Hermeneutics or Poetics Author(s): Matei Calinescu Reviewed work(s): Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Jan.

, 1979), pp. 1-17 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1202111 . Accessed: 13/11/2011 00:15
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Hermeneutics or Poetics* Matei Calinescu

/
Indiana Universityat Bloomington

Since the advent of modernity, the problem of reading and interpreting literary texts has posed itself increasingly in terms of contextuality. The dogmatic past, with its unquestioned authority of tradition, has been gradually replaced in the last two centuries by a plastic historical past that is constantly questioned and reshaped according to criteria evolved by the present. Historicism first asserted itself by stressing the importance of historical contexts, indeed their primacy: to understand a work of the past was largely a matter of discovering and specifying the setting in which it had appeared (cultural, social, psychological). But such historical contexts, it was eventually realized, no matter how objectively and painstakingly established, had nothing "fixed" or definitive about them. Once historical knowledge becomes aware of its own historicity, the past ceases to be static, frozen time, whose complex crystalline formations are there to be contemplated, analyzed, and finally understood in their arrested succession. From the point of view of modernity, which is a protean point of view, and self-consciously so, no aspect of the historical past can be seized once and for all simply because the past keeps changing with every meaningful change in the present. As early as 1917, in his famous essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," T. S. Eliot advanced the notion of a flexible literary past, a past whose significance is to 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 been created, Eliot argued, is continuously modified by "the supervention of novelty." When a new work appears, "the relations, proportions, values of 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 Divinity School 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

The Journal of Religion reaction to historicism. Historicism triumphs in a critique of historical consciousness. If contexts (and even historical contexts) are in reality nothing but constructs created by the interpreter, then the very concept of "historical time," based on the model of linear succession, on the notion of a sequential-chronological development, ceases to be the uniquely relevant frame of reference even within the domain of purely historical studies. This weakening of historical time is even more apparent in the area of artistic or literary studies, where modernity is responsible for the emergence of a highly sophisticated and paradoxical form of time consciousness. Some of the possibilities contained in this new, historicalantihistorical, time consciousness are indicated in an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, "Kafka and His Precursors" (1941), which may be seen as an attempt to apply, and therefore to specify, Eliot's general approach to the question of tradition/novelty. Borges's thesis is formulated straightforwardly (Eliot being given due credit in a footnote): "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future." Who, then, are Kafka's precursors? Borges thinks he can recognize 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 movement (Achilles who cannot reach the tortoise poses a problem that "is, exactly, that of The Castle").2A Chinese apologue about the unicorn is another unexpected example of early pre-Kafkian writing. Then, closer to us in time, Kafka's voice is identified in texts by Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, Leon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. The conclusion of the essay is important: "If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka's idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser extent, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist."3 What does all this mean? Simply that, in the world of reading, the terms of the fundamental relationship of anteriority/posteriority, upon which our ordinary or immediate historical consciousness is based, can become interchangeable. The ineluctably ongoing causal-temporal relationships implied in our historical terminology, then, cease to be binding. In reading, a new kind of time appears, both active and retroactive, both linear and circular, continuously shifting between these opposite ideal models. This historical-antihistorical time, to give an example,
2Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths,ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1964), quotations from pp. 201, 199, and 199, respectively. 3Ibid., p. 201.

Hermeneutics or Poetics
should allow us to use the notion of "influence"(so restrictivelyand sense and in a one-sidedly understood by positivism)both in its "normal" but equally valid sense. Thus we may speak of the directly opposite on influence of the "metaphysicals" the modernist poets, but with no less question, "Who came first?"is pointless in the universe of reading.4 The anteriority/posteriority relationship, compelling as it may be within the framework of positivist one-way historicism, is constantly (although in general tacitly)challenged by any reader's real experience of literature.We do not read literarytexts in chronologicalorder of their appearance. What happens, I think, is rather that we reach the great classicsat a relativelylate stage of our literaryeducation. But actuallythis backward movement from the present to the past, and from a recent past to a more remote one, is as irrelevantto our discussion as its opposite. From the reader's point of view the literarypast appears as a huge reservoir of possibilities:which ones are realized first and which ones later does not count as much as the discovery that among these possibilities-these books that I have read in whatever order and these that wait for me to read them-there are countless interconnectionsand subtle interdependencies. A book contains all books and is contained in all. Once the inadequacy of the anteriority/posterioritydistinction becomes apparent, other time-honored oppositions derived from it, such

