Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic-Deconstructive Approach more

UNDERSTANDING MISREADING: A HERMENEUTIC/DECONSTRUCTIVE APPROACH* Jose Angel Garcia Landa Gniversidad de Zaragoza Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere (Roland Barthes —a la Oscar Wilde s/z— 1974: 16) In this paper I will present for the purpose of comparison several critical conceptions originating in different schools and dealing with a range of objects of study. The comparison will yield a common element whose outline will become more visible as we proceed, as each of these conceptions brings out aspects which are implicit in the others. This exercise might be compared to the drawing of lines between stars to form a constellation, allowing us to see a previously invisible figure. The lines in constellations may seem too insubstantial as terms of comparison, but perhaps our critical promenade will go some length towards the deconstruction of the clear-cut opposition between what is substantial and what is constructed by the imagination, at least as far as the field of interpretive theory is concerned. The thread connecting the critical reasonings I will examine is the retrospective rereading of a narrative and its consequences for hermeneutics. These consequences might be summarized by saying that the passing of time alters everything —even the past, once so safely stored. * I am grateful for the financial aid provided by the DGICYT (Programa Sectorial de Promotion General del Conocimiento, proyecto PS94-0057), which has allowed me to carry out this and other related projects. 58 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding 1. The Borges-Eliot Theme Borges, perhaps recognizing in Kafka one of his own precursors, writes as follows: Yo premedite alguna vez un examen de los precursores de Kafka. A este, al principio, lo pense tan singular como el fenix de las alabanzas retoricas; a poco de frecuentarlo, crei reconocer su voz, o sus habitos, en textos de diversas literaturas y de-diversas epocas ... En cada uno de esos textos esta la idiosincrasia de Kafka, en grado mayor o menor, pero si Kafka no hubiera escrito, no la percibiriamos; vale decir, no existiria ... El hecho es que cada escritor crea a sus precursores. Su labor modiflca nuestra concepcion del pasado, como ha de modificar el future (Borges, 1984: 107, 109)1. Let us recall that for T. S. Eliot (whom Borges refers us back to), cultural tradition causes history to be retrospectively altered, instead of simply moving forwards: The existing monuments [=great literary works] form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered ... [The past is] altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. (Eliot, 1951: 15)2. Playing with this idea, David Lodge makes one of the characters in his novel Small World write a thesis on «the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare» (1985: 51). Literary tradition is a form of historical narrative, and a masterpiece is among other things a historical event. It is therefore relevant to contemplate these ideas from the perspective of the hermeneutics of history, which logically underlies any reflection on literary history3. Narrative and the Hermeneutics of History The second thread of our critical plot will be provided 'by Paul Ricoeur, whose work on historiography effects a synthesis between narrativist and structuralist theories of history. Ricceur looks upon history as a literary genre (note: not «a fictional" genre). History as a genre rests in the last analysis on the role of the 1 At one time 1 intended to investigate Kafka's precursors. Him 1 thought at first to be as unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; as I became more familiar with his work, I thought 1 could recognise his voice or his manner in writings from various literatures and from various periods ... Kafka's idiosyncrasy is to be found in each of those writings to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we'would not perceive it, which is as good as saying that it would not exist... The fact is that every writer creates his precursors. His labour modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. (Translation mine). 2 Compare Ricceur's concept of tradition, which is also an "interactive" one: «a tradition is constitued by the interplay of innovation and .sedimentation" (1984: 68). 3 In my article «Speech acts, Literary Tradition and intertextual Pragmatics» (1996) 1 address some of these issues from the perspective of structuralist analysis and speech act theory. Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic/Deconstructiue Approach 59 historian; it is the historian who constructs a narrative plot which allows the understanding of past events. It is customary to start any discussion of the function of plot in narrative with a reference to Aristotle's Poetics. Ricceur takes as a starting point the Aristotelian definition of plot, according to which the plot performs a structuring function on the action: emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession. (Ricceur, 1984: 65). In a freer interpretation of Aristotle's conception, Ricoeur defines plot as the operation which effects a synthesis between discordant elements and allows us to reach an intelligible conclusion. To follow a story is to move forward in the midst of contingencies and peripeteia under the guidance of an expectation that finds its fulfilment in the «conclusion» of the story. This conclusion is not logically implied by some previous premises. It gives the story an «end point*, which, in turn, furnishes the point of view from which the story can be perceived as forming a whole. To understand the story is to understand how and why the successive episodes led to this conclusion, which, far from being foreseeable, must finally be acceptable, as congruent with the episodes brought together by the story. (1984: 66-67)4. This structural function of closure (Kermode's «sense of an ending») becomes more perceptible when we reread a narrative (see Ricceur, 1984: 67). In rereading we watch the ending beforehand as it were, and we are privy to a peculiar temporal phenomenon: we know the future, we advance ahead in time with a clear knowledge of our destination. This privilege is rarely afforded by our own future in our personal lives. In a detective novel, however, any trivial word uttered by the butler betrays him once we know he is the murderer. The repetition of a story, governed as a whole by its way of ending, constitutes an alternative to the representation of time as flowing from the past toward the future,Jollowing the well-known metaphor of the «arrow of time». It is as though recollection inverted the so-called «natural» order of time. In reading the ending in the beginning and the beginning in the ending, we also learn to read time itself backwards, as the recapitulation of the initial conditions of a course , of action in its terminal consequences. (Ricceur, 1984: 67-68). The theories of action formulated by Dray and von Wright take into account indirect action —both intentional indirection and unintended consequences. According to Ricceur, this is essential for the writing of history. A contemporary witness of the events narrated by history could never be a historian in the sense defined by Ricceur, even if s/he was perfectly acquainted with all the circumstances 4 Unlike Ricceur (1984: 56) I think that the level of action is not alien to a previous temporal configuration. A plot is not a simple "configuration" but a reconfiguration, of a previous plot. After all, Ricoeur goes on to affirm (1984: 57) that any action is always already symbolically mediated. That mediation surely includes some kind of temporal perspective. 60 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding and viewpoints, all the deeds and intentions of historical agents. The contemporary witness lacks the necessary temporal perspective which allows us to perceive the unintended and unforeseeable results of contemporary events. «What transforms actions into histories?» asks a philosopher. Precisely those factors that escape a simple. reconstruction of the calculations made by the agents of the action. (Ricoeur, 1984: 229). Mink (1965) holds that writing history does not consist in writing a narrative of facts, but in rewriting it. The historian's task is not that of a witness; rather, it necessarily involves retrospection, describing the past as an intelligible schema of relationships. This retrospective intelligibility rests upon a construction that no witness could have put together when the events were occurring, since this backward way of . proceeding would be unavailable to any contemporary witness. (Ricceur, 1984: 157, paraphrasing Mink, 1965). As noted by Walter Benjamin, it is the concerns of the present which ultimately justify the existence of history as a discipline and of the past as a cultural construct: every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. Mo fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it. by thousands Of years. (Benjamin, 1969b: 255, 263). Danto and Ricoeur argue that the way the «images» and «events» of the past are represented is shaped by present concerns and methods, too. Thus historians are able to explain the past with methodological tools which did not exist in the period they study, such as sociology or psychoanalysis, and use concepts which are to some extent anachronic; e.g. when we speak of the "Roman proletariat" (Ricceur, 1984: 256 n. 43). For Danto, whom Ricceur also comments, the narrative phrases used in the writing of history involve three distinct times: that of the event, that of its consequences, and that of the historian (who is not an eyewitness): the whole truth concerning this event cannot be known until after the fact and long after it has taken place. This is just the sort of story only a historian can tell. (Ricoeur, 1984: 145). Danto lacks the notion of a plot, a narrative articulation beyond the sentence, ^although his «narrative sentences" are in themselves a miniature version of plot. Emphasis on the narrative macrostructure is laid by Gallie's notion of «fol!owability»: What, then, is a story? and what does it mean «to follow* a story? A story describes a sequence of actions and experiences done or undergone by-a certain number of people, whether real or imaginary. These people are presented either in situations that change or as reacting to such change. In turn, these changes reveal hidden aspects of the situation and the Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic/Deconstructiue