James Creech vs. Barbara Johnson

I really enjoyed reading James Creech's "From Deconstruction" excerpt lambasting Barbara Johnson. It's not that I didn't take away anything constructive from Johnson's article; she lays out a solid and airtight argument regarding Claggart's character. But I agree with Creech when he says that she leaves no room for other interpretations.

One thing I think that Creech's article shows us is the different lenses and biases we all as readers and critics have. I recall that once Amanda pointed out the "Jemmy Legs" ejaculation excerpt, we tried to look for more homoeroticism. That's not to say that it isn't there in the text of Billy Budd! I just wish to point out what I understand Creech to be saying in his article; that if we come to a text with a certain expectation and the purpose to find that in the text, we are eliminating other potential venues of fruitful meaning and analysis. This vaguely reminds me of philosophical concept of 'synchronicity,' a Jungian term regarding the experience of two or more events that are unrelated but are seen to take place together in order to produce meaning. One example I'm familiar with is "The Dark Side of the Rainbow" where people sync up Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album to the film version of The Wizard of Oz. The purpose of this is to see that the two mediums work together in tandem and the lyrics of the song often describe what is happening in the film. Some criticisms the Dark Side of the Rainbow has come across is that is the moments of synchronicity are overshadowed by the multiple and numerous instances where the music and film do not sync up and our brains discard information that does not fit with the pattern we have decided to see.

I'm not 100% well versed in Jungian theory, but if we take reading the text as an event and interpreting/analysing the text as a separate event, we can see how synchronicity can be applied to our studies. If we force a text into a certain argument or do not not consider the opposing side, then we fall into the fault of Barbara Johnson as Creech sees it; "Johnson acknowledged no other reason to read Melville's tale" (17). I'm primarily thinking of the ways academics sometimes do not consider that perhaps their argument is wrong, misinterpreted, or even other venues for meaning within the text.