Taken out of context this could be badly misunderstood, and so I’ll briefly summarize the overall point of Ken’s blog post: It is about the ability of interpreters to find subtle possibilities, intertextual echoes, and other means of deriving alternative meanings from a text. Ken’s point (as I understand it) is that sometimes we come up with something more complex than the author is likely to have had in mind – and in that sense “cleverer” than the original author.
I wonder if the tendency to interpret in this way is symptomatic of two factors, namely (1) a conviction that we are supposed to be recovering the meaning of the text in its original context, and (2) an awareness that so interpreted the text regularly doesn’t say what we want it to.
At any rate, Ken’s post is worth reading, and I hope it will lead to interesting conversations about interpretation both there and here.
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