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Hermeneutics or PoeticsAuthor(s): Matei CalinescuReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 1-17Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202111 .

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Hermeneutics or Poetics*Matei Calinescu / Indiana Universityat Bloomington

Since the advent of modernity, the problem of reading and interpretingliterary texts has posed itself increasingly in terms of contextuality. Thedogmatic past, with its unquestioned authority of tradition, has beengradually replaced in the last two centuries by a plastic historical pastthat is constantly questioned and reshaped according to criteria evolvedby the present. Historicism first asserted itself by stressing the im-portance of historical contexts, indeed their primacy: to understand awork of the past was largely a matter of discovering and specifying thesetting in which it had appeared (cultural, social, psychological). Butsuch historical contexts, it was eventually realized, no matter how objec-tively and painstakingly established, had nothing "fixed" or definitiveabout them.Once historical knowledge becomes aware of its own historicity, thepast ceases to be static, frozen time, whose complex crystalline forma-tions are there to be contemplated, analyzed, and finally understood intheir arrested succession. From the point of view of modernity, which isa protean point of view, and self-consciously so, no aspect of the histori-cal past can be seized once and for all simply because the past keepschanging with every meaningful change in the present. As early as 1917,in his famous essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliotadvanced the notion of a flexible literary past, a past whose significance isto be unendingly redefined in light of what happens in the present.Tradition, in the sense of the ideal order of all the works that have beencreated, Eliot argued, is continuously modified by "the supervention ofnovelty." When a new work appears, "the relations, proportions, valuesof each work of art toward the whole are readjusted."'Such a view of an ever-changing tradition is both a result of and a

*Paper read at the Conference on Theories of Interpretation, organized by the DivinitySchool of the University of Chicago, November 17-19, 1977.1T. S. Eliot, SelectedProse, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1975), p. 38.? 1979 by The University of Chicago. 0022-4189/79/5901-0001$01.30

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The Journal of Religionreaction to historicism. Historicism triumphs in a critique of historicalconsciousness. If contexts (and even historical contexts) are in realitynothing but constructs created by the interpreter, then the very conceptof "historical time," based on the model of linear succession, on thenotion of a sequential-chronological development, ceases to be theuniquely relevant frame of reference even within the domain of purelyhistorical studies.This weakening of historical time is even more apparent in the area ofartistic or literary studies, where modernity is responsible for theemergence of a highly sophisticated and paradoxical form of time con-sciousness. Some of the possibilities contained in this new, historical-antihistorical, time consciousness are indicated in an essay byJorge LuisBorges, "Kafka and His Precursors" (1941), which may be seen as anattempt to apply, and therefore to specify, Eliot's general approach tothe question of tradition/novelty.Borges's thesis is formulated straightforwardly (Eliot being given duecredit in a footnote): "The fact is that every writer creates his own pre-cursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modifythe future." Who, then, are Kafka's precursors? Borges thinks he canrecognize Kafka's voice "in texts from diverse literatures and periods"and records some of these in (ironically) chronological order. There is,Borges contends, a Kafkian element in Zeno's paradox against move-ment (Achilles who cannot reach the tortoise poses a problem that "is,exactly, that of The Castle").2A Chinese apologue about the unicorn isanother unexpected example of early pre-Kafkian writing. Then, closerto us in time, Kafka's voice is identified in texts by Kierkegaard, RobertBrowning, Leon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. The conclusion of the essay isimportant: "If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I haveenumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them re-semble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each ofthese texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser extent, butif Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; inother words, it would not exist."3What does all this mean? Simply that, in the world of reading, theterms of the fundamental relationship of anteriority/posteriority, uponwhich our ordinary or immediate historical consciousness is based, canbecome interchangeable. The ineluctably ongoing causal-temporal re-lationships implied in our historical terminology, then, cease to be bind-ing. In reading, a new kind of time appears, both active and retroactive,both linear and circular, continuously shifting between these oppositeideal models. This historical-antihistorical time, to give an example,

2Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, d. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: NewDirections Publishing Corp., 1964), quotations from pp. 201, 199, and 199, respectively.3Ibid., p. 201.

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Hermeneutics or Poeticsshould allow us to use the notion of "influence"(so restrictivelyandone-sidedlyunderstoodby positivism)both in its "normal" ense and in adirectly opposite but equally valid sense. Thus we may speak of theinfluence of the "metaphysicals"n the modernistpoets,but withno lessjustification of the influence of the modernists on the metaphysicals. Thequestion, "Who came first?" s pointlessin the universe of reading.4The anteriority/posteriorityrelationship, compelling as it may bewithin the framework of positivist one-way historicism, is constantly(although in general tacitly)challenged by any reader's real experienceof literature.We do not readliterarytexts in chronologicalorder of theirappearance. What happens, I think, is rather that we reach the greatclassicsat a relatively atestageof our literaryeducation. Butactually hisbackward movement from the present to the past, and from a recentpast to a more remote one, is as irrelevantto our discussion as its oppo-site. Fromthe reader'spoint of view the literarypastappearsas a hugereservoir of possibilities:which ones are realized first and which oneslater does not count as much as the discovery that among thesepossibilities-these books that I have read in whateverorder and thesethat waitfor me to read them-there are countlessinterconnectionsandsubtle interdependencies.A book containsall books and is containedinall.Once the inadequacy of the anteriority/posterioritydistinction be-comes apparent, other time-honoredoppositionsderived from it, such

