A Philosophically Based Technique
"Meaning and Distance" undertakes an assessment of the various views concerning "Correspondences", a poem by Baudelaire which is convenient for our purpose, as almost everyone knows it. Moreover, beyond the example, our essay deals with the study of any fictional work. Interpreting a literary piece raises the issue of securing a defendable meaning for its content. A method is thus needed to distinguish between the various degrees of confidence deserved by the different interpretations. Disregarding the useless sophism according to which the author had no specific purpose, we are looking for the original meaning of the text, a meaning impossible to define precisely, but identifiable by its likelihood. We just study what the author consciously intended, because even if a thousand ideas involuntarily crossed his mind, in the event he could not avoid having, mostly when he was sane, a rough grasp of their outcome. In order to filter out the best interpretations, we start from the idea that the greater the distance between the words used, the more the failings of our memory will prevent us from connecting them in the strongest possible way, except when there is an explicit reminder. We devise a method of calculation following that of probability calculation and based on this principle. If the greatest plausibility is 1/1 = 1, we put a quantity, 2 for example, as the denominator, for such and such a distance between words that are to be connected according to one interpretation. Then we distinguish obstacles other than distance and thus include in the denominator the numerical equivalents of the risk of false interpretations, such as in 1/(2)(2)(2)(2), which gives a plausibility of 1/16. We then explore in each part of the study further fields in which to apply this method.
Michel Magnen