Characterizing Interpretation

This weekend at AWP (a giant literary conference), I looked through at least a hundred different literary journals. Some were produced on a large scale, some were meticulously hand bound and released in a small print run. One journal that stood out came from Forklift Ohio’s table. Each copy was covered in butcher paper, and secured with twine and tape. This doesn’t sound beautiful, but it really was. Inside, the cover was a close-up picture of meat (less beautiful), bright red and marbled. The head editor at Forklift explained the reasoning behind the aesthetic choice as a physical representation of the interaction that takes place between reader and book. He believed in a kind of inherent violence (hence the meat) constituting this relationship, where the act of reading (& interpreting) changes what was originally there.

I didn’t talk to him for very long, so I’m not sure what exactly he meant by what was “originally there” (perhaps the book as a text waiting to be experienced) but it reminded me of our reading of Austin, and more tangentially, of Barthes. Austin provides the example of a marriage ceremony as a performative utterance, where saying is actually doing. The resulting act is dynamic, physically altering the space in which it exists. The physical act of tearing off the butcher paper, opening the book, and then making critical interpretations of the content seems like an analogous action. The textual field is also dynamic, as Barthes describes, with active and associative play. 

Is this play imaginative, connotatively positive? Or is it inherently violent, as the head editor at Forklift described? Constituting interpretation as violence posits the work as some kind of unblemished, whole, and complete entity. On the other hand, characterizing interpretation as imaginative orients the reader as creating the text, establishing the work itself as less than useful without interpretation.