4The notion of "inverse influence," as we may label it, has been advanced in Americancriticism by Harold Bloom, who discusses some of its implications in the last chapter of hisAnxietyof Influence, "Apophrades or The Return of the Dead" (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1973). "Yeats and Stevens, the strongest poets of our century," Bloom writes,"and Browning and Dickinson, the strongest of the later nineteenth century, can give usvivid instances of this most cunning of revisionary ratios. For all of them achieve a style thatcaptures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time almostis overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitatedbytheirancestors"(p. 141). But Bloom's concept of "influence," based on the Freudian scenario of aruthless fight between sons (the late-coming poets) and fathers (their great literary ances-tors), is essentially confined to the linear model of historical time. Bloom's entire theoryhinges on the idea of "belatedness" and the deep frustrations that presumably go with it.Thus, the "tyranny of time" is not really overturned; this is only an illusion whose explana-tion is found in the success of the "revisionary movement." From Bloom's point of view, thetemporal paradoxes suggested by Borges are simply a "witty insight." Bloom writes: " ... Iwant to distinguish the phenomenon from the witty insight of Borges, that artists createtheir precursors. .. I mean something more drastic and (presumably) absurd, which is thetriumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one's work, that particular passages in hiswork seem to be not presages of one's own advent, but rather to be indebted to one's ownachievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one's greater splendor" (ibid.). Inspite of his attempt to "dramatize" influence, in spite of the agonistic-antagonistic vocabu-lary that he employs (poetry is misinterpretation, misunderstanding, misprision, disci-plined perverseness, etc.), Bloom's "influence" is compatible with a disappointingly banalview of linear time, in which the only "original" addition consists of seeing the relationbetween anteriority and posteriority in terms of a generational conflict (anteriority appearsas a privilege which posteriority tries, sometimes successfully, to contest).

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The Journal of Religionas the one between "primary"and "secondary" texts, must also undergocritical scrutiny. Geoffrey Hartman remarks that this distinction couldoccur only within the framework of a (traditional and traditionalist)hermeneutics based on a "description of life which divides it into 'origi-nal' and 'secondary' components-vision and mediation, experience andrationalization, Bible and books." But, Hartman argues, "We have en-tered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literary-critical texts. Longinus is studied as seriously as the sublime texts hecomments on; Jacques Derrida on Rousseau almost as interestingly asRousseau. This is not as perverse as it sounds; most of us know Miltonbetter than the Bible, or have read the latter again by way of Milton."5Inthe essay from which I have just quoted, Hartman goes on to speak of ageneral decline of hermeneutics as a characteristic of our time. He doesnot go so far as to condemn interpretation outright (as Susan Sontag didin her Against Interpretation, n which she said that interpretation hadbecome "reactionary" and affirmed that "in place of a hermeneutics weneed an erotics of art"),6but he clearly sets interpretation against her-meneutics, an opposition which I personally find intriguing. Here iswhat Hartman writes in his "The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis": "Even asinterpreters ... we must set interpretation against hermeneutics. For thedistinction between a primary source and secondary literature, or be-tween a 'great Original' and its imitations, is the sphere in which tradi-tional hermeneutics works. It seeks to reconstruct, or get back to, anorigin in the form of sacred text, archetypal unity or authentic story. Toapply hermeneutics to fiction is to treat it as lapsed scripture; just as toapply interpretation to scripture is to consider it a mode, among others,of fiction. Both points of view, it can be argued, involve a categorymistake."'7For the last twenty years or so, hermeneutics (defined as a generaltheory of interpretation) and interpretation as a form of practical criti-cism (based on the assumption that there is something in a literary textthat lies deeper than its immediate meaning) have come under attackfrom certain quarters of the more "advanced" intelligentsia. The first tobecome impatient with interpretation, with the search for the hiddenmeaning of a poetic work, were naturally the poets. As long ago as the1870s, we recall, Rimbaud answered his mother's naive question aboutwhat he had intended to say in Une Saison en enfer by stating with sugges-tive bluntness: "J'aivoulu dire ce que ?a dit, litteralement et dans tous lessens." In his essay "Figures," Gerard Genette cites the angry reaction ofAndre Breton when confronted with a paraphrase which was supposed

5Geoffrey Hartman, TheFateofReading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p.17.6Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1969), p. 23.7Hartman, pp. 16-17.4