justification of the influence of the modernists on the metaphysicals. The

4The notion of "inverse influence," as we may label it, has been advanced in American criticism by Harold Bloom, who discusses some of its implications in the last chapter of his Anxietyof Influence, "Apophrades or The Return of the Dead" (New York: Oxford University 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 us vivid instances of this most cunning of revisionary ratios. For all of them achieve a style that captures and oddly retains priority over their precursors, so that the tyranny of time almost is overturned, and one can believe, for startled moments, that they are being imitated their by ancestors" 141). But Bloom's concept of "influence," based on the Freudian scenario of a (p. ruthless fight between sons (the late-coming poets) and fathers (their great literary ancestors), is essentially confined to the linear model of historical time. Bloom's entire theory hinges 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 explanation is found in the success of the "revisionary movement." From Bloom's point of view, the temporal paradoxes suggested by Borges are simply a "witty insight." Bloom writes: " ... I want to distinguish the phenomenon from the witty insight of Borges, that artists create their precursors. .. I mean something more drastic and (presumably) absurd, which is the triumph of having so stationed the precursor, in one's work, that particular passages in his work seem to be not presages of one's own advent, but rather to be indebted to one's own achievement, and even (necessarily) to be lessened by one's greater splendor" (ibid.). In spite of his attempt to "dramatize" influence, in spite of the agonistic-antagonistic vocabulary that he employs (poetry is misinterpretation, misunderstanding, misprision, disciplined perverseness, etc.), Bloom's "influence" is compatible with a disappointingly banal view of linear time, in which the only "original" addition consists of seeing the relation between anteriority and posteriority in terms of a generational conflict (anteriority appears as a privilege which posteriority tries, sometimes successfully, to contest).

The Journal of Religion as the one between "primary" and "secondary" texts, must also undergo critical scrutiny. Geoffrey Hartman remarks that this distinction could occur only within the framework of a (traditional and traditionalist) hermeneutics based on a "description of life which divides it into 'original' and 'secondary' components-vision and mediation, experience and rationalization, Bible and books." But, Hartman argues, "We have entered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literarycritical texts. Longinus is studied as seriously as the sublime texts he comments on; Jacques Derrida on Rousseau almost as interestingly as Rousseau. This is not as perverse as it sounds; most of us know Milton better than the Bible, or have read the latter again by way of Milton."5 In the essay from which I have just quoted, Hartman goes on to speak of a general decline of hermeneutics as a characteristic of our time. He does not go so far as to condemn interpretation outright (as Susan Sontag did in her Against Interpretation,in which she said that interpretation had become "reactionary" and affirmed that "in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art"),6 but he clearly sets interpretation against hermeneutics, an opposition which I personally find intriguing. Here is what Hartman writes in his "The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis": "Even as interpreters ... we must set interpretation against hermeneutics. For the distinction between a primary source and secondary literature, or between a 'great Original' and its imitations, is the sphere in which traditional hermeneutics works. It seeks to reconstruct, or get back to, an origin in the form of sacred text, archetypal unity or authentic story. To apply hermeneutics to fiction is to treat it as lapsed scripture; just as to apply interpretation to scripture is to consider it a mode, among others, of fiction. Both points of view, it can be argued, involve a category mistake."'7 For the last twenty years or so, hermeneutics (defined as a general theory of interpretation) and interpretation as a form of practical criticism (based on the assumption that there is something in a literary text that lies deeper than its immediate meaning) have come under attack from certain quarters of the more "advanced" intelligentsia. The first to become impatient with interpretation, with the search for the hidden meaning of a poetic work, were naturally the poets. As long ago as the 1870s, we recall, Rimbaud answered his mother's naive question about what he had intended to say in Une Saison en enfer by stating with suggestive bluntness: "J'aivoulu dire ce que ?a dit, litteralement et dans tous les sens." In his essay "Figures," Gerard Genette cites the angry reaction of Andre Breton when confronted with a paraphrase which was supposed
5Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 17. 6Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation(New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1969), p. 23. 7Hartman, pp. 16-17.

