Karl Simms
The interest in textuality from a hermeneutic perspective has its historical origins in Martin Luther’s doctrine of Sola Scriptura, “Only Scripture.” While from a theological point of view this is significant for its rejection of received doctrine, hermeneutically it establishes a relationship between a reader and a text: the entire Protestant Reformation is predicated on the notion of reading and interpreting a text for oneself. Moreover, the text is taken to be trustworthy, and hence a tool for its own interpretation: as Luther (1976, 2335) himself writes, “Scripture is its own light. It is a fine thing when Scripture explains itself.” Scripture aside, the two principles embedded in this attitude to texts—that one should read a text for oneself, and that the text is a fundamentally trustworthy guide to its own interpretation—were to remain the bedrock of textual hermeneutics as developed in the twentieth century by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. Further, we should not overlook that Luther was writing at the very beginnings of the mass literacy afforded by the printing press, and that the ability to read, being literate, is for him a precondition of hermeneutics. For him and for contemporary hermeneutics, hermeneutics is primarily textual, and the principles of understanding other forms of discourse (speech, nonlinguistic symbols, etc.) are derived from the textual approach.
For the three hundred years following Luther, hermeneutics was considered exclusively to be a practice of biblical exegesis. It was Friedrich Schleiermacher at the turn of the nineteenth century who was to liberate hermeneutics from the Bible. Schleiermacher’s aim was to reconcile theology with the new scientism of the Enlightenment, and to this end he attempted to apply scientific method to the hermeneutic process. This had the effect of making hermeneutics universally applicable, rather than being an ad hoc series of interpretations of biblical passages—and yet, for Schleiermacher, hermeneutics is still exclusively grounded in textuality.
Schleiermacher’s “scientific” account of textuality consists in establishing a “dialectic” (he is influenced by his contemporary G. W. F. Hegel) between the grammatical and the psychological. The grammatical is the “totality of language,” while the psychological is the “whole” of the author. “Every utterance presupposes a given language,” Schleiermacher (1998, 8) asserts, and in his development of this axiom he anticipates the thinking of post-Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy and of discourse analysis: language, for Schleiermacher, is conceived of as primarily shared, and, further, understanding it requires an immersion into not only the narrow linguistic expression which it manifests, but also its means of production and the general historical and societal circumstances which have led to that production. The psychological, meanwhile, entails placing oneself “in the place of the author” (Schleiermacher 1998, 24). Here again, Schleiermacher’s thinking is remarkably modern, since by this he does not mean simply adopting “the mind of the author” in order to discover his genius after the manner of Immanuel Kant’s third Critique, nor does he mean what tends to follow from that, “what the author intended” as a clue to what a text “means.” Rather, being in the place of the author entails understanding, as with the language, the historical and societal circumstances that caused such a person to develop, circumstances which the author may not have been aware of himself—it is perfectly possible, claims Schleiermacher, to know an author better than he knew himself (this is what Schleiermacher means by the “whole” of the author). Textual understanding, then, consists in a dialectic between these two facets of the text’s production: the language in which the text is couched, and the factuality of its having been written by someone. Neither of these aspects can be considered in isolation: the language of the text has a history and circumstances of being-written, and the author also has a history and circumstances of being formed into a person. Moreover, the author partakes of the same public language that we all share, and (this is the dialectical part) understanding the text comes through understanding how its language has acted on the author and how that author has in turn deployed the language to create the text. The upshot of all of this is that a text is not merely a text, but a work: it is conceived of as a whole by the author, and can only be understood as a whole, not by considering the meanings of its respective parts in isolation, but by considering how they relate to one another to form a complete work, and how that work in turn interacts with the world of language of which it is a part.