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Hermeneutics or Poeticsto convey what Saint-Pol-Roux had meant to say in a certain poem:"Non, Monsieur, Saint-Pol-Roux n'a pas voulu dire. S'ilavait voulu dire, ill'aurait dit."8 More recently, we know of Beckett's complaints about the"overinterpretation" of his works (a form of maltreatment) and recall hisoften-quoted answer to the director, Alan Schneider, who was inquiringabout the meaning of Godot: "If I had known, I would have said it in theplay."Along the same lines are Robbe-Grillet's strictures against attribut-ing transcendent meanings to literary texts (such as those of Kafka)whose real power lies in their "visionary presence" and in their "hal-lucinatory effect [which] derives from their extraordinary clarity and notfrom mystery or mist."9Interpretation, in such views, is not only an unwelcome intruder butposes a definite threat with regard to the very integrity of the work itpurports to elucidate. In short, interpretation appears as an aggression.If "apoem should not mean but be" (Archibald MacLeish), it is clear thatany kind of interpretative criticism turns against the raison d'etre ofpoetry, which is simply to be, to be there. Such reactions against inter-pretation by writers and artists-the number of examples could bealmost endlessly multiplied-are little more than symptoms of moderni-ty's antitraditional cast of mind, unreflective attempts to recover theimmediacy of art from the stifling burden of having to "mean" this orthat, of having to "mediate" between this or that, of having to be a mere"reflection" of a historical or even eternal truth.On a theoretically more sophisticated level, hermeneutics has to face amore formidable adversary. This enemy-whose identity and namekeep changing but whose interest may be seen as centering on the notionof "structure," whether this notion is taken as a methodological goal orwhether it is itself subjected to a "parastructuralist"critique-rather thandirectly contest interpretation, prefers to sharply limit its scope, to makeit appear as a marginal and somewhat old-fashioned, if not altogethersuperfluous, activity. So it is all right to go on interpreting, if one cares tointerpret. Hermeneutics may even have its minor tasks to perform, butthis should not divert us from dealing with the much larger problem ofthe interplay between rules, relations, and formal factors of meaning-of all meaning, and not of this or that particular meaning as in-corporated in this or that particular work. Once this larger problem isrecognized, a new hierarchy of interests and research purposes imposesitself. Insofar as literary criticism is concerned, this means that "poetics"should take precedence over any kind of literary history, as well as any

XG6rardGenette, Figures (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 205-6. Here are Genette'scomments: "Lalitt6ralit6 du langage apparait aujourd'hui comme l'etre meme de la poesie,et rien n'est plus antipathique ia cette idee que celle d'une traduction possible, d'un espacequelconque entre la lettre et le sens."9Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press,1965), p. 164.5


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The Journal of Religionkind of theory or practice of interpretation. The rightful areas andpursuits of historical or interpretative criticism can, in this view, be de-fined only from the standpoint of a "science of literature," a general poet-ics, which, to quote its most authoritative advocate and spokesman,Roland Barthes, "ne pourra etre une science des contenus (sur lesquelsseula la science historique la plus stricte peut avoir prise), mais une sciencedes conditions du contenu, c'est-4a-diredes formes: ce qui l'interessera, ceseront les variations de sens engendrees, et, si l'on peut dire, engendrables,par les oeuvres: elle n'interpretera pas les symboles, mais seulement leurpolyvalence; en un mot, son objet ne sera plus les sens pleins de l'oeuvre,mais au contraire le sens vide qui les supporte tous."10 Practicalcriticism--la critique-deals with the meaning of a particular work. Butthis particularized meaning (contrary to the naive and widespread opin-ion) is not there to be "translated"or "deciphered." What criticism reallydoes, consciously or not, is to produce a certain meaning, a meaning thatis legitimate only when it is fully derived from the form of the work, thatis, from the text itself, whose actual content is its form. In Saussureanterminology, Barthes regards the work as langue (language), whichshould be separated from parole (speaking), the latter being nothing butthe execution, always individual, always more or less accidental, of theessential, systematic langue. The critic, therefore, has only an "executivefunction" vis-a-vis the work-"il donne une parole [parmi d'autres] ia lalangue mythique dont est faite l'oeuvre."" The production of meaningby the critic is or should be a strict operation, a sort of "anamorphosis":guided "by the formal constraints of signification."12 Some interpreta-tion, Barthes admits, can be involved in the process, but this should havenothing to do with unveiling a signified (or reference). The aim of suchinterpretation is simply to discover, beyond the signifiers or symbolsimmediately given in the work, a second set of signifiers. What criticismcan do (if it is to be justified from the point of view of poetics) is toestablish "homologies" between various chains of symbols; it cannot pre-tend to reveal a signified: "Ce qu'elle devoile ne peut etre un signifie (carce signifie recule sans cesse jusqu'au vide du sujet), mais seulement deschaines de symboles, des homologies de rapports: le 'sens' qu'elle donnede plein droit ai l'oeuvre n'est finalement qu'une nouvelle efflorescencedes symboles que font l'oeuvre."13

Conceived this way, interpretation becomes not "arbitrary"-as theacademic adversaries of la nouvellecritiquehave argued-but on the con-trary a fairly rigorously controlled methodology of bypassing meaning inthe conventional sense (meaning is a snare), a move from a first set of"oRolandBarthes, Critiqueet verite (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 57.l"Ibid., p. 64.12Ibid., p. 71.13Ibid.