Approach 61 people involved, and engender a new predicament which calls for thought, action, or both. This response to the new situation leads the story toward its conclusion. (Ricceur, 1984: 150, paraphrasing Gallie, 1968: 22). In his essay in this collection, Leo Hickey too points out that in short narratives such as jokes the ending effects (usually in the hearer's mind) a synthesis of discordant elements such as double meanings of words. A punchline must be congruent, although in order to bring about the desired effect the congruence must not be predictable. Something similar happens in historical narrative—in fact, in any narrative: Rather than being predictable, a narrative's conclusion has to be acceptable. (Ricoeur, 1984: 150). From a logical perspective, a narrative has the shape of an implicit judgement (in the Kantian sense of «judgement» as «synthesis»). A narrative defines, or redefines, the events which make it up as events; the relationship betwen the events and the narrative is therefore adequately described by the hermeneutic circle. An event may only count as one from the perspective introduced by the narrative as a whole; we could argue that such an event is «created» retrospectively, once its consequences come to light —once its narrative value emerges and can be formulated and enhanced by inserting the event in a narrative5. The act of judgement which brings it to light by hermeneutically relating it to a narrative is a performative act, an intervention on history in its own right6. The hermeneutic circle as described by Schleiermacher is actually an ever-expanding spiral, leading us from the narrow linguistic sense of a word to its wider stylistic or cultural sense. Note that this means that the sense of a narrative event also expands hermeneutically through history: an event is reinterpreted anew (retrospectively) not only once we have read the whole narrative it is set in, but also once we have read that narrative within the larger narrative of history and the new contexts it produces. Even in Schleiermacher's limited sense, the hermeneutic circle is intrinsically temporal, and involves retrospection and revision, a «pIot» in a way. Narratives are sequences of events together with their explanation, but usually the task of extracting the explanation from the sequence— the task of spelling out the narrative congruence— is left to the reader. In this way narrative is «showing» instead of «telling»7. What it shows is always more than it tells; in fact, no clear line can be drawn between what the narrative tries to show and what it does show. Reading narrative involves constructing a synthesis through interpretive labour. There is a 5 A related idea appears in the work of Freud: an event thought to be biographical is revealed to be a symbolic fantasy retrospectively transferred to the subject's childhood (see e.g. 1988a: 1589; 1988b). For Freud this phenomenon is a pathological exception, and he does not seem to contemplate it as an instance of a more general principle, applicable to explain the configuration of the past in general. 6 This notion was suggested to me by a seminar of J. Hillis Miller's on Trollope's Auala's Angel (Ciniversidad de Zaragoza, November 1996). 7 On «showing» and «telling» see section 2.4.1 in Garcia Landa, 1998. 62 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding kinship between this view of reading and the definition of plot as a structuring of discordant elements which Ricoeur discovers in Aristotle. There is no telling which discordant elements (within the narrative, within the author's oeuvre or life, within a tradition, or more generally cultural and contextual ones) will be made concordant by a new reading. 2. The theory of misreading The extended sense of «misreading» is a concept associated to the Yale school of deconstruction. Theorists of misreading hold that any act of writing involves the authors's imperfect comprehension of his/her own text or a previous text; any critical act is yet another misreading, an interpretation built on a founding error. As Vincent B. Leitch puts it, in an account of Paul de Man's theories, all interpretation, given the rhetoricity of language, is misreading ... Any critical reading that tries to contain the inevitable misreadings itself affirms the inevitability of misreading in spite of its very desire to circumscribe the random play of grammatical structures and the dizzying aberrations of rhetorical figures. Necessarily, the critical readings of an author or of a text exist in the mode of error. (1983: 186). This conception has often been denounced as a fallacy from a traditional hermeneutic viewpoint. We might also argue that if there exists no possibility of «reading», if there are no correct interpretations, it makes no sense to speak of «misreading» —this would be simply the normal condition of reading and the negative or pejorative prefix would be unwarranted, its function merely polemical. There is no absolutely correct reading in the sense of being the best reading of a work for all purposes and in all circumstances, although of course there are readings which are adequate in the sense that they fulfil in a satisfactory way a given institutional function (academic, educational, etc.). The strictures made