Hermeneutics

or Poetics

to convey what Saint-Pol-Roux had meant to say in a certain poem: "Non, Monsieur, Saint-Pol-Roux n'a pas voulu dire. S'il avait voulu dire, il l'aurait dit."8 More recently, we know of Beckett's complaints about the "overinterpretation" of his works (a form of maltreatment) and recall his often-quoted answer to the director, Alan Schneider, who was inquiring about the meaning of Godot: "If I had known, I would have said it in the play." Along the same lines are Robbe-Grillet's strictures against attributing transcendent meanings to literary texts (such as those of Kafka) whose real power lies in their "visionary presence" and in their "hallucinatory effect [which] derives from their extraordinary clarity and not from mystery or mist."9 Interpretation, in such views, is not only an unwelcome intruder but poses a definite threat with regard to the very integrity of the work it purports to elucidate. In short, interpretation appears as an aggression. If "a poem should not mean but be" (Archibald MacLeish), it is clear that any kind of interpretative criticism turns against the raison d'etre of poetry, which is simply to be, to be there. Such reactions against interpretation by writers and artists-the number of examples could be almost endlessly multiplied-are little more than symptoms of modernity's antitraditional cast of mind, unreflective attempts to recover the immediacy of art from the stifling burden of having to "mean" this or that, 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 a more formidable adversary. This enemy-whose identity and name keep changing but whose interest may be seen as centering on the notion of "structure," whether this notion is taken as a methodological goal or whether it is itself subjected to a "parastructuralist" critique-rather than directly contest interpretation, prefers to sharply limit its scope, to make it appear as a marginal and somewhat old-fashioned, if not altogether superfluous, activity. So it is all right to go on interpreting, if one cares to interpret. Hermeneutics may even have its minor tasks to perform, but this should not divert us from dealing with the much larger problem of the interplay between rules, relations, and formal factors of meaningof all meaning, and not of this or that particular meaning as incorporated in this or that particular work. Once this larger problem is recognized, a new hierarchy of interests and research purposes imposes itself. 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's comments: "La litt6ralit6 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 espace quelconque entre la lettre et le sens." 9Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 164.

The Journal of Religion kind of theory or practice of interpretation. The rightful areas and pursuits of historical or interpretative criticism can, in this view, be defined only from the standpoint of a "science of literature," a general poetics, which, to quote its most authoritative advocate and spokesman, Roland Barthes, "ne pourra etre une science des contenus (sur lesquels seula la science historique la plus stricte peut avoir prise), mais une science des conditionsdu contenu, c'est-4a-diredes formes: ce qui l'interessera, ce seront les variations de sens engendrees, et, si l'on peut dire, engendrables, par les oeuvres: elle n'interpretera pas les symboles, mais seulement leur polyvalence; 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 Practical criticism--la critique-deals with the meaning of a particular work. But this particularized meaning (contrary to the naive and widespread opinion) is not there to be "translated" or "deciphered." What criticism really does, consciously or not, is to produce a certain meaning, a meaning that is legitimate only when it is fully derived from the form of the work, that is, from the text itself, whose actual content is its form. In Saussurean terminology, Barthes regards the work as langue (language), which should be separated from parole (speaking), the latter being nothing but the execution, always individual, always more or less accidental, of the essential, systematic langue. The critic, therefore, has only an "executive function" vis-a-vis the work-"il donne une parole [parmi d'autres] ia la langue mythique dont est faite l'oeuvre."" The production of meaning by the critic is or should be a strict operation, a sort of "anamorphosis": guided "by the formal constraints of signification."12 Some interpretation, Barthes admits, can be involved in the process, but this should have nothing to do with unveiling a signified (or reference). The aim of such interpretation is simply to discover, beyond the signifiers or symbols immediately given in the work, a second set of signifiers. What criticism can do (if it is to be justified from the point of view of poetics) is to establish "homologies" between various chains of symbols; it cannot pretend to reveal a signified: "Ce qu'elle devoile ne peut etre un signifie (car ce signifie recule sans cesse jusqu'au vide du sujet), mais seulement des chaines de symboles, des homologies de rapports: le 'sens' qu'elle donne de plein droit ai l'oeuvre n'est finalement qu'une nouvelle efflorescence des symboles que font l'oeuvre."13 Conceived this way, interpretation becomes not "arbitrary"-as the academic adversaries of la nouvelle critiquehave argued-but on the contrary a fairly rigorously controlled methodology of bypassing meaning in the conventional sense (meaning is a snare), a move from a first set of
"oRoland Barthes, Critiqueet verite (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), p. 57. l"Ibid., p. 64. 12Ibid., p. 71. 13Ibid.