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Hermeneutics or Poetics(immediate) signifiers to a second one, less directly accessible. Barthesspeaks of a "profound reading," lectureprofonde,but he instantly takesback the epithet and replaces it by "profiled"; the reading he advocates isa lectureprofil&e.Let us note in passing that the dislike of such words asprofond, profondeur,etc., is quite widespread in the circles of the Parisianintellectual avant-garde. The interpreter, then, must be aware of thedangers and pitfalls of the signified. Meaning should be avoided, voided,systematically driven out from the series (potentially infinite) ofhomologous signifiers. Barthes's elegant and sometimes fascinating criti-cism (he is without doubt a great writer) revolves around the idea ofabsence. Absence of the subject, absence of the signified, an extremelydemanding and complex emptiness, become the goals of criticism.In Critiqueet verint,from which I have quoted, Barthes mentions withapproval Paul Ricoeur's definition of the concept of "symbol"as a pointof departure for a logic of double meaning, irreducible to the linearity ofsymbolic logic. Like Ricoeur, Barthes opposes to the univocal symbolismof modern logic the multivocal symbolism of discourse, specifically liter-ary discourse, as realized in what he calls la langue plurielle. But Barthes'sposition has nothing to do with the type of hermeneutics proposed byRicoeur, a hermeneutics grounded in the "reflective function" of thecogito, which "opens up a new field of experience, objectivity, and re-ality," namely, the field constituted by the "signs scattered in the variouscultures of that act of existing."14 Barthes may be seen rather as anextreme representative, in literary criticism, of the "hermeneutics ofsuspicion," in which the very act of interpreting becomes suspicious ofitself and ends up by suppressing both the cogito(the subject) and reflec-tion and by transforming itself into a technique of derealizing meaning(insofar as meaning is a mode of being).The great master of Barthes and of the best "structuralists"or "para-structuralists" in French criticism is not so much Ferdinand de Saussurebut, as Georges Poulet has suggested, Mallarme.15From the perspectiveof his own "phenomenology of critical consciousness," Poulet describesBarthes's conception of literature and criticism in the following way:"Dans le discours critique de Roland Barthes se pergoit toujours l'inten-tion d'etablir, par-dela le langage-objet, un autre langage, medium lin-guistique d'oui toute designation concrete serait abolie, d'oiu toute sig-nification relative a un monde externe se serait evanouie, et ou l'objecti-vite verbale, purgee de toute signification externe et adventice, se con-tenterait de se signifier elle-meme, et cela rien que par son fonctionne-

14PaulRicoeur, Freud and Philosophy:An Essayon Interpretation,rans. Denis Savage (NewHaven, Conn.; Yale University Press, 1970), p. 52.15Georges Poulet, La Consciencecritique(Paris: Jose Corti, 1971), p. 280. Poulet writes:"Ainsi se decele dans le structuralisme une pretention egale ' celle de Mallarme, celle deremplacer l'etre vrai des objets et du moi par un etre verbal, le realite par une parole."7


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The Journal of Religionment. L'activite litteraire deviendrait une combinatoire de mouvementsverbaux. A ce degre ... l'oeuvre se revelerait au critique dans une ab-sence totale d'individualite, de subjectivite, et meme de signification."16For Barthes, reading is nothing but a "traversal of codes" (a code, aswe are told in S/Z, being "a perspective of quotations, a mirage of struc-tures");17 its purpose is to establish a "galaxy of signifiers, not a structureof signifieds."18 Interestingly, Barthes's cult of absence and sterility man-ifests itself indirectly, but how suggestively, in the rejection of fullness."Repleteness" in and by itself is disgusting, and when referring to itBarthes cannot help using, in his habitually subtle and icy fashion, a toneof unequivocal disparagement. Consider the following passage from S/Z:... Anyclassic(readerly) ext is implicitlyan artof RepleteLiterature:iteraturethat is replete: like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked,safeguarded(in this text nothing is lost:meaning recuperateseverything); ikeapregnant female, replete with signifiedswhich criticismwill not fail to deliver;like the sea, replete withdepths and movements whichgive it its appearanceofinfinity,its vast meditativesurface;like the sun, replete with the glory it shedsover those who write it, or finally, acknowledged as an establishedand rec-ognized art: institutional.This Replete Literature,readerlyliterature,can nolonger be written:symbolic plenitude (culminating n romanticart) is the lastavatarof our culture."9The last? Perhaps not. The institutionalization of absence, emptiness, lecreux, of a strange sort of negative theology of meaning, has been underway for some time. Barthes's own texts have become textbooks andexamples of "readerly" criticism-literature, replete with the negativepresence of all the meanings it has rejected or erased.IIThe science of literature or poetics (in a sense already defined by PaulValery in his 1937 address "L'Enseignement de la poetique au Collegede France")20 is ultimately an analysis of literary discourse in terms of

16Ibid., pp. 270-71.17Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974), p. 20."8Ibid., p. 5.19Ibid., p. 201.20Paul Valery, Oeuvres, Pleiade edition, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard, 1957-60),1:1438-43. Poetics, Valery thought, should serve as a theoretical introduction to a newkind of history of literature, understood "non tant comme une historie des auteurs et desaccidents de leur carriere ou de celle de leurs ouvrages, que comme une Historiede l'esprit ntant qu'il produitou consommede la 'litterature,' t cette histoire pourrait meme se faire sansque le nom d'un ecrivain y ffit prononce" (p. 1439). Poetics, then, is nothing but a histori-cally conceived theory of literature: "Le nom de Poetique nous parait lui convenir, enentandant ce mot selon son etymologie, c'est-a-dire comme nom de tout ce qui a trait a lacreation ou a la composition d'ouvrages dont le langage est a la fois la substance et le moyen