upon the deconstructive concept of misreading are reasonable in many respects. Still, and in spite of its discordance with classical or with materialist hermeneutics, the theory warrants a closer look, in case it also holds an element of truth. It might well be that these discordant theories may be brought to a partial synthesis, allowing us to configurate a satisfactory ending for this paper. We shall therefore examine some modes of misreading described by Paul de Man, Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller. For Paul de Man, an author can be blind to what is being done by the language of his text. The author does not understand his text—it seems to say something but it does or shows something else. Its implicit rhetoricity deconstructs between the lines whatever the author may seem to be explicitly stating. The critic (the «reader» for de Man) points out this blind spot. Now de Man seems to suggest that this blind spot is «in» the text and is simply recognised or identified by the critic who communicates to us its existence. We Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic/Deconstructiue Approach 63 should note that de Man is not interested in the subject's (author's, reader's) consciousness but in the text in itself: it follows from the rhetorical nature of literary language that the cognitive function resides in the language and not in the subject. The question as to whether the author himself is or is not blinded is to some extent irrelevant (de Man, 1983: 137). I find it difficult to share, indeed to understand, this notion of discourse («language») having meaning independently of any conscious subject. It is clear that the text and the interpretation are dialectically linked, and in that respect we can profit from de Man's notion of reading. But de Man leaves outside this schema the subject who makes or endorses the interpretation —in this case he leaves himself out. The author may be blind to his own language, but de Man cannot be blind to it —the cognitive function has to be performed by a subject (de Man) not merely by the language of the text; we need someone with eyesight to point out someone else's blindness. De Man does not acknowledge his own position as an observer in this triangular relationship (author-language-critic). This is no doubt one of those moments of critical blindness which according to de Man haunt a critic's most significant insights like a doppelganger. His preference for the term «reader» instead of «critic» perhaps indicates this self-effacement. «Readers» as such leave no trace of their reading, but it is clear that in speaking of «readers» who identify the blind spots of a text de Man refers primarily to those readers who give their reading a textual form readable in its turn —critics, not mere readers. In calling himself a «reader» de Man oddly simulates critical transparency. More paradoxically still, de Man holds that there may be texts (for instance Rousseau's) with no blind spots5. It is the critics of those texts (such as Derrida) who misread the texts, necessitating a second critic (e.g. de Man) to point out how these areas of blindness are to be found in the first critic's text, and not in the author's. There may be an element of bardolatry in this conception; there is no doubt an essentialist view of interpretation and ideology which seems to be at odds with what is supposed to be the anti-essentialist programme of deconstruction. Even if we run the risk now of simply adding one more link to the chain of deconstructions, we must sketch a critique of this conception: a) If meaning is the result of an interaction between text and reading, we cannot speak a priori of texts with blind spots and texts without blind spots. Blind spots do not exist in a text apart from a reading of the same. Put in structuralist terms, it is a mistake to represent as a synchronic textual structure the interaction of blindness and insight which unfolds diachronically or sequentially. b) More generally, a text as a whole, insomuch as it is a semiotic phenomenon, exists only as a function of actual or potential readings. c) The ideology of a text is not an a priori definable substance contained in the text, but a dialectical relationship between the text and its interpreters. If someone 8 De Man (1983: 139). I criticised this notion in an earlier paper (1994: 30 n.7). 64 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding utters the phrase «deconstruction is a crypto-Nazi theory." it would be naive to accept that ideological characterisation without a simultaneous consideration of the ideology of the speaker and of our own ideological project as we interpret the sentence. Surprisingly enough, de Man seems to reify the textual structure and meaning, and to consider the text unaltered by the process of interpretation. As a corollary, the text is kept apart from the process of historical change. Historical evolution, as reflected in the sequence of interpretations, cannot be perceived in the text in itself considered apart from history or aseptically cut off from the history of its reception. From de Man's reading of Derrida's essay on Rousseau9 we are supposed to conclude that Derrida interpreted Rousseau mistakenly; that de Man, on the other hand, has read him accurately, and that