Our only access to a story itself is through the act of its being told; by that act, the story is inevitably rearranged, deformed, and made into a new version that possesses its own singularity -- and which may then be retold again.
What this means for interpretation is that the primary object of interpetation is the narrative act of telling the story "the story," as Henry James put it, "of the story" -- and that for purposes of criticism, it matters not at all, logically speaking, what the "content" of that story is. For, clearly, failing to tell a story, in the sense of making its events radically ambiguous in meaning and content, is quite as much a narrative act as succeeding in doing so. Moreover, the "failures" in this respect of Henry James, Marcel Proust, and many other modern writers, are instructive.
They point up the existence of a principle of narrative uncertainty partly analogous to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in physics.
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