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Hermeneutics or Poeticsdifferences from other types of discourse and also in terms of the inter-nal differences, within the sphere of literature, between historical andgeneric types. Poetics, then, focuses not on literary works as such,although it uses them as examples, but on the various qualities thatjustify their discussion under the rubric "literature," that is, on what theRussian Formalists used to call literaturnost,"literariness." In short, poet-ics aspires to study and classify literary conventions and devices. Thetrouble with the notion of literariness is that literature always has beenone of the most heteronomous activities of man, and to isolate its literar-iness is an extremely difficult task. It may even be that literariness-thepure difference between literature as art and nonartistic literature-is autopian concept, something absolutely ungraspable. The proponents ofpoetics tend to take the idea of literariness-and its reality as an object ofscientific study-for granted. If this is done, hermeneutics and inter-pretation can be easily assigned a secondary, minor role and can even bedismissed as inadequate not only for the fulfillment of the tasks thatpoetics sets itself, but also in regard to the "legitimate" aims of the readerof a particular text. Echoing Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov writes in hisessay "How to Read?" (1969), collected in The Poeticsof Prose, that "themoment we produce a discourse on literature, we rely, willy-nilly, on ageneral conception of the literary text; poetics is the site where thisconception is elaborated."21 Poetics is distinct from reading (lecture),although the former offers the latter a set of procedures and concepts,which Todorov discusses under the labels of "superposition" and "figu-ration" on the two levels of the intratextual and the intertextual. Insofaras reading is an application of poetics it is distinct from interpretation.By interpretation Todorov refers "to any substitution of another text forthe present text, to any endeavor which seeks to discover, through theapparent textual fabric, a second more authentic text."22 Fodorov rec-ognizes that in any particular reading of a text-the number of possiblereadings being indefinite-"there are points of focalization. . .. But inorder to discover them we cannot apply a procedure based on externalcriteria"; we must choose "such points, axes and nodes, . . . as a conse-quence of their role in the work." This choice is responsible for theplurality of our readings of the same text, and it is this choice that

..." (p. 1441). Literary art is seen as being, among the other arts, "celui dans lequel laconvention joue le plus grand role" (ibid.). Poetics would therefore consist of a study ofliterary conventions (sound, meaning, syntactical forms, concepts, images). Valkry's notionof literary convention is very close to that of "literariness" as defined by the RussianFormalists of the 1920s and further elaborated by Roman Jakobson.21Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1977), p. 237.22Ibid., p. 238.

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The Journal of Religionentitles us to "speak of a more or less rich reading (and not simply of atrue or false one)."23

In "How to Read?" and in several other theoretically oriented essaysincluded in The Poeticsof Prose ("Language and Literature," "Poetics andCriticism," "An Introduction to Verisimilitude," etc.), as well as in hislengthy discussion of poetics in the multiauthored volume Qu'est-cequelestructuralisme1968), which was issued separately, in a thoroughly revisedversion, in 1973,24 Todorov, who is also the editor of the journalPoitique, appears as one of the most cogent, intellectually versatile, andunprejudiced proponents of poetics. His contributions to the subject alsohave the merit of being highly readable, a quality not to be despised in adiscipline whose representatives, with few exceptions, seem more inter-ested in concocting new terminologies (made up of whimsical coinagesand borrowings from the most heterogeneous sciences, from algebra topsychoanalysis) than in addressing themselves to the existing issues-what they have to say about these, once the terminological barrage issuccessfully traversed, is very often poignantly naive if not self-evident.Todorov's approach to poetics and the question of reading (more pre-cisely, his concept of literariness and his defense of a purely immanentreading, entirely subsumed under the category of literariness and reject-ing, as a matter of principle, any procedure derived from "externalcriteria") is open to two lines of criticism.Take first the notion of literariness. I am ready to admit that, nomatter how difficult to define (because it is so relative), literariness existsas an object of knowledge. Granted there are literary devices and con-ventions, which are historical in nature (but which can be approachedsystematically or synchronically). Granted also that an awareness of suchdevices and conventions is important, even indispensable, for my under-standing of a particular text both internally (in its intratextuality) and inits relationship, potentially polemical, with other texts-that is, in itscomplex intertextual connections. Nevertheless, the big problem re-mains: Do I read a literary work simply because it claims to be literary,because it displays the signs of literariness, because I am attracted by itsself-centeredness and by the fact that it keeps saying (promising), "Jesuislitterature"?25This is highly doubtful. The writing and reading of litera-ture (and, more recently, even antiliterature), the formation of a literarytradition, have certainly not been a result of the mere recognition ofdifference-literature is distinct from other kinds of discourse-but ofthe attachment of a certain value to the fictional use of language, beyondthe tautology implied in the notion of literariness, beyond the viciouscircle of literature signifying only its signification as literature. This value

23Ibid., p. 239.24Tzvetan Todorov, Poetique(Paris: Editions du Seuil, Collection Points, 1973).25Barthes, Critiqueet veritMn. 10 above), p. 71.