Rousseau's work remains untouched by these readings10. The central thesis of de Man's book Blindness and Insight is that criticism is not as lucidly self-conscious as it purports to be. The book is devoted to the deconstruction of critical readings, and holds that criticism achieves its best insights when it is literary and not literal, when it forces us to read between the lines and see how its deeper sense—what it does or shows—contradicts its surface assertions— what it says or tells (I use these terms to bring out de Man's implicit use of the modernist binary «showing/telling»). Only, the author of the critical text is not in full control of the meaning shown: The reader is given the elements to decipher the real plot hidden behind the pseudo-plot, but the author [critic] himself remains deluded ... It is left to the reader to Hraw a conclusion that the critics cannot face if they are to pursue their task, (de Man, 1983: 104). That is to say, the critic's blindness is the necessary condition for insight to take place: Critics' moments of greatest blindness with regard to their own critical assumptions are also the moments at which they achieve their greatest insight, (de Man, 1983: 109). It is not clear, though, who is responsible for this insight. Is the author blind after all or not? The author may be said to be responsible for the conditions of the insight, but not for the insight itself, since according to de Man the author remains blinded to the deeper meaning of the text. To me, the insight is de Man's (e.g. by insightfully deconstructing Derrida's almost-insightful text de Man shows Derrida's blindness to 9 See Jacques Derrida (1967a) and Paul de Man, «The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau., (in de Man, 1983:102-41). 10 Leitch (1983: 187) tries to smooth out this contradiction by considering de Man's assessment of Rousseau as an «early formulation., —an interpretation which perhaps would leave us with Rousseau transformed by de Man's reading. However, this is Leitch's reading of de Man; de Man did not modify the essay in the revised edition of Blindness_and Insight, although he does admit to unspecified ..inadequacies., in this particular essay (1983: xi). De Man was criticised for ignoring statements in Derrida's essay in which Derrida insisted on the interaction between text and deconstructive reading (Culler, 1982: 217). Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic/Deconstructive Approach 65 his own meaning). We have seen that de Man prefers to ignore those subjective attributions, silencing his labour as a critic, and objectivates that insight as belonging to «the text». But it should be clear by now that «the text» cannot be invoked as an unproblematic and self-evident object. The text is not a brute fact; it is a text read by someone. The insight does not belong to the text as «read» (written) by the author, nor to the text as read by other readers who may have other projects and remain alien to this hermeneutic problem. The insight de Man teases out from the text belongs to the text as read by de Man, and to the text de Man teaches us to read11. The insight is de Man's insight into the text, and ours as we follow his reading. Correlatively, a blind spot comes into being retrospectiuely: something which did not exist before de Man's reading exists now in the past, in the text other critics read without perceiving that blind spot. The text has been transformed by the critical reading—even if de Man, in what I see as a spot of critical blindness, fails to put it that way. Instead of explicitly addressing the productive capacity of reading, de Man prefers to speak of texts' «unreadability» and of «misreading», which is not very helpful for most students of literature. There can be found in de Man other mystifying moves related to this one, such as the equation of unreadability with the "literary specificity" of a work (de Man 1983:137n). Literature should be defined institutionally and contextually, not rhetorically. We could of course assume that de Man entrusts his readers with the task of deconstructing him and finding his blind spots, but it is disquieting to find that his own text does not explicitly address the reflexive problem of its own metacritical status— by erasing its own enunciation, it sets itself on a privileged level, allowing readers to assume that de Man's reading is immune to the deconstruction he effects upon other critics. It would be unfair to assert that de Man claims this status for his text. Or wouldn't it? The implications are for us to sort out. It is well known that the practice of deconstruction lends itself to infinite regress12, A critic (Derrida) deconstructs an author (Rousseau), but is then deconstructed by a second critic (de Man) whose reading is deconstructed by yet other critics. Hillis Miller describes this phenomenon as a narrative sequence, thus providing an additional element to add to our constellation of retrospective readings and a key connection between hermeneutics and narrative theory. The failure to read ... takes the form of a further, secondary or tertious, narrative superimposed on the first deconstructive narrative. This supplementarity narrative shows indirectly, in the form of a story, someone committing again the ■same, linguistic error that the deconstructive narrative has lucidly identified and denounced. (Miller, 1987: 47) 11, Clearly de Man is not coherent in his attributions of blindness and insight. He does say elsewhere that the critic is «only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place, (qtd. in Norris, 1982: 108). If this were the case, the critic's intervention would be superfluous. 