Hermeneutics or Poetics
(immediate) signifiers to a second one, less directly accessible. Barthes speaks of a "profound reading," lectureprofonde, but he instantly takes back the epithet and replaces it by "profiled"; the reading he advocates is a lectureprofil&e.Let us note in passing that the dislike of such words as profond,profondeur, etc., is quite widespread in the circles of the Parisian intellectual avant-garde. The interpreter, then, must be aware of the dangers and pitfalls of the signified. Meaning should be avoided, voided, systematically driven out from the series (potentially infinite) of homologous signifiers. Barthes's elegant and sometimes fascinating criticism (he is without doubt a great writer) revolves around the idea of absence. Absence of the subject, absence of the signified, an extremely demanding and complex emptiness, become the goals of criticism. In Critiqueet verint, from which I have quoted, Barthes mentions with approval Paul Ricoeur's definition of the concept of "symbol" as a point of departure for a logic of double meaning, irreducible to the linearity of symbolic logic. Like Ricoeur, Barthes opposes to the univocal symbolism of modern logic the multivocal symbolism of discourse, specifically literary discourse, as realized in what he calls la langue plurielle. But Barthes's position has nothing to do with the type of hermeneutics proposed by Ricoeur, a hermeneutics grounded in the "reflective function" of the cogito, which "opens up a new field of experience, objectivity, and reality," namely, the field constituted by the "signs scattered in the various cultures of that act of existing."14 Barthes may be seen rather as an extreme representative, in literary criticism, of the "hermeneutics of suspicion," in which the very act of interpreting becomes suspicious of itself and ends up by suppressing both the cogito (the subject) and reflection 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 "parastructuralists" in French criticism is not so much Ferdinand de Saussure but, as Georges Poulet has suggested, Mallarme.15 From the perspective of his own "phenomenology of critical consciousness," Poulet describes Barthes's conception of literature and criticism in the following way: "Dans le discours critique de Roland Barthes se pergoit toujours l'intention d'etablir, par-dela le langage-objet, un autre langage, medium linguistique d'oui toute designation concrete serait abolie, d'oiu toute signification relative a un monde externe se serait evanouie, et ou l'objectivite verbale, purgee de toute signification externe et adventice, se contenterait de se signifier elle-meme, et cela rien que par son fonctionne14Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy:An Essay on Interpretation,trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, 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 de remplacer l'etre vrai des objets et du moi par un etre verbal, le realite par une parole."

The Journal of Religion

ment. L'activite litteraire deviendrait une combinatoire de mouvements verbaux. A ce degre ... l'oeuvre se revelerait au critique dans une absence totale d'individualite, de subjectivite, et meme de signification."16 For Barthes, reading is nothing but a "traversal of codes" (a code, as we are told in S/Z, being "a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures");17 its purpose is to establish a "galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds."18 Interestingly, Barthes's cult of absence and sterility manifests itself indirectly, but how suggestively, in the rejection of fullness. "Repleteness" in and by itself is disgusting, and when referring to it Barthes cannot help using, in his habitually subtle and icy fashion, a tone of unequivocal disparagement. Consider the following passage from S/Z: ... Any classic(readerly)text is implicitlyan art of Replete Literature:literature that is replete: like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, safeguarded(in this text nothing is lost: meaning recuperateseverything);like a pregnant female, replete with signifieds which criticismwill not fail to deliver; like the sea, replete with depths and movementswhich give it its appearanceof infinity, its vast meditativesurface; like the sun, replete with the glory it sheds over those who write it, or finally, acknowledged as an established and recognized art: institutional.This Replete Literature, readerly literature, can no longer be written: symbolic plenitude (culminatingin romantic art) is the last avatarof our culture."9 The last? Perhaps not. The institutionalization of absence, emptiness, le creux, of a strange sort of negative theology of meaning, has been under way for some time. Barthes's own texts have become textbooks and examples of "readerly" criticism-literature, replete with the negative presence of all the meanings it has rejected or erased.
II

The science of literature or poetics (in a sense already defined by Paul Valery in his 1937 address "L'Enseignement de la poetique au College de 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 new kind of history of literature, understood "non tant comme une historie des auteurs et des accidents de leur carriere ou de celle de leurs ouvrages, que comme une Historiede l'espriten tant qu'il produit ou consommede la 'litterature,'et cette histoire pourrait meme se faire sans que le nom d'un ecrivain y ffit prononce" (p. 1439). Poetics, then, is nothing but a historically conceived theory of literature: "Le nom de Poetique nous parait lui convenir, en entandant ce mot selon son etymologie, c'est-a-dire comme nom de tout ce qui a trait a la creation ou a la composition d'ouvrages dont le langage est a la fois la substance et le moyen