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Hermeneutics or Poeticsis only in part aesthetic. Its external (nonaesthetic) sources are manifold.To grasp it in its rich complexity we have to broaden the concept ofliterature to comprise everything that is written (which means to reviveor perhaps only to reawaken the dormant etymology of the word "litera-ture"). As Gadamer points out in Truth and Method, when we read aliterary work of art "our understanding is not specifically concerned withthe achievement of form that belongs to it as a work of art, but with whatit says to us." Then, inescapably,the differencebetween a literaryworkof art and anyother literary[i.e.,written]text is not so fundamental. It is true that there is a difference between thelanguageof poetryand the languageof prose,and againbetween the languageof poetic prose and of "scientific"prose.These differences can certainlyalsobeconsideredfrom the pointof view of literaryform. But the essentialdifferenceof these various"languages" bviously ies elsewhere:namelyin the distinctionbetween the claims to truththat eachmakes. All literary i.e.,written]workshavea profound community in that the linguistic form makes effective the sig-nificanceof the contents to beexpressed.In this light,the understandingof textsby, say, a historian is not so very different from the experienceof art. .... Awrittentradition,whendecipheredand read,is to suchan extent puremind thatit speaksto us as if in the present.That iswhythe capacity o read,to understandwhat is written,is like a secret art, even a magic that looses and binds us. ...Hence . . . in our context, despite all aesthetic divisions, the concept of literatureis as broad as possible.26

The theory of literariness, as I have made clear earlier, in spite of itsradical rejection of interpretation, recognizes the possibility and legiti-macy of an indefinite number of readings of the same work. This is sobecause-while never reducing the work to something extraliterary ordiscovering in its text another text-reading always involves a "certaindestruction of the text's apparent order"27and a subsequent reorderingof the elements thus obtained according to intratextual or intertextualresemblances or relations. This means that any reading will have to makechoices and "privilege certain points of the text." Such choices are notindifferent. Depending on the "more or less appropriate strategy"28onwhich the critic decides, his reading will be more or less rich. Here, Ithink, poetics-Todorov being merely its spokesman-encounters itsmajor difficulty. What actually determines the richness of a reading?How is this richness to be measured? Suppose these questions are an-swered as one might expect, namely, that the richness of a particularreading is to be established by comparison with other readings, by thecomplexity and convincing character of the relationships, intratextualand intertextual, it discovers or invents, and, ultimately, by its novelty.26Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truthand Method(London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), pp. 145-46.27Todorov, The Poeticsof Prose, p. 241.28Ibid., p. 239.

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The Journal of ReligionBut do such criteria by which the richness of a reading can be ap-preciated favor certain (intrinsic) approaches to the text at the expenseof others? I do not see how. There are extrinsic readings which areextremely rich. We may disagree with the premises of a critic, we mayreject the conclusions he reaches and still be fascinated with his "strat-egy," with the way he conducts his argument, with the unsuspectednetwork of relationships in which he locates a particular work, making itmean things that it did not occur to us it could mean.Like all criticism, the procedure that Todorov calls reading is ulti-mately subject to what we may label the "test of brilliance." WhatHartman says in "The Interpreter," namely, that an interpretationshould always be brilliant, can easily be extended to all criticism, includ-ing the antiinterpretative kind. Hartman writes: "Interpretation [allcriticism, I would propose] is a feast, not a fast. It imposes an obligatoryexcess. The only hypotheses that count are those 'which may seem fan-tastic,' as Freud remarked in Totemand Taboo. Even those-pace Popperand Hirsch-which may seem unverifiable."29 From this standpoint, nosingle method of reading is in a privileged position in absolute terms.Any reading is good when, by being itself interesting (that is, proposingunexpected but meaningful intellectual challenges), it renders the textinteresting.Historically, structuralist poetics was a welcome reaction against thebanalities of a belated positivist historicism prevailing in Frenchacademic criticism and, at the same time, against certain widespreadreductionist fashions (popular versions of psychoanalysis or Marxiansociologism). Structuralism as a practice of reading has produced somefirst-class criticism (Barthes on Balzac, Genette on Proust, Todorov onHenry James); on a more theoretical level it has produced, from theworks of the early-twentieth-century Russian Formalists (or near-Formalists, like the unclassifiable Mikhail Bakhtin) to the more recentstudies of the language of poetry (Jean Cohen's Structure du langagepoitique)30 and narrative syntax, an impressive number of provokinghypotheses about the nature and internal functions of literary discourse.Along with such achievements, which like all achievements are the ex-ception rather than the rule, the structuralist fashion has also produceda huge quantity of worthless stuff, an incredible number of unperceptivereadings and a whole body of unusable theories, each one more jargonythan the other.The kind of reading proposed by poetics can be rich (ideally, a rich-ness of the order of absence), but only insofar as it defines itself inopposition to other reading practices, which seem more acceptable and

29Hartman (n. 5 above), p. 18.30JeanCohen, Structuredu langage poetique(Paris: Flammarion, 1966).12


