Abstract
When interpreting, when reading, what place should be given to details in relation to the overall picture ? We may tend to neglect them in favor of an overall interpretation. Or, on the contrary, we may want to construct a new interpretation from details taken from here and there, one that contradicts or even destroys the overall interpretation : the deconstructionist method. However, the legitimate hidden meaning is not the one that reverses the obvie meaning, but the one that pushes it further, refines it, radicalizes it in an unexpected direction and builds a new coherence congruent with what we know about the author or his time. Interpretation is an art, in the sense given to the term by Paul Valéry, because there are many ways of interpreting, some better than others, according to four categories : contresens, faux-sens, unlikely but not impossible interpretations, and finally the most probable interpretations. The mistake to avoid at all costs is over-interpretation, which opens up a slippery slope.
A text is like a person. Conversely, a writer can be read as a text. What should we make of biographical details that seem to invalidate his commitment to emancipation ? What are we to make, for example, of Voltaire's financial participation in the Compagnie des Indes, one of whose activities was the slave trade ? A person, like a text, is not necessarily coherent : seeking semantic purity in a work is as absurd as demanding moral or ideological purity in a human being. There is always a dross, an unintegratable residue, which doesn't invalidate the rest, but makes it more complex.
The anarchic proliferation of details and their incoherence are among the reasons why philosophers and moralists, right up to Immanuel Kant, have condemned novels. Mistrust of imaginative outbursts has a long tradition, from the depictions of the Temptation of St. Anthony to the readings of Don Quixote.
