is one of the things I shall aim to do.
The most uninspired form of criticism simply tells the story of a
work in different words. Some students imagine they are writing
criticism when for the most part they are simply paraphrasing
a text, occasionally throwing in the odd comment of their own.
All the same, recounting what happens in a story or novel is