The Interpreter's Gloss: A Word on Origins

What we say seems clear enough: “It's getting late.” The words clearly say what they say, but the interpreter hears something else lurking behind them: “I think your wife means that we should be on our way” “She really means that this conversation has gone too far” “She thinks we're acting like fools.” These glosses presuppose the opacity of the words glossed. Nothing is clear to the interpreter. A literary critic will gloss a text as “literary” only if it is not plainly literary. If he can tell us what the term means, or if we already know, the gloss sheds light on the text. Standing in the light of the gloss, the text is a literary text. In the light of a psychoanalytic gloss the text will look different. The psychoanalyst and the literary critic may disagree, my friends and I may differ as to my wife's meaning, but a common assumption unites us. The text is opaque.1 On this claim rests the interpreter's whole practice: what is already clear need not be clarified. I want to explore the claim to determine whether the practice that relies on it can be justified. I confess in advance that I subscribe to the interpreter's