Big Concepts from Big Minds
Psychic Life
Have you ever been in a bad mood and wanted the world to know it? You stomp around, call people names, make the sort of face your mother used to tell you would stick if you made it too often? However much your blood is boiling, no one can see your rage directly—but they can sure see signs of it in how you act. That’s why you’re making such a fuss.
So what does your rudeness have to do with literary theory? Well, the kinds of inner feelings and thoughts that are expressed through outward behavioral signs are what the Romantic Hermeneutic philosophers called a “psychic life.” They argued that the goal of interpreting an author’s text is to understand the psychic life of the author.
So a writer who uses mountains of exclamation points? Probably a more lighthearted psychic life than someone with ellipses and long descriptions and miserable, indecisive characters. Hey, weren’t we done talking about Dostoevsky?
Hermeneutic Circle
Hermeneutic philosophers argue that interpretation is a circular progression. That’s because the whole of a work has to be understood in terms of its parts, and the parts of a work have to be understood in light of the whole. Each contributes to our understanding of the other.
So, as you progress through a story, you get a clearer and clearer picture of what it’s all about, and when you finish, that means you can look back and see the whole. By then, you have the full picture and can see how all the parts fit into it. And as you see how the parts fit together to make the whole, you understand the whole even better. Or else differently, like if the character you thought was a hero turns out to be the villain. Then you find yourself returning to early events and reading them in the context of this new revelation.
And there’s more. The hermeneutic circle extends beyond the specific work to include the psychic life of the author and those of the readers, plus the contexts in which the work was authored and read. The more you learn about the history of the British colonies in America and the political theories that informed the thought of the United States founders, the more sense the Declaration of Independence will make.
Okay, so you’re trapped in the hermeneutic circle, but you can still get around.
Conflicts of Interpretation
No one would take you seriously if, after watching Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, you claimed that the dark knight is really just a figment of Gotham City’s imagination. Bruce Wayne totally picked out that batmobile, buddy. The “text” simply doesn’t support that interpretation in any shape or form or silly costume, however shapely the bat ears.
You could, however, find yourself debating with a friend about the motives of the villain Bane, and not only because his voice is kind of garbled. Is he after social progress or is he using political rhetoric merely to mask his destructive plans?
You and your Bane-buddy could disagree, yet both find support for your conflicting interpretations in the words and actions of the character. The state of a “conflict of interpretation” means that there are multiple valid but incompatible interpretations of a book or movie or other text—interpretations that cannot be reconciled or synthesized.
Mediation
Imagine a typical day when you’re exploring a cave. Say you enter a passage and notice a discoloration upon the wall to your left, and on closer inspection you see that it’s actually the result of some markings painted on the wall. As you study the markings, repeated patterns appear, so you obviously conclude that what you’re looking at is some kind of writing.
Obviously to even see this writing you needed an eyeball or two, but you require something more, too. To see the markings as writing, you had to know what writing is. To see the discoloration as markings, you had to know that human beings use paint to mark things. Your knowledge of markings and writing mediated your perception of the discoloration; you perceived it by way of what you knew.
Mediation happens whenever you read a text. You understand the words on the page by way of what you already know, believe, and feel. The words on the page also mediate the way you get a sense for what’s being written about. Reading a description of a sunset allows you to “see” a sunset, but you see it in terms of the specific meaning of the words.
Discourse
In hermeneutics, the term discourse means language that is used either in speech or in writing. You have discourse whenever, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, “someone says something to someone about something.” Yes, your Tweets and texts count as discourse. Hope we didn’t just make them sound boring.
Horizons
Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote about the horizons of our own understanding. Poetic, right? What he meant is that because each of us is situated in some context or another, there are limits to our understanding. We cannot cease to have a place in time and space, but we can move around, both physically and intellectually.
So, you can’t get a sense of what it was like to live during the Great Depression by actually being there (until they invent time travel, at least), but you can get a sense, and expand the horizons of your experience and understanding, by reading Grapes of Wrath. And when you do, your “world” gets bigger, including not only the here-and-now of what’s before you, but also times in the past and places you’ll never physically visit.
And as your horizons change or expand, you will notice yourself reinterpreting your own experiences in light of the now-larger whole. Just avoid the smog. And Smaug, too. You don’t want him on your horizon.
Prejudices and Presuppositions
When Gadamer wrote about prejudice, he didn’t mean bigoted or otherwise biased beliefs about groups or individuals. He meant it in its older sense of pre-judgment (which, when you break the word apart, makes a lot of sense).
Basically, you always approach a text with personal judgments already in place. You judge that the text might be worth your time, that you might gain something from it, that it has some importance. You likewise have prejudgments about your own wants and needs; you’re reading the text for some reason that pertains to you. You probably also judge something about the book: it was written in the seventeenth century, so the language will probably be slightly different.
For Gadamer, our prejudices mediate our understanding of the text, but they are also open to change. A work that is especially meaningful to you might well lead you to rethink your whole basic outlook and approach to life. And your prejudices before reading might get in the way of that, or allow for an even fuller transformation. What’s key, Gadamer says, is to be aware of your prejudices as you begin your read.
Speech Acts
A lot of interpretation involves discerning the types of speech acts an author has employed. The first step to that is getting that a speech act refers to some words you utter that have some intention or impact that become some sort of action. Eddie Money isn’t just tossing out a catchy '80s tune—he’s actuating a decree that you must, in fact, take him home tonight.
Knowing what speech act is used helps you determine how you should interpret and respond to the discourse. Are you the audience to a question? To a vow? A promise? A command? A declaration? The growl of a zombie? If the last, don’t stick around to broaden your horizons. Run. Possibly home to Eddie Money.
Polysemy
For Paul Ricoeur and his herm theory buddies, discourse is polysemic. Translation: words have different meanings in different contexts—both the contexts of the author and the reader.
It is polysemy that allows a single discourse to have multiple valid but conflicting interpretations. Well, that and the fact that some lazy authors write ambiguous endings—or are they just trying to get the reader to less lazily work to interpret those crazy cliffhangers?
Method
Duh—the way it gets done. In this case, the rules of interpretation. Some hermeneutic philosophers put a lot of stock in getting the method just right so as to keep objectivity. Others note that interpretations have methodology, but they’re more interested in describing these methods than ironing out the one true key to unlocking meaning. They all have a method to their madness, though.