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Hermeneutics or Poetics"natural."Once the standards elaborated by poetics gain recognition andcome to be taken for granted (something similar happened in theEnglish-speaking world with the New Criticism's concept of "close read-ing"), other techniques of reading are bound to appear, and they canonly be, in the broad sense, hermeneutic.Insofar as interpretation is seen not as a deciphering of indifferentenigmas but as a way of understanding certain revelations, certain exis-tential truths (of the order of fiction, of what Wallace Stevens called theSupreme Fiction), certain "miracles" which have become, to use MirceaEliade's word, "unrecognizable,"31 hermeneutics implies a sense of con-fidence, a belief in the possibility that the reader can identify with theauthor, with his "awareness," with his "profound self" (as Proust wouldsay), with his cogito(as Poulet would say). Poulet is certainly not a repre-sentative of hermeneutics in the narrow sense (cf. E. D. Hirsch's conceptof "validity in interpretation"),32 but his phenomenology of reading,together with other phenomenological approaches to literature (GastonBachelard, Jean-Pierre Richard), is relatable under a broadly definednotion of interpretation. Mutatis mutandis, such a trend is comparablewith what in the field of general hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur has calledthe "phenomenology of the sacred," as illustrated by a variety of scholarsof religion from Rudolf Otto to Mircea Eliade. Ricoeur writes:... The theme of the phenomenologyof religion is the somethingntended inritual actions, in mythicalspeech, in belief or mystical feeling; its task is todis-implicate hatobjectfrom the variousintentions of behavior,discourse,andemotion. Let us call this object the 'sacred,'... whether it be the tremendumnuminosum, ccording to Rudolf Otto; the 'powerful,'according to Van derLeeuw;or 'fundamentalTime,'according o Eliade.... Is not the expectationofbeing spoken to what motivatesthe concern for the object? Implied in thisexpectationis a confidence in language:the belief that language,whichbearssymbols,is not so much spokenby men as spokento men.... It is this expecta-tion, this confidence,this belief,thatconfers on the studyof symbols ts particu-lar seriousness.33To the directions taken by the phenomenology of the sacred corre-spond, in literary criticism, the theories of reading that recognize theneed for the reader to "fulfill"the signifying intention of a text, while atthe same time being aware that "there are several ways of fulfillingvarious intentions of meaning according to various regions of objects."34

31For a discussion of Eliade's concept of the "unrecognizability of miracle" and of the"camouflages of myth," see my article "Imagination and Meaning: Aesthetic Attitudes andIdeas in Mircea Eliade's Thought," Journal of Religion 57, no. 1 (January 1977): 1-15.32E.D. Hirsch, Validity n Interpretation New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967)and, more recently, TheAimsof Interpretation Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).33Ricoeur (n. 14 above), pp. 29-30.34Ibid., p. 30.

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The Journal of ReligionIt is precisely this fullness of language, as I have tried to show, thatstructuralist poetics turns against and attempts to subvert, "deconstruct,"

expose, and reduce not to something else (in this sense poetics goesbeyond the "hermeneutics of suspicion," which is finally reductive,Marx's economic structure, Freud's unconscious) but to its own absence.Hence the interesting phenomenon, which also manifests itself outsidepoetics, in philosophy, philosophical anthropology, the philosophy oflanguage, etc., of the appearance of a new rhetoric of absence and nega-tion, in which certain terms, such as "emptiness," "gap," "interstice,""discontinuity," "break," "rupture," "dispersion," "interruption," "dis-ruption," etc., play, beyond their normal denotative function, a positivesuggestive-connotative role and in which the opposite terms (rememberBarthes's derogatory considerations about "repleteness") have acquireda definitely pejorative meaning.Literary hermeneutics, in the comprehensive meaning I have giventhis concept, always presupposes a deep conviction in and commitmentto the fullness of language. It is true that, in the text he wants to inter-pret, the interpreter often looks for a second text, but he knows that thissecond text is not valuable in itself (it does not contain the hidden mean-ing, the explanation, the solution of the enigma); its function consists inhelping the mind to become aware of the richness of the first text, arichness that had always been there but that had become invisible, un-recognizable. The hermeneutic cycle is obviously incomplete when itdoes not return to the original, that is, when the second text it constructsis not fully incorporated and dissolved into the first. A text that is inter-preted completely is made to manifest not its "latent content" but itslatent richness. But even an incomplete hermeneutic motion-a re-ductionist approach, when it is practiced with intelligence and a certaingoutpassionnede l'obstacle-can be revealing when the reader of the inter-pretation realizes that the "conclusions" he is offered can be disregardedand that he himself can trace the circle of understanding back to its pointof origin, to the original text. Thus, for a true theory of interpretation asI see it, the only authentic text is always the text the interpretation startswith. (Obviously, in the case of ancient texts, textual criticism, formcriticism, etc., are highly useful auxiliary activities, but the kind of"interpretation" involved in them is different from the one I am talkingabout; in that case, we may say, the problem is to establish the object ofinterpretation.)Discussing the problem of translation in his recent book AfterBabel, inthe chapter entitled "The Hermeneutic Motion," George Steiner makesa series of very perceptive observations, which are true not only of trans-lation but indeed of all authentic interpretation: "The work translated isenhanced .... The relations of a text to its translations [and to its inter-pretations in general, I would add] . . . categorize the entire question of14


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Hermeneutics or Poeticsthe meaning of meaning in time, of the existence and effects of thelinguistic fact outside its specific, initial form. But there can be no doubtthat echo enriches, that it is more than shadow and inert simulacrum.We are back at the problem of the mirror which not only reflects but alsogenerates light."35 Interpretation is always part of a dialogue: the inter-preter listens, tries to understand, then speaks. When his response isadequate, the interpreted work is enriched, and so is the interpreter.Should I add that by "adequacy" in this context I mean a faithfulnesswhich can only result from imagination?

