Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Issue 3. Illustrations |
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Nothing out of hermeneutics' certain course |
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Author: Ortwin de Graef Abstract (E): In this article, the autor critically discusses the way Umberto's Eco theory of "the limits of interpretation" functions as an anti-deconstructionnist "machine de guerre". The author argues that Eco's semiotic vision of deconstruction bears no serious relationship with the main theses deconstructionnism stands for. Abstract (F): L'auteur de cet article interroge critiquement la manière dont la théorie des "limites de l'interprétation" d'Umberto Eco fonctionne surtout comme une machine de guerre anti-déconstructionniste. Il démontre que la conception des thèses déconstructionnistes que défend Eco, n'a rien à voir avec les enjeux véritables de la déconstruction. Keywords: Eco, deconstruction, Wordsworth, interpretation |
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For the past two decades or so, Umberto Eco has, among many other things, been engaged in the at times vertiginous task of interpreting the interpretations his own writing has suffered. Most visibly and, at least at first sight, most excitingly, this task has involved numerous commentaries on readers' responses to his own novels--commentaries which, while at times perhaps a little embattled, skilfully manage to avoid the reactionary recourse to the intentio auctoris as the final say in the matter. What concerns us today, however, is Eco's attempt--or what I interpret, for now, as his attempt--to come to terms with the fate of a work from his more distant past that appears to haunt him like an undeserved bad conscience, not so much because it contains jargon he now, by his own confession, feels 'ashamed' of , but because its title has been opened up to yield a meaning that lies well beyond the limits assigned to it by the work in question. I am alluding, of course, to Opera aperta, and more specifically to the casual readings of its title as a licence to read just about anything (or even absolutely anything) in any work, itself included. To anyone familiar with Eco's work, the suggestion that he would honour such a vapid principle that doesn't even deserve the label of relativism, is preposterous indeed. In fact, the issue would probably not even detain us, were it not for the fact that Eco, in his often implicit efforts to set the record straight, seems to believe that there is (or was) an influential School of Literary Theory and Criticism whose Members, mainly working in the seventies and eighties, actually practice this absolutely-anything-goes-principle. In order to measure his distance from these ultra-radical "deconstructionistic" psycho's, Eco has devoted part of his legendary energy to the critical articulation of what he calls "the limits of interpretation". Before I formulate a question regarding this serious and challenging project, I should first like to clear my throat. For I must admit that I often feel offended by Eco's cavalier treatment of deconstructive literary criticism--for instance when, in the Tanner Lectures published as Interpretation and Overinterpretation, he reveals similarities between, on the one hand, the 'over-indulgent generality and flexibility' of the 'criterion of similarity' espoused in Hermetic semiosis (45) and, on the other hand, 'contemporary practices of textual interpretation' (51). Time and again Eco states that '[w]e find in ancient Hermetism and in many contemporary approaches some disquietingly similar ideas' (39) and 'similar procedures' (51) and he suggests that as a result of these damagingly unrecognised similarities 'contemporary theories of textual interpretation'--and in fact 'most so-called 'post-modern' thought'--'look very pre-antique' (25). What offends me in this is not the suggestion that there would indeed be similarities between deconstruction and hermetic semiotics of similarity but rather that Eco, over-indulging in generality and flexibility, and while generously sharing his massive erudition concerning the most extremely psychotic forms of hermetic semiotics, just posits these similarities without bothering to give us a single shred of traceable evidence from the maligned writings of the historically dislocated disciples of deconstruction. Whenever a concrete reference to a deconstructive critic is introduced in the course of these lectures, or in the related essay 'Intentio Lectoris' (and there is a relation between the Tanner Lectures and this essay, I'm not making it up, deconstructor or not), Eco is careful to qualify the critics in question as 'responsible deconstructionists' ('Intentio' 60) or as 'the shrewdest representatives of this school' (Interpretation 60) who produce 'charming', 'if not fully convincing' readings (61) and are somehow exempt from the ridicule levelled at the disembodied dimwits irresponsibly following in their train. My throat is cleared and I move to less frivolous matters--or rather, to what I take to be the major flaw in Eco's self-confessed "caricature" of "the most radical reader-oriented theories of interpretation" (40). This flaw can be indicated by way of the following related propositions: (1) If a radical reader-oriented theory of interpretation holds that 'the glory of the reader is to discover that texts can say everything, except what their author wanted them to mean' (39), then deconstruction is not a radical (or even a moderate) reader-oriented theory of interpretation (as indeed Eco himself just about admits in a comment on a statement by J. Hillis Miller that says as much ("Intentio", 60)). (2) Far from being a wilful transgression of the limits of interpretation, deconstructive reading is a practice devoted to the articulation of the limits of interpretation. (3) Umberto Eco's limits of interpretation are not the limits of interpretation articulated in deconstructive reading. The third proposition governs the two preceding ones, so I shall immediately focus on the difference between Eco's limits and mine, so to speak. The key to this difference involves an ambiguity the phrase 'the limits of interpretation' shares with most genitival constructions. Eco construes this phrase as a subjective genitive: the limits of interpretation designate the boundaries imposed by the hermeneutic enterprise itself in order to distinguish responsible interpretations from wild interpretations or over-interpretations; interpretation itself provides the interpretive enterprise with its lawful limits. Deconstruction, on the other hand, construes the phrase also (not just exclusively) as an objective genitive: the limits of interpretation are limits imposed on all interpretation, including what Eco calls 'use', by the materiality of the text; the limits of interpretation are not provided by intepretation itself but by something other that limits interpretation as such. Let me try to further elucidate this distinction in a series of contrastive formulas-the true import of these formulas should become clearer when I turn to a specific case later on.