The modern hermeneutic theory of textuality is first developed by Gadamer. Gadamer accepts Schleiermacher’s concept of grammar as a totality of language, but is critical of the attempt to reconstruct an authorial psychology, since for him the meaning of a text continues to be developed subsequent to the historical death of the author, and is not simply fixed at the author’s own time. A text’s meaning, for Gadamer, is its meaning for us, and this tends to make the author somewhat irrelevant to his theory of textuality. In this respect, Gadamer’s biggest influence is Martin Heidegger, particularly ¶32 of the latter’s Being and Time, on “Understanding and Interpretation.” Heidegger’s revolutionary claim here is that understanding and interpretation are primordial: if one simply stares at something, for example, it is not because one has not understood it yet, but rather because one has stopped understanding it. Understanding for Heidegger is disclosure, and “that which is disclosed in understanding—that which is understood—is already accessible in such a way that its ‘as which’ can be made to stand out explicitly”: we never merely see something, but see it “as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge” (Heidegger 1962, 189). Understanding, then, discloses how things are: as Heidegger (1962, 190–191) puts it, “In interpreting, we do not, so to speak, throw a ‘signification’ over some naked thing which is present-at-hand, we do not stick a value on it; but when something within-the-world is encountered as such, the thing in question already has an involvement which is disclosed in our understanding of the world, and this involvement is one which gets laid out by the interpretation.”
Heidegger is discussing understanding in general—his examples are objects in the world such as tables, doors, carriages, and bridges—but in appropriating Heidegger’s concept of the “hermeneutic circle,” that I must already have some understanding of something in order to be able to understand it—Gadamer immediately makes it textual: according to Gadamer, the “things in themselves” which are the objects of Heidegger’s concern are, for the literary critic, “meaningful texts, which are themselves concerned with objects” (Gadamer 2004, 269). It is a criticism of Gadamer that he does not question the nature of the literary object, or the nature of representation within literature, or that literature should be representational (mimetic) as such; nor does he say whether his “interpretive understanding” itself constitutes, or is sufficient for, literary criticism. These questions aside, Gadamer (2004, 267) describes what happens between a text and its interpreter:
A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there.
This leads Gadamer to an examination of what constitutes writing, and Gadamer becomes the first thinker in the hermeneutic tradition to define “textuality” as such, and discuss its nature. In so doing, he breaks with Schleiermacher (who downplayed writing to emphasize that hermeneutics could apply to any situation whatever, including speech), and restores hermeneutics to its tradition of textual exegesis. “A text”, writes Gadamer (2004, 394–396),
is not to be understood as an expression of life but with respect to what it says. Writing is the abstract ideality of language, [and it] has the methodological advantage of presenting the hermeneutic problem in all its purity …. Everything written is, in fact, the paradigmatic object of hermeneutics.
What this means in practice is that for the purposes of hermeneutics—and this constitutes a radical break from Schleiermacher—“the horizon of understanding cannot be limited either by what the writer originally had in mind or by the horizon of the person to whom the text was originally addressed” (Gadamer 2004, 396). This is the very nature of textuality: by being written down, words become detached from the original speaker and acquire permanence. This spatial and temporal detachment from the author means that the author is no more qualified than anyone else to comment on the text’s meaning, and writing’s permanence means that the text continues to have meaning for successive generations who read it. To delimit a text’s meaning by the circumstances of its original writer and readers is to misunderstand the nature of the language in which it is written, which is public and “accessible to anyone who can read.” Textual meaning is not fixed at a historical point, but constantly develops and renews itself over time.
A text, then, is what Gadamer calls “autonomous,” its autonomy consisting precisely in this detachment from the “contingent” historical factors of its original production and reception. Of course, some texts are more autonomous than others, and hence bear a greater weight of interpretation: a shopping list, for example, is a mere aide mémoire, and is usually thrown away once it has served its purpose. Although it is permanent in principle, the texts which acquire permanence in practice are specifically literary texts, and that
we are dealing with a work that has become autonomous … is shown by the fact that any reproduction—even on the part of the author or reader—contains an inappropriate contingent moment. A genuine text in this eminent sense is never measured against the original way in which it was originally said. There is always something disturbing about hearing a poet reading his own works: we ask why the poet sounds just like this and why he performs it in just this kind of way. Every speaker of a “text” knows that no possible vocal realisation—not even his own—can ever completely satisfy our inner ear. The text has acquired an ideality that cannot be obviated by any possible realisation.