IIIAt the beginning of this paper I ventured into a brief discussion ofmodernity, time consciousness, and the necessary contextuality of allreading. The rise of historicism, and subsequently the appearance of atypically modern awareness of the historicity of historicism itself, I havesuggested, can explain the coexistence of two contrasting time models inthe mind of the reader of literature. The historical ordering of theliterary past is still essential, and even its most vehement enemies wouldagree, I believe, that in spite of all its drawbacks it is at least as convenientas the alphabetical ordering of entries in a dictionary. This gives us alinear model of time seen as an irreversible succession of events unfold-ing in a "generational" series of "causes" and "effects" (fathers and sons,authors and works). In this ineluctably ongoing progression, the funda-mental relationship between phenomena is, as I have said earlier, of theorder of anteriority/posteriority. To this normal model the reading andrereading of literary texts opposes the notion of a circular and reversibletime. Let me observe that this time is distinct from the mythical time ofthe 'eternal return," as described by the phenomenology of the sacred(Mircea Eliade), as well as from such philosophical concepts asNietzsche's "eternal recurrence," although it certainly is structurallycloser to these than to the inescapably sequential time of history.In spite of their apparently irreducible incompatibility, or perhapsbecause of it, the linear time of history and the circular time of readingand interpretation (ideally, of recreation) presuppose each other anddepend upon each other like the terms of an antithesis. Historical time ispossessed, when embodied in literary works, by the secret wish to find away out of sheer transitoriness, to attain the "bliss"of repetition, whilethe circular time of interpretation, "hermeneutic time," as I shall label it,seems ready to historicize itself, to become part of the unpredictableunfolding of diachronic time, as a unique "moment" in an unrepeatable

35George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1975), pp. 300-301.

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The Journal of Religionseries. It might be argued that interpretation itself, insofar as it aspires tobe new, to say something new (by comparison with previous inter-pretations), starts by being an "unsettling" factor, by attempting to"make history." Ultimately, however, the interpreter wants to establish anonhistorical relation between the work and himself. He cannot helpbreaking the linearity of historical time and proposing the notion of anessential time, a time that is lost and can be regained, as meaning is lost(banalized, blurred, rendered opaque, covered by meaningless cliches)and regained, revived-through interpretation. The return of meaningpresupposes a return of time.It is this essential time that reading and interpretation strive to re-cover. And this essential time is nothing but a book, what Proust calls the"essential book," the only true book, which is in every one of us, our deepself. A writer is simply a "translator"of this book, as Proust puts it in afamous passage of Le Tempsretrouvi. And to be a good translator, thewriter has to see, to discern, to decipher, to uncover, to unveil-Proustuses all these words and numerous synonyms.Thus, "style for a writer, as well as color for a painter, is a question notof technique but of vision."36 Style is revelation, but by focusing exclu-sively on style--"cette constante aberration de la critique"37--one missesprecisely the substance of revelation. What Proust calls "reasoning intel-ligence" does not help either: "Des que l'intelligence raisonneuse veut semettre a juger des oeuvres d'art, il n'y a plus rien de fixe, de certain: onpeut demontrer tout ce qu'on veut."38 To read truly one has to readone's self. A book is, Proust says, a kind of optical instrument offered bythe writer to the reader for the latter to discern in himself things that hewould not have been able to see by himself.39If books as well as their interpretations, to broaden the scope ofProust's enlightening metaphor, are indeed "optical instruments," poet-ics and the kind of criticism evolved within the framework of poetics areperfectly legitimate activities: it is always important to know well theinstruments we are working with, to be aware of their complexities, tounderstand how they are constructed and how they function. But whatdo we see with the help of these instruments? Poetics refuses to answerthis question. These instruments, it seems to suggest, are interesting inthemselves, in what one can see in them, not through them. These in-struments, if we trust them and simply look through them, may deludeus, showing unreal things (fake meanings, "ideological" objects). Tomake sure that we are not cheated, we had better examine first the

36Marcel Proust, A la recherchedu tempsperdu, Pleiade edition, ed. Pierre Clarac andAndre Ferre (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 3:895.37Ibid., p. 893.38Ibid.39Ibid., p. 911.16


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Hermeneutics or Poeticssystem of lenses and mirrors which constitute these instruments. And tofigure out how the system works we have to "deconstruct" it, to "de-center" it, to establish homologies between its parts and the parts ofother systems; in short, we have to subject it to criticism, to become awareof its limitations and of the role played in its functioning by variousbuilt-in prejudices and conventions. All this sophistication makes whatwe actually can see with the aid of such "optical instruments" highlyunreliable and ultimately unimportant. For hermeneutics, books andinterpretations are important precisely by what they show us, by whatthey allow us to decipher from the essential book that is in us-our truelife: lived meaning, lost and regained in the dialectic between passing-ness and recurrence.

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Bachelard hermeneutics