This dispute can perhaps not be settled, but it can certainly be refined. Rather than to try doing so by further extending this serial chain of distinctions, I propose to pursue this issue by following Eco's advice 'to check with concrete examples whether there are, and to what extent, limits of interpretation' ('Intentio' 62)--the main question being what indeed the extent, or the nature, of these limits is. A Wordsworthian exampleThe example I have chosen is a passage from Book Nine of William Wordsworth's The Prelude:
The passage figures in Wordsworth's account of his visit to France in 1791-92 and its overt purpose is to explain his lack of enthusiasm--surprising to himself--for the "events" of the Revolution. This strange "indifference" (l. 91), as he calls it, had troubled him ever since he set foot on French soil and in the 200 lines or so preceding the passage just quoted, he tries out a number of hypotheses to come to terms with it. Now, in order to appreciate the stakes involved in reading our passage, it is necessary to sketch at least the bare bones of Wordsworth's argument; and I should perhaps add here that, contrary to the caricature, this necessity is an imperative point of principle for deconstructive reading. For deconstruction does not, as Eco would have it, indulge in 'pretextual reading, performed not in order to interpret the text but to show how much language can produce unlimited semiosis.' ('Intentio' 62) Rather, it reads the text in a principled attempt to allow for its resistance to interpretation, and this resistance is not an illustration of unlimited semiosis (as if such an illustration were even needed in the first place) but an index of semiotic crisis. Deconstruction does not get excited by language's potential to produce an infinity of meanings dwindling into nothingness, it does not, pace Eco, 'privilege the initiative of the reader and reduce the text to an ambiguous bunch of still unshaped possibilities, thus transforming texts into mere stimuli for the interpretive drift' ('Intentio' 52); on the contrary, it focuses on irresolvable conflicts between alternative interpretations generated within a critically and philologically responsible textual-contextual reading. The annoying result of this principle is that deconstructive reading, even in the extremely reduced form I propose to practice here, actually requires some argumentative effort--so please bear with me for a moment. Wordsworth's first interpretation of his own indifference in the face of the events of the French Revolution is that he was "unprepared" (l. 92), i.e. he did not possess the "needful knowledge" (l. 93) that would have enabled him to properly interpret the historical processes he set out to witness. The image he uses here is significant: he writes that he "had abruptly passed / Into a theatre of which the stage / Was busy with an action far advanced." (ll. 93-95) Incomprehensible history is translated as fragmented theatre: this is the first stage in a tropological chain transforming the history Wordsworth cannot understand into something he recognises. The remedial exercise he resorts to in order to give a "form and body" (l. 105) to the "loose and disjointed" (l. 106) "events" (l. 104) that fail to excite him is entirely consistent with this theatrical trope, albeit it only implicitly. Unable to interpret the performance, Wordsworth decides to join it: "I gradually withdrew / Into a noisier world, and thus did soon / Become a patriot" (ll. 121-23). This transformation of an English tourist into a French patriot obviously generates new difficulties, which Wordsworth skilfully addresses by way of yet another transformation: it now turns out that for an Englishman the French Revolution is less than exciting because it is really only a belated imitation of the egalitarian society supposedly firmly rooted in the nature of the English. The tropological pattern generating our passage is now in place: the uninterpretable events of history are transformed into eminently interpretable nature via theatrical fiction. The riddle of the Revolution is solved: "the events seemed nothing out of nature's certain course", they were unexciting because supremely familiar to the English subject unwittingly witnessing them. Yet this apparently internally consistent transformation cannot erase the resistance of the text in which it takes shape: for if the events of history were initially unexciting because they were, by Wordsworth's own account, uninterpretable in the absence of needful knowledge of their origin, how then can these same events, rehearsed from the same retrospective present some ten years after the fact, be said to be unexciting by virtue of Wordsworth's natural familiarity with, precisely, their origin in nature? This crux is crystallized in Wordsworth's statement 'unto me the events / Seemed nothing out of nature's certain course', a statement which, informed as it is by what Geoffrey Hartman has called the 'special negativity of Wordsworth's style', now yields two irreconcilable interpretations and hence functions as a moment of unreadibility affecting Wordsworth's entire argument. In its immediate context, the sentence means something like 'the events of the Revolution do not swerve from nature's certain course'; but in the larger context that has generated it, it also means: 'the events of the Revolution do not belong to nature's certain course'. The phrase 'out of' can indeed mean (among other possibilities) either 'coming from' (as in 'out of the goodness of my heart'), or 'deviating from' (as in ' out of order'): the events are either ordinary, i.e. , they seem 'nothing out of the ordinary', where the ordinary is the order of nature's certain course, or they are extra-ordinary, i.e. they seem like 'nothing originating in the certain course of nature'. The events are either joined to nature's certain course, or they are out of joint, 'disjointed' (l. 106). And never the twain shall meet. Yet they do, and in doing so they mark Wordsworth's text with the unimaginable touch of the unreadable, a touch that cannot be lifted by recourse to that bedrock of hermeneutics we call intention. No reading of Book Nine of The Prelude can afford to ignore this touch of aporia, even if, or precisely because, this means the reading has to accept the limits of interpretation and to recognise the text as nothing out of hermeneutics' certain course. Works quotedUmberto ECO (1990). 'Intentio lectoris: The State of the Art', in The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 44-63. |
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