Response Paper 3, Sontag/Hemmingway

In “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag famously writes, “the modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one.” What is Sontag saying about how we read?
Immediately after hearing the Susan Sontag quote from “Against Interpretation” I thought of “deconstruction” as defined by Derrida and practiced for literary analysis purposes throughout the intellectual community.  I think that Sontag is talking about this kind of approach to understanding and absorbing a text by taking it apart and examining the pieces.
When you read a text very closely, you begin to interpret meaning in every word choice.  Because the author of the piece is unlikely to be at hand or potentially even in a better place, the reader is left to scrutinize their words at their leisure.  It is impossible to know what the author intended the symbolic meaning to be, and virtually anything can be inferred.  Once a piece has been reduced to its lowest common denominator, the audience is free to claim that the writer means whatever they themselves are imposing upon it.  I think that the danger of this is that a text can be mutilated and dissected to the point that it is rendered completely meaningless and hollow.
I have read several of Hemmingway’s short stories.  I wrote a paper about “Hills Like White Elephants” and what I thought all the “sub-text” was behind the dialogue and imagery.  We discussed the meaning of the “white elephants” in terms of the girl’s eminent abortion, as the proverbial “elephant in the room”.   I wrote about the barren, dry landscape in juxtaposition with the banks on the other side of the Ebro that were lush and fertile, and how this represented her two options, the two paths her life could take from here.  Should she choose to continue living this shallow life of travel, drinks, and voyeurism, or should she start a family and settle down, look for something real?
The story is ripe with symbolism and is a great text to break down.  You can easily defend many different interpretations of the “true” story between the lines.