(Gadamer 1986, 146)
Following Gadamer, Ricoeur (1991, 74) also writes that “what enables us to communicate at a distance is … the matter of the text, which belongs neither to its author nor to its reader,” and it is this “matter of the text” that leads him “to the threshold of [his] own reflection.” This reflection complements Gadamer’s, insofar as it addresses the notions of the nature of the literary object and the nature of representation within literature which were absent from Truth and Method. Indeed, for Ricoeur, what is most important about textuality is distanciation; the distance from the psychology of the author and the sociology of the text’s production that writing affords. Ricoeur sees this distanciation as “positive and productive” rather than “alienating.” Moreover, as with Gadamer, literary texts occupy a special place for Ricoeur, since (as Schleiermacher also said) they are works. What is interesting about this for Ricoeur is that the triad of discourse, writing, and work which constitutes a literary text opens up a world, the “world of the text” which is in contradistinction to the real world that it “destroys.”
To be a work, says Ricoeur, textual discourse must satisfy three criteria: it must be a sequence longer than a sentence; it must be codified into a genre (a story, poem, essay, etc.); and it must be uniquely configured into a style. Ricoeur’s analysis of work in this sense is an attempt to synthesize the Romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher with what he sees as being its antithesis, the structuralism which was having its heyday at the time Ricoeur was writing. Schleiermacher’s notion of attempting to reconstruct the “genius” of the author who created the work in attempting to understand it is subjective, whereas structuralism’s “scientific” investigation of the structures of discourse is an attempt at pure objectivity. Ricoeur agrees with the structuralist paradigm established, for example, in Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”: from a purely discursive point of view, the term “author” is reducible to a question of style, and Ricoeur agrees with Barthes that this is a necessary consequence of being-written as such. But nevertheless, there is a correlation between a work and its author: they share the same style, or, as Ricoeur (1991, 82) puts it, “Man individuates himself in producing individual works,” and “The signature is the mark of this individuation.” Thus, “the objectification of discourse in a structured work does not abolish the first and fundamental feature of discourse, namely, that it is constituted by a series of sentences whereby someone says something to someone about something” (Ricoeur 1991, 82–83).
Notwithstanding this, “thanks to writing, the ‘world’ of the text may explode the world of the author” (Ricoeur 1991, 83), but Ricoeur’s approach does not attempt to reconstruct the structure of a work pace structuralism, as little as it attempts to reconstruct the world of the author pace Romanticism. Structuralism, after all, is concerned with the process of signification, whereas Ricoeur is interested in reference. His question is, “What happens to reference when discourse becomes a text?” (Ricoeur 1991, 85). The answer is that through the fact of something’s being-written “there is no longer a situation common to the writer and the reader,” and so writing cannot be about a shared here and now. Literature is created by the impossibility of writing directly referring to a given reality. It “glorif[ies] itself at the expense of the referential function of ordinary discourse.” On the other hand, “there is no discourse so fictional that it does not connect up with reality” (Ricoeur 1991, 85); being freed from first-order reference, literature creates a second-order reference in which statements may be true or false within that order, but which also bear some kind of mimetic resemblance to reference within the real world in which we live. This, for Ricoeur (1991, 86), is “the most fundamental hermeneutical problem.” Romantic criticism attempted to reconstruct the world behind the text; structuralism attempted to reconstruct the world within the text; it is the task of hermeneutics to reconstruct the world before the text. A literary text presents a possible world, and “what must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world that I could inhabit and wherein I could project one of my ownmost possibilities. That is what I call the world of the text, the world proper to this unique text” (Ricoeur 1991, 86).
Although Ricoeur includes poetry in his definition of “text,” it is clear that his predisposition is toward (prose) narrative fiction, since it is here that the other world that the text creates may most readily be seen. When Ricoeur writes of text, he tends to slip seamlessly into writing about narrative fiction, whereas, when Gadamer writes of text, he tends to slip seamlessly into writing about poetry. This is because Gadamer continues to be influenced by Heidegger to a much greater extent than was Ricoeur. In Being and Time, Heidegger wrote of interpretation as disclosing how things are; in his later works, this “how things are” becomes synonymous with “truth” for Heidegger, and poetry the form of discourse best suited to disclosing that truth. In his essay “Language,” Heidegger (1975, 194) writes: “What is spoken purely is that in which the completion of the speaking that is proper to what is spoken is, in its turn, an original. What is spoken purely is the poem.” This is illustrated by a reading of Georg Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening,” of which Heidegger (1975, 195) writes, “Who the author is remains unimportant here, as with every masterful poem. The mastery consists precisely in this, that the poem can deny the poet’s person and name.”
