"Soft Filters": Some Sunshine on "Cat in the Rain".(Critical Essay)

David Herman introduces his collection Narratologies with a citation from David Lodge's essay on Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain." Lodge's essay posed a question of continuing relevance, namely, can narratology help readers achieve more refined interpretations? Contemporary narratology, as represented in Herman's book, seems to reverse the issue, arguing that interpretations, variable as they may be, play an important role in narrative analysis, not only in determining plots, characters, and setting, but also in shaping our understanding of the discourse itself. When we say, for example, that character X is focal, we have opted for one interpretation rather than another. And since interpretations vary, it is possible that another reader might weight the narrative discourse in a different way. Or because different readers conceive the theme of a story differently, there might be a difference of opinion about whether the plot "resolves" questions (Barthes's risques) or only "reveals" a state of affairs. (On the distinction between plots of resolution and plots of revelation, see Chatman, Story 48). In saying that the critical decision to attribute a certain narrative feature presupposes an interpretation, however, I do not mean to deny that such a feature has an independent theoretical existence identifiable across narrative texts.

The entity I wish to discuss is character point of view, or what I prefer to call "filter" (rather than "focalization"), distinguishing it from the narrator's point of view, which I call "slant" (Chatman, Coming to Terms, ch. 9). Clearly, the nature and placement of filter are subject to individual and collective differences in interpretation. Without relinquishing gains in understanding of how structures operate with some uniformity across the universe of narrative texts, narratologists must pay more attention to the role and influence of interpretation.

One source of change in reader input results from general cultural presuppositions. Most contemporary readers would share the view of Lodge and previous inter preters Carlos Baker and John Hagopian about the general point of Hemingway's story, namely that it recounts how a bored and lonely young American wife is dragged around Europe by her husband, George, a bookish chap, who neglects her emotional needs. However, few today would agree with Baker's patriarchal suggestion that the wife's longings are irrational, or with Hagopian's psychoanalytic view that the man in the cape (in the twelfth paragraph) symbolizes a sheathed penis--Freud's hand, and that of symbolism generally, falls less heavily these days.

These are simple and obvious illustrations of how readings change with the intellectual climate. Whether Hemingway's own views were closer to Baker's than to ours, of course, is irrelevant, as is the…