I n t e r p r e t a t i o n1 2 3down to the last detail. Yet the stories would still not be about him.
They would still be fictional.
Fictionality is one reason why literary works tend to be more
ambiguous than non- literary ones. Because they lack practical
contexts we have fewer clues to determine what they mean, so that
phrases, events or characters can lend themselves to different read-
ings. Or it may simply be that writers find themselves lapsing
unconsciously into ambiguity, or do so deliberately to enrich their
works. Among such ambiguities are sexual double entendres. One
of Shakespeare’s sonnets opens with the lines ‘When my love
swears that she is made of truth, / I do believe her, though I know
she lies.’ Alongside its obvious meaning, this could also mean
‘When my love swears that she is indeed a virgin (maid, of truth),
I do believe her, though I know she has sexual intercourse (lies).’
In Richardson’s Clarissa, we are told that the sexually voracious
Lovelace, who is also a great scribbler of letters, ‘has always a pen
in his fingers when he retires’. Richardson is surely aware of the
double meaning. The same is true of Dickens in Nicholas Nickleby,
a novel which at one point shows us the demure Mary Graham
sitting beside her beloved Tom Pinch at his organ in a rural church:
‘She touched his organ, and from that happy epoch even it, the old
companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought it of
elevation, began a new and deified existence.’ Only the charitable
or naive will imagine that this ambiguity is unintended. When
Jane Eyre notes with quiet satisfaction how round and supple
Mr Rochester’s hand is, her words may have a less innocent
implication, though one which is probably unconscious. This is
unlikely to be true of the fact that one of Henry James’s characters
is called Fanny Assingham.