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of interpretation is via “narrative banalization.” It is when we take a narrative
as so socially conventional, so well-known, so in keeping with the canon, that
we can assign it to some well-rehearsed and virtually automatic interpretive
routine. These constitute what Roland Barthes called “readerly” texts in con-
trast to “writerly” ones that challenge the listener or reader into unrehearsed
interpretive activity (Barthes 1985).
In a word, then, it is not textual or referential ambiguity that compels in-
terpretive activity in narrative comprehension, but narrative itself. Narrative
seduction or narrative banalization may produce restricted or routine interpre-
tive activity, but this does not alter the point. “Readerly” story interpretation or
“hack” story constructions can be altered by surprisingly little instruction (See,
for example, (Elbow 1986)). And the moment a hearer is made suspicious of
the “facts” of a story or the ulterior motives of a narrator, he or she immedi-
ately becomes hermeneutically alert. If I may use an outrageous metaphor, au-
tomatized interpretations of narratives are comparable to the “default settings”
of a computer: an economical, time- and effort-saving way of dealing with
knowledge - or, as it has been called, a form of “mindlessness” (Langer 1989).
Interpretation has a long history in biblical exegesis and in jurisprudence.
It is studded with problems that will become more familiar shortly, problems
that have to do more with context than text, with the conditions on telling
rather than with what is told. Let me tag two of them better to identify them
for subsequent discussion. The first is the issue of
intention
:“why”thestory
is told how and when it is, and interpreted as it is by interlocutors caught in
different intentional stances themselves. Narratives are not, to use Roy Harris's
felicitous phrase, “unsponsored texts” to be taken as existing unintentionally
as if cast by fate upon a printed page (Harris 1989). Even when the reader takes
them in the most “readerly” way, he usually attributes them (following conven-
tion) as emanating from an omniscient narrator. But this condition is itself not
to be overlooked as uninteresting. It probably derives from a set of social con-
ditions that give special status to the written word in a society where literacy is
a minoritarian prerogative.
A second contextual issue is the question of
background knowledge
-ofboth
the story teller and the listener, and how each interprets the background knowl-
edge of the other. The philosopher Hilary Putnam, in a quite different context,
proposes two principles: the first is a Principle of Benefit of Doubt, the second
a Principle of Reasonable Ignorance: the first “forbids us to assume that . . .
experts are factually omniscient,” the second that “any speakers are philosoph-
ically omniscient (even unconsciously)” (Putnam 1975: 278). We judge their
accounts accordingly. At the other extreme, we are charitable toward ignorance
