Hermeneutics & Literature

 

How do we escape our current viewpoint and see a piece of literature as its author intended? We can't: our views are always bound up with our present concerns, just as those concerns are themselves coloured by past traditions. Hermeneutics began as the science of interpreting ancient documents, making a consistent picture when the parts themselves drew their meaning from the document as a whole, but has become important to Postmodernism and literature in general.

It was the review by Jürgen Habermas (born 1929) of Gadamer's Truth and Meaning, and the extended debate which followed, which brought hermeneutics to widespread notice. The two thinkers have much in common, but Habermas was a Marxist colleague of Adorno at Frankfurt, and saw tradition as a distortion of the human spirit. He stressed the liberating function of communication far more than Gadamer would allow, and has been tireless in freeing Marxism from Stalinist corruption, and in battling against the nihilism of Poststructuralism.

Though the Frankfurt school has traditionally been empiricist, Habermas criticized the rationality of science as effectively placing judgement in the hands of specialists, an undemocratic procedure. Man is entitled to his freedoms — from material want, from social exclusion, and from perversions that alienate him from himself. Thus his interest in Marxism, not to justify Marxist prophecies, but to rationalize and update Marx's criticisms of societies that force men to act contrary to their better natures. Labour is not simply a component of production, but how men are forced to live. Class ideologies that reduce liberties are perversions of language which we need to exhume and examine.

Like Heidegger, Gadamer sees language as the house of Being. He is also pleased with Wittgenstein's picture of language as social games. Through playing (i.e. using language) we acquire an understanding of the world. And that applies to any language. It is the learning process which is important: it mimics and provides an exemplar for human experience. And whereas Habermas sees language as a sedimented ideology, full of undisclosed corruptions and prejudices that analysis must bring to light, Gadamer finds these corruptions and prejudices as constitutive of understanding. There is no language free of them. Nor can we get outside language to some purer mode of understanding. No doubt words mirror objects imperfectly, but it is on their multiple reflecting surfaces that truth become visible.

Intention is central to Roman Ingarden's concept of the literary work, because texts preserve the acts of consciousness on the part of their writer, which are then reanimated in various ways by the reader. One can distinguish four levels in a text — word sounds, meaning units, perspectives controlling states of affair, and represented objectivities. Particularly prevalent in the last two levels are gaps or indeterminacies, which the reader fills with his own creations. But such gaps are not filled in an uncontrolled fashion, argues Wolgang Iser, but through a process of retrospection and anticipation that can overturn the text's "prestructure", the coding of the reader's usual habits and expectations. Reading indeed is a variable, complex business, which accepts the disruptions and dissonances to be expected in a modernist work. Hans Robert Jauss stresses change. Since we absorb a work only when we enlarge the horizon of our understanding, the accepted canons of literature that no longer shock and challenge may not be relevant. Meaning emerges in interaction between text and readers, often in societies very different from the writer's expectations, and so largely out of his control.

A much fuller account is available on TextEtc.

 

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Hermeneutics

 

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