At first blush it may seem odd that Gadamer should follow Heidegger’s talk of language speaking, when he has already established the interpretation of writing as the paradigm of hermeneutics. But for Heidegger, in poetry it is language as such that “speaks,” aside from the contingency of whether that language is spoken or written. This insistence is in the background of Gadamer’s later works on textuality, where he makes a distinction between texts in general, and specifically literary texts. With texts in general, “the process of understanding a text tends to captivate and take the reader up into that which the text says, and in this fusion the text disappears” (Gadamer 2007, 180). Gadamer does not say what he means by texts in general (although he does not mean “anti-texts” such as jokes or irony, or “pre-texts” such as dreams, the true meaning of which in either case is the opposite of the overt one), but the context suggests he is referring to such artifacts as technical writing and trashy literature. We might find an instruction manual or a scientific paper difficult because we do not understand the terms in which it is couched: here, an interpreter is useful, but their function is just the same as in translating from one language to another—their duty is to become invisible, since all the reader is interested in is the message to be conveyed. The fact that it is a text (and that it is being interpreted) is irrelevant to or, worse, a distraction from the work of understanding on the part of the reader. Likewise, it is easy to “lose oneself” in trashy literature: for the reader of Bridget Jones’ Diary, part of the pleasure is in imagining that Bridget is speaking to you (or to herself, whose position the reader vicariously occupies), and again the textual medium is irrelevant to this, which is why such a work is capable of making an all too easy transition to another medium, such as film.
“But not in the case of literature!” exclaims Gadamer (2007, 180). Literary texts “do not disappear in our act of understanding them, but instead stand there confronting our understanding with normative claims, and stand before every new way the text can speak” (Gadamer 2007, 180). Literary texts are, for Gadamer (2007, 181), “texts in the original and authentic sense,” by which he means that they are not merely “the rendering of a spoken language into a fixed form”: on the contrary, they are originarily written, and it is up to the reader to make them speak “out of themselves.” In fact, it is precisely because a literary text does not point back to a primordial act of oral utterance or to the intentions of the speaker that it “seems to originate in itself.” If it is successful in speaking truly (in the way in which a friend may be a “true friend,” which is not the same as its containing referential truths), then it may “overwhelm even its author.” Literary texts suspend their referential or message-giving functions: this is what constitutes them as literature. This also demands that literary texts be spoken and heard:
A literary text possesses its own status. Its linguistic presence as text is such as to demand repetition of its words in the original power of their sound—not in such a way as to reach back to the original speaking of the words, but looking forward to a new, ideal speaking.
(Gadamer 2007, 183)
For Gadamer, then, literary, and especially poetic, texts are unique in bringing language itself to presence, by drawing attention to their own linguisticality, demanding to be spoken (that is, Gadamer reminds us, the original meaning of the word literature). This is what causes literary texts to be remembered for posterity, and thus have cultural value. In this respect, Gadamer posits a clear difference between hermeneutics and Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida (1976, 158–159) famously asserted, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which can be variously translated as “There is nothing outside of the text,” or “There is nothing that is not textual.” Gadamer is sympathetic to much of deconstruction: like deconstruction, Gadamer’s hermeneutics sees writing as conceptually prior to speech and, like deconstruction, Gadamer’s hermeneutics seeks to overturn the presuppositions of Western metaphysics. But Gadamer denies that literature’s demand to be spoken is logocentric, precisely because it is not a return to the spoken form, since that spoken form never originally existed. Moreover, Il n’y a pas de hors-texte is too general: as we have seen, some texts are more textual (“autonomous”) than others, and while the referential function of most ordinary texts calls for deconstruction, the special poetic character of literary texts escapes this, since the disclosure of truth performed by literary texts itself deconstructs the metaphysics of presence presupposed by referential writing. And furthermore, the ambiguity of Il n’y a pas de hors-texte is unsatisfactory for Gadamer: it is the task of philosophy to speak clearly. Following Ricoeur, Gadamer characterizes deconstruction as a “hermeneutics of suspicion”: for Gadamer, texts which are uninterpretable through aporia or contradiction are the exceptions to the norms established by literary textuality, which as a general rule can be trusted to lead the reader to a true interpretation. The hermeneutics of both Ricoeur and Gadamer are returned to their Lutheran origins through this faith in textuality, or textual goodwill.