12 Derrida (1967b) announced several of the moves we are describing and enacting here. 66 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding De Man shows that we always reveal what we try to hide (Miller, 1987: 51). The question is, to whom do we reveal it? Some critics hold that de Man's theory was a systematic technique for the justification and occultation of his role in Nazi collaboration (see e.g. Newton, 1990: 95). Nowadays de Man's texts are read retrospectively as a penitential or evasive manoeuvre. As I see it, those meanings were not «in the text» until history or cultural difference taught their lessons and someone saw those meanings, or retrospectively established them. We should remember in this connection that we cannot define history without recognising the implicit but necessary function of the historian (Ricceur, 1984: 99). That is to say, the historian is not a supplement or accident of history, but a central element in the structure of history. I would like to put forward the notion that the same principle holds with respect to the interpreters or readers of literature: they are not mere observers of sense, but rather constitute the meaning of the text with their activity. If interpretation is an intrinsically temporal, sequential activity, its time-span, like historical time as a whole, is not «empty, homogeneous"; rather, it is «based on a constructive principle": the interpreter's present and his/her overall project are structurally linked to the past event13. A practical case of deconstructive analysis may serve as an additional example of the central topic we keep returning to—the retrospective construction of meaning. The example will be Henry James's self-rereadings in the prologues to the New York edition of his works, analyzed by Hillis Miller in The Ethics of Reading. James structures his tales around a vision he wishes to express. The vision is further brought into focus in his retrospective explanation (provided by the prefaces) of the original act of invention and configuration which was the writing of the novel. A good reading further reshapes the central matter of the novel, and allows the vision to emerge with greater clarity. The work itself and its critical rereading are two (temporally discrete) viewpoints which provide a stereoscopic view of the subject. This «subject» has an ideal existence: it is neither the work nor its critical reading, though both afford an intuition of the «subject». Whose intuition? Evidently, a third reader's. James ascribed the^same stereoscopic role to the illustrations in novels—as Miller notes, they were acceptable for James only if they did not refer directly to the story or the characters. Instead, an illustration should harmonize with something behind or deep within the text, the «thing» both novel and illustration allude to (Miller, 1987: 118). Miller sums James's experience of rereading as follows: To re-read is to be forced by an irresistible necessity that is not in the text he once wrote and now re-reads, but appears to come from the matter that text represented in a way he now finds inadequate. But if he is coerced, he is, strangely, also free. (Miller, 1987: 115)14. 13 1 borrow these insights on time from Benjamin (1969b: 262). 14 This conceptual configuration should be compared with Ricoeur's notion of potential stories, «stories that demand to be told» (1984: 74) or, further, with the Aristotelian ambiguity as to the status of the «unity of action». The unity of an action is an effect of the author's selection and his configuration of a plot, but on the other hand it also seems to be already there, in the sense that the author must give shape to an action which already has some kind of unity, bringing out its dramatic possibilities. That potential plot emerges through the author's act of emplotment. Likewise, with this reading i am configurating a potential sense in Aristotle's text. Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic/Deconstructive Approach 67 Let us recall that in Miller's view a deconstructive reading does not create a meaning freely willed by the critic, but rather the meaning which emerges from the text with the critical reading (Miller, 1987). There is here, too, an element of law or compulsion. The reading brings out the difference between what the text says and what it represents or allegorizes (Miller, 1987: 117) —what it shows. Therefore, reading is subject not to the text as its law, but to that law to which the text is subject. This law forces the reader to betray the text or deviate from it in the act of reading it, in the name of a higher demand that can yet be reached only by way of the text. This response creates yet another text which is a new act. (Miller, 1987:120). Any text is a «misreadingn in the sense that it deviates from, or imperfectly translates, the «thing» or «matter», the subtle and evasive subject which James