Hermeneutics or Poetics
differences from other types of discourse and also in terms of the internal differences, within the sphere of literature, between historical and generic types. Poetics, then, focuses not on literary works as such, although it uses them as examples, but on the various qualities that justify their discussion under the rubric "literature," that is, on what the Russian Formalists used to call literaturnost,"literariness." In short, poetics aspires to study and classify literary conventions and devices. The trouble with the notion of literariness is that literature always has been one of the most heteronomous activities of man, and to isolate its literariness is an extremely difficult task. It may even be that literariness-the pure difference between literature as art and nonartistic literature-is a utopian concept, something absolutely ungraspable. The proponents of poetics tend to take the idea of literariness-and its reality as an object of scientific study-for granted. If this is done, hermeneutics and interpretation can be easily assigned a secondary, minor role and can even be dismissed as inadequate not only for the fulfillment of the tasks that poetics sets itself, but also in regard to the "legitimate" aims of the reader of a particular text. Echoing Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov writes in his essay "How to Read?" (1969), collected in The Poetics of Prose, that "the moment we produce a discourse on literature, we rely, willy-nilly, on a general conception of the literary text; poetics is the site where this conception 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 "figuration" on the two levels of the intratextual and the intertextual. Insofar as reading is an application of poetics it is distinct from interpretation. By interpretation Todorov refers "to any substitution of another text for the present text, to any endeavor which seeks to discover, through the apparent textual fabric, a second more authentic text."22 Fodorov recognizes that in any particular reading of a text-the number of possible
readings being indefinite-"there are points of focalization. . .. But in

order to discover them we cannot apply a procedure based on external quence of their role in the work." This choice is responsible for the plurality 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 la convention joue le plus grand role" (ibid.). Poetics would therefore consist of a study of literary conventions (sound, meaning, syntactical forms, concepts, images). Valkry's notion of literary convention is very close to that of "literariness" as defined by the Russian Formalists of the 1920s and further elaborated by Roman Jakobson. 21Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 237. 22Ibid., p. 238.

criteria"; we must choose "such points, axes and nodes, . . . as a conse-

The Journal of Religion entitles us to "speak of a more or less rich reading (and not simply of a true or false one)."23 In "How to Read?" and in several other theoretically oriented essays included in The Poetics of Prose ("Language and Literature," "Poetics and Criticism," "An Introduction to Verisimilitude," etc.), as well as in his lengthy discussion of poetics in the multiauthored volume Qu'est-ce le que structuralisme (1968), which was issued separately, in a thoroughly revised version, in 1973,24 Todorov, who is also the editor of the journal Poitique, appears as one of the most cogent, intellectually versatile, and unprejudiced proponents of poetics. His contributions to the subject also have the merit of being highly readable, a quality not to be despised in a discipline whose representatives, with few exceptions, seem more interested in concocting new terminologies (made up of whimsical coinages and borrowings from the most heterogeneous sciences, from algebra to psychoanalysis) than in addressing themselves to the existing issueswhat they have to say about these, once the terminological barrage is successfully traversed, is very often poignantly naive if not self-evident. Todorov's approach to poetics and the question of reading (more precisely, his concept of literariness and his defense of a purely immanent reading, entirely subsumed under the category of literariness and rejecting, as a matter of principle, any procedure derived from "external criteria") is open to two lines of criticism. Take first the notion of literariness. I am ready to admit that, no matter how difficult to define (because it is so relative), literariness exists as an object of knowledge. Granted there are literary devices and conventions, which are historical in nature (but which can be approached systematically or synchronically). Granted also that an awareness of such devices and conventions is important, even indispensable, for my understanding of a particular text both internally (in its intratextuality) and in its relationship, potentially polemical, with other texts-that is, in its complex intertextual connections. Nevertheless, the big problem remains: 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 its self-centeredness and by the fact that it keeps saying (promising), "Je suis litterature"?25This is highly doubtful. The writing and reading of literature (and, more recently, even antiliterature), the formation of a literary tradition, have certainly not been a result of the mere recognition of difference-literature is distinct from other kinds of discourse-but of the attachment of a certain value to the fictional use of language, beyond the tautology implied in the notion of literariness, beyond the vicious circle 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 veritM 10 above), p. 71. (n.

10

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is only in part aesthetic. Its external (nonaesthetic) sources are manifold. To grasp it in its rich complexity we have to broaden the concept of literature to comprise everything that is written (which means to revive or perhaps only to reawaken the dormant etymology of the word "literature"). As Gadamer points out in Truth and Method, when we read a literary work of art "our understanding is not specifically concerned with the achievement of form that belongs to it as a work of art, but with what it says to us." Then, inescapably, the difference between a literarywork of art and any other literary[i.e., written] text is not so fundamental. It is true that there is a difference between the language of poetry and the language of prose, and again between the language of poetic prose and of "scientific" prose. These differences can certainlyalso be considered from the point of view of literaryform. But the essentialdifference of these various "languages" obviouslylies elsewhere: namely in the distinction between the claimsto truth that each makes. All literary[i.e., written] workshave a profound community in that the linguistic form makes effective the significanceof the contentsto be expressed. In this light, the understandingof texts A by, say, a historian is not so very different from the experience of art. writtentradition,when deciphered and read, is to such an extent pure mind that .... it speaksto us as if in the present.That is why the capacityto read, to understand what is written, is like a secret art, even a magic that looses and binds us. ... is as broad as possible.26
Hence . . . in our context, despite all aesthetic divisions, the concept of literature

The theory of literariness, as I have made clear earlier, in spite of its radical rejection of interpretation, recognizes the possibility and legitimacy of an indefinite number of readings of the same work. This is so because-while never reducing the work to something extraliterary or discovering in its text another text-reading always involves a "certain destruction of the text's apparent order"27 and a subsequent reordering of the elements thus obtained according to intratextual or intertextual resemblances or relations. This means that any reading will have to make choices and "privilege certain points of the text." Such choices are not indifferent. Depending on the "more or less appropriate strategy"28 on which the critic decides, his reading will be more or less rich. Here, I think, poetics-Todorov its being merely its spokesman-encounters What actually determines the richness of a reading? major difficulty. How is this richness to be measured? Suppose these questions are answered as one might expect, namely, that the richness of a particular reading is to be established by comparison with other readings, by the complexity and convincing character of the relationships, intratextual and intertextual, it discovers or invents, and, ultimately, by its novelty.
26Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truthand Method (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), pp. 145-46. 27Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, p. 241. 28Ibid., p. 239.

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But do such criteria by which the richness of a reading can be appreciated favor certain (intrinsic) approaches to the text at the expense of others? I do not see how. There are extrinsic readings which are extremely rich. We may disagree with the premises of a critic, we may reject the conclusions he reaches and still be fascinated with his "strategy," with the way he conducts his argument, with the unsuspected network of relationships in which he locates a particular work, making it mean things that it did not occur to us it could mean. Like all criticism, the procedure that Todorov calls reading is ultimately subject to what we may label the "test of brilliance." What Hartman says in "The Interpreter," namely, that an interpretation should always be brilliant, can easily be extended to all criticism, including the antiinterpretative kind. Hartman writes: "Interpretation [all criticism, I would propose] is a feast, not a fast. It imposes an obligatory excess. The only hypotheses that count are those 'which may seem fantastic,' as Freud remarked in Totemand Taboo. Even those-pace Popper and Hirsch-which may seem unverifiable."29 From this standpoint, no single method of reading is in a privileged position in absolute terms. Any reading is good when, by being itself interesting (that is, proposing unexpected but meaningful intellectual challenges), it renders the text interesting. Historically, structuralist poetics was a welcome reaction against the banalities of a belated positivist historicism prevailing in French academic criticism and, at the same time, against certain widespread reductionist fashions (popular versions of psychoanalysis or Marxian sociologism). Structuralism as a practice of reading has produced some first-class criticism (Barthes on Balzac, Genette on Proust, Todorov on Henry James); on a more theoretical level it has produced, from the works of the early-twentieth-century Russian Formalists (or nearFormalists, like the unclassifiable Mikhail Bakhtin) to the more recent studies of the language of poetry (Jean Cohen's Structure du langage poitique)30 and narrative syntax, an impressive number of provoking hypotheses about the nature and internal functions of literary discourse. Along with such achievements, which like all achievements are the exception rather than the rule, the structuralist fashion has also produced a huge quantity of worthless stuff, an incredible number of unperceptive readings and a whole body of unusable theories, each one more jargony than the other. The kind of reading proposed by poetics can be rich (ideally, a richness of the order of absence), but only insofar as it defines itself in opposition to other reading practices, which seem more acceptable and
29Hartman (n. 5 above), p. 18. 30Jean Cohen, Structuredu langage poetique (Paris: Flammarion, 1966).