tries to express (Miller 1987: 121). The example of Henry James or the act of deconstruction are here paradigmatic of any act of reading. Yet another ideal and evasive retrospective sense arises as Miller compares the ideal image of the subject behind James's texts to another ideal object, the result too of intertextual confrontation: the ideal sense which, according to Walter Benjamin (1969a), emerges between an ideal text and its translation: Both original [1] and translation are inadequate translations of an original [2] which can never be given as such. (Miller, 1987: 123). Note that the second use of the word «original» is paradoxical: «original» no. 2 appears only as a virtual effect of the convergence of original no. 1 and of its translation. This is a clear instance of the retrospective creation of a virtual «cause» as an effect of reading. It is not clear whether Miller is aware that these virtual objects, such as the compulsive «law» which according to him governs reading, are instances of retroactive causes'5 created by the process of reading—thence their mysterious or ghostly overtones. Be that as it may, such numinous and ethereal objects as the "ideal original of an original" or the «law which governs reading» should be deconstructed. Harold Bloom also defines criticism as «misprision» or "creative misreading"16. In Bloom's theory, misreading is both a tropological phenomenon and a mechanism of defense, a symptom of anxiety in the face of the precursors who obstruct a writer's attempts at originality because they have written first. A strong poet like Milton will attempt to (retrospectively) reverse literary tradition, and subsume his predecessors through an act of transumptive misreading (Bloom, 1980: 142). Actually, belatedness infects all modes of reading: Reading, despite all humanist traditions of education, is very nearly impossible, for every reader's relation to every poem is governed by a figuration of 15 On retroactive causality, see the discussion in Culler (1982). 16 Bloom 1976: 4, qtd. in Newton, 1990: 89. 68 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding belatedness ... In order to become a strong poet, the poet-reader begins with a trope or defense that is a misreading, or perhaps we might speak of the trope- as-misreading. (1980: 69). A crucial third element is missing in Bloom's theory as it was missing in de Man's: the reader (e.g. Bloom) who constructs this narrative for us. Maybe this self- effacing accounts in part for Bloom's notion that the retrospective appropriation of the past dissolves «the reality of the present moment* (1980: 192) instead of narratively structuring it, as I would hold it does. Though Bloom's theory is, as he acknowledges himself, hyperbolic, it has the advantage of dramatically highlighting the intertextual quality of literature17, and the element of concealment in intertextuality—if the identity of the literary object were self-evident there would be no need for literary critics. We need Bloom, though, to bring to light all the precursors which the author's anxiety has carefully concealed in the text. 3. Misreading and the hermeneutic circle. Back to the Wilde side Discussing the "rewriting of the self» that takes place in autobiography, Mark Freeman concludes that «the meanings one arrives at are as much made as found" (1993: 30). This applies no less to the experiential text of the writer's own life than to the linguistic text of the work itself as read by a critic. In both cases meaning emerges from a dialectical relationship between the past and the present, an interaction which of course can take place only in the present. Thus, the meaning of the past text is ever in the making, as new interpretive contexts emerge. It is in this extended sense that any reading is a misreading, since it necessarily goes beyond the historical horizon of the text and takes place in that hermeneutic locus Gadamer called horizontuerschmelzung. As noted by Gadamer, this phenomenon is related to a more general interpretive phenomenon, the hermeneutic circle of understanding (Gadamer, 1977: 361ff). In Ast and Schleiermacher's, ' original definition, the hermeneutic circle is «the notion that any part of a text can be understood only be means of an understanding of the whole, and that for this reason every explanation of a given element already presupposes that the whole has been understood" (Scheliermacher, 1986: 195). This «whole» is understood by Gadamer in the sense of the historical development of a tradition, beyond the sense of the whole of a work with respect to a sentence, or of the author's complete works with respect to a single work. The significance of a work for a developing tradition is constantly evolving—in this respect Gadamer's notion concurs with T. S. Eliot's conception of tradition in «Tradition and the Individual Talent». We should perhaps stress that tradition is not self-evident and that it is subject to direct intervention and manipulation (not least by 17 A quality which incidentally is rarely dealt with in de Man's criticism. This absence goes a long way to account for the ahistorical nature of his approach and for his notion of history as a collection of random events (Leitch, 1983: 188-89). Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic/Deconstructibe Approach 69 critics such as Eliot himself). This complicates the hermeneutic problem considerably. A tradition is also a kind of plot: it is read as one, and it evolves as one through the interventions of successive critical schools and institutions. The whole of a tradition, like an individual work, is constantly being «misread». This is, in part, what Oscar Wilde called «creative criticism", criticism as an active cultural agent, an instrument of social production, not merely reproduction. According to Wilde, criticism should not discover in a work the intention of the artist, since the work of a great artist will always go beyond his intention. Most twentieth- century formalists and New Critics would side with Wilde in this anti-intentionalist position18. Wilde is more radical than most, though. The critic must discover in the work something which was not there at all before the critical intervention. The receiver is an agent of the work's meaning just like the author; like Benjamin or Ricoeur, Wilde considers the temporal and cultural span between the work and the interpreter as a non-inert, productive medium; the critic's creative activity is not gratuitous; it is at once an intervention within a cultural tradition, and a connection of past, present and future through the expression of Utopian desire: the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives, and symbol of what we pray for, or perhaps of what, having prayed for, we fear that we may receive. (1990: 26). This is why criticism is not neutral, and why\in the act of interpretation the critic must not try to suppress but to intensify his own personality. The truth of the interpretation is created by the interpretive act, not mimetically extracted from the interpreted object. 4. A provisional conclusion on literary interpretation We have been shown how establishing a concordance between discordant elements is one of the functions of emplotment and of plot-reading (Ricceur, 1984: 43, commenting Aristotle). This definition of Ricceur's can be applied to interpretive labour as well. Like the writing of history, criticism has an essentially narrative quality, due to the inherently temporal and narrative structure of human experience and of cultural productions. Articulating a concordance between discordant interpretations is one such narrative resolution. Stepping beyond the threshold of a text-world in a quest after the meaning of a work —the more or less magical object supposedly hidden inside it which must be retrieved for the community— is yet another narrative function of criticism. At least in the sense of narrative defined by Hayden White, for whom ^ „}8, Se,6, f0r instance' the discussions on the ..Intentional Fallacy- and its offspring collected in Newton- De Molina (1976). 70 The Pragmatics of Understanding and Misunderstanding a narrative is any literary form in which the voice of the narrator rises against a background of ignorance, incomprehension, or forgetfulness to direct our attention, purposefully, to a segment of experience organized in a particular way. (White, 1972: 13; qtd. in Ricceur, 1984: 258, n. 59). The «significance» of a work can be understood in a double sense—as «its value and influence within a tradition", e.g. in our examples drawn from Borges and Eliot, or in the sense of "meaning, sense, statement". These senses are the object of two distinct but related critical tasks, and both tasks have a narrative structure. 'lnt'efpretin^^~worIrTnvo"lves""'"explicitly or implicitly settirig it within a historical plot, reconfigurating it by foregrounding certain aspects or structures, pointing out the meanings which appear in it under the light of other readings, other (con)texts. Some recent works (Kiely, 1993; Readings, 1993; Freeman, 1993) show additional practical applications of this critical perspective. For Freeman, "rewriting the self» is a basic hermeneutic process in our experience of our own life story and identity, «the process by which one's past and indeed oneself is figured anew through interpretation" (1993: 3). The self itself is hermeneutically constituted, since without a unifying interpretive act which retrospectively articulates our lives, «there would be no past and indeed no self, but only a sequence of dispersed accidents" (1993: 47). Perhaps the development of our critical views and our rereadings —our literary hermeneutics— should be contemplated within this larger process of experiential hermeneutics and self-understanding (or, at least, of self-expression, and of the projection of utopitn desires towards the future, if we follow Wilde). These processes take place at a collective and cultural level no less than at an individual level. «Misreading» is inevitable, but it should be understood as a way of exploring and building new coherence and meanings (even in deconstruction!), not as an ineradicable source of error and confusion about the past. In defining the value, essence, and function of literature, the labour of the institutional context of reading and of the interpreter should not be ignored or relegated, since the work which is no longer read has stopped existing and growing. Or, put otherwise, the dead poets are still living and writing. 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