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"natural." Once the standards elaborated by poetics gain recognition and come to be taken for granted (something similar happened in the English-speaking world with the New Criticism's concept of "close reading"), other techniques of reading are bound to appear, and they can only be, in the broad sense, hermeneutic. Insofar as interpretation is seen not as a deciphering of indifferent enigmas but as a way of understanding certain revelations, certain existential truths (of the order of fiction, of what Wallace Stevens called the Supreme Fiction), certain "miracles" which have become, to use Mircea Eliade's word, "unrecognizable,"31 hermeneutics implies a sense of confidence, a belief in the possibility that the reader can identify with the author, with his "awareness," with his "profound self" (as Proust would say), with his cogito (as Poulet would say). Poulet is certainly not a representative of hermeneutics in the narrow sense (cf. E. D. Hirsch's concept of "validity in interpretation"),32 but his phenomenology of reading, together with other phenomenological approaches to literature (Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Pierre Richard), is relatable under a broadly defined notion of interpretation. Mutatis mutandis, such a trend is comparable with what in the field of general hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur has called the "phenomenology of the sacred," as illustrated by a variety of scholars of religion from Rudolf Otto to Mircea Eliade. Ricoeur writes: intended in ... The theme of the phenomenology of religion is the something ritual actions, in mythical speech, in belief or mystical feeling; its task is to dis-implicatethat object from the variousintentionsof behavior,discourse,and emotion. Let us call this object the 'sacred,' ... whether it be the tremendum numinosum, according to Rudolf Otto; the 'powerful,' according to Van der Leeuw;or 'fundamentalTime,' accordingto Eliade.... Is not the expectationof being spoken to what motivates the concern for the object? Implied in this expectation is a confidence in language: the belief that language, which bears symbols,is not so much spoken by men as spoken to men.... It is this expectation, this confidence, this belief, that confers on the study of symbolsits particular seriousness.33 To the directions taken by the phenomenology of the sacred correspond, in literary criticism, the theories of reading that recognize the need for the reader to "fulfill" the signifying intention of a text, while at the same time being aware that "there are several ways of fulfilling various 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 and Ideas in Mircea Eliade's Thought," Journal of Religion 57, no. 1 (January 1977): 1-15. 32E. D. Hirsch, Validityin Interpretation(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967) and, more recently, TheAims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 33Ricoeur (n. 14 above), pp. 29-30. 34Ibid., p. 30.

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It is precisely this fullness of language, as I have tried to show, that structuralist poetics turns against and attempts to subvert, "deconstruct," expose, and reduce not to something else (in this sense poetics goes beyond 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 outside poetics, in philosophy, philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of language, etc., of the appearance of a new rhetoric of absence and negation, in which certain terms, such as "emptiness," "gap," "interstice," "discontinuity," "break," "rupture," "dispersion," "interruption," "disruption," etc., play, beyond their normal denotative function, a positive suggestive-connotative role and in which the opposite terms (remember Barthes's derogatory considerations about "repleteness") have acquired a definitely pejorative meaning. Literary hermeneutics, in the comprehensive meaning I have given this concept, always presupposes a deep conviction in and commitment to the fullness of language. It is true that, in the text he wants to interpret, the interpreter often looks for a second text, but he knows that this second text is not valuable in itself (it does not contain the hidden meaning, the explanation, the solution of the enigma); its function consists in helping the mind to become aware of the richness of the first text, a richness that had always been there but that had become invisible, unrecognizable. The hermeneutic cycle is obviously incomplete when it does not return to the original, that is, when the second text it constructs is not fully incorporated and dissolved into the first. A text that is interpreted completely is made to manifest not its "latent content" but its latent richness. But even an incomplete hermeneutic motion-a reductionist approach, when it is practiced with intelligence and a certain gout passionne de l'obstacle-can be revealing when the reader of the interpretation realizes that the "conclusions" he is offered can be disregarded and that he himself can trace the circle of understanding back to its point of origin, to the original text. Thus, for a true theory of interpretation as I see it, the only authentic text is always the text the interpretation starts with. (Obviously, in the case of ancient texts, textual criticism, form criticism, etc., are highly useful auxiliary activities, but the kind of "interpretation" involved in them is different from the one I am talking about; in that case, we may say, the problem is to establish the object of interpretation.) Discussing the problem of translation in his recent book AfterBabel, in the chapter entitled "The Hermeneutic Motion," George Steiner makes a series of very perceptive observations, which are true not only of translation but indeed of all authentic interpretation: "The work translated is enhanced .... The relations of a text to its translations [and to its interpretations 14 in general, I would add] . . . categorize the entire question of

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the meaning of meaning in time, of the existence and effects of the linguistic fact outside its specific, initial form. But there can be no doubt that 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 also generates light."35 Interpretation is always part of a dialogue: the interpreter listens, tries to understand, then speaks. When his response is adequate, the interpreted work is enriched, and so is the interpreter. Should I add that by "adequacy" in this context I mean a faithfulness which can only result from imagination?
III

At the beginning of this paper I ventured into a brief discussion of modernity, time consciousness, and the necessary contextuality of all reading. The rise of historicism, and subsequently the appearance of a typically modern awareness of the historicity of historicism itself, I have suggested, can explain the coexistence of two contrasting time models in the mind of the reader of literature. The historical ordering of the literary past is still essential, and even its most vehement enemies would agree, I believe, that in spite of all its drawbacks it is at least as convenient as the alphabetical ordering of entries in a dictionary. This gives us a linear model of time seen as an irreversible succession of events unfolding in a "generational" series of "causes" and "effects" (fathers and sons, authors and works). In this ineluctably ongoing progression, the fundamental relationship between phenomena is, as I have said earlier, of the order of anteriority/posteriority. To this normal model the reading and rereading of literary texts opposes the notion of a circular and reversible time. Let me observe that this time is distinct from the mythical time of the 'eternal return," as described by the phenomenology of the sacred (Mircea Eliade), as well as from such philosophical concepts as Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence," although it certainly is structurally closer to these than to the inescapably sequential time of history. In spite of their apparently irreducible incompatibility, or perhaps because of it, the linear time of history and the circular time of reading and interpretation (ideally, of recreation) presuppose each other and depend upon each other like the terms of an antithesis. Historical time is possessed, when embodied in literary works, by the secret wish to find a way out of sheer transitoriness, to attain the "bliss" of repetition, while the circular time of interpretation, "hermeneutic time," as I shall label it, seems ready to historicize itself, to become part of the unpredictable unfolding of diachronic time, as a unique "moment" in an unrepeatable
35George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 300-301.

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The Journal of Religion series. It might be argued that interpretation itself, insofar as it aspires to be new, to say something new (by comparison with previous interpretations), starts by being an "unsettling" factor, by attempting to "make history." Ultimately, however, the interpreter wants to establish a nonhistorical relation between the work and himself. He cannot help breaking the linearity of historical time and proposing the notion of an essential 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 meaning presupposes a return of time. It is this essential time that reading and interpretation strive to recover. 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 deep self. A writer is simply a "translator" of this book, as Proust puts it in a famous passage of Le Temps retrouvi. And to be a good translator, the writer has to see, to discern, to decipher, to uncover, to unveil-Proust uses all these words and numerous synonyms. Thus, "style for a writer, as well as color for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision."36 Style is revelation, but by focusing exclusively on style--"cette constante aberration de la critique"37--one misses precisely the substance of revelation. What Proust calls "reasoning intelligence" does not help either: "Des que l'intelligence raisonneuse veut se mettre a juger des oeuvres d'art, il n'y a plus rien de fixe, de certain: on peut demontrer tout ce qu'on veut."38 To read truly one has to read one's self. A book is, Proust says, a kind of optical instrument offered by the writer to the reader for the latter to discern in himself things that he would not have been able to see by himself.39 If books as well as their interpretations, to broaden the scope of Proust's enlightening metaphor, are indeed "optical instruments," poetics and the kind of criticism evolved within the framework of poetics are perfectly legitimate activities: it is always important to know well the instruments we are working with, to be aware of their complexities, to understand how they are constructed and how they function. But what do we see with the help of these instruments? Poetics refuses to answer this question. These instruments, it seems to suggest, are interesting in themselves, in what one can see in them, not through them. These instruments, if we trust them and simply look through them, may delude us, showing unreal things (fake meanings, "ideological" objects). To make sure that we are not cheated, we had better examine first the
36Marcel Proust, A la recherchedu tempsperdu, Pleiade edition, ed. Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferre (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 3:895. 37Ibid., p. 893. 38Ibid. 39Ibid., p. 911.

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system of lenses and mirrors which constitute these instruments. And to figure out how the system works we have to "deconstruct" it, to "decenter" it, to establish homologies between its parts and the parts of other systems; in short, we have to subject it to criticism, to become aware of its limitations and of the role played in its functioning by various built-in prejudices and conventions. All this sophistication makes what we actually can see with the aid of such "optical instruments" highly unreliable and ultimately unimportant. For hermeneutics, books and interpretations are important precisely by what they show us, by what they allow us to decipher from the essential book that is in us-our true life: lived meaning, lost and regained in the dialectic between passingness and recurrence.

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