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Originally published in 1983.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691613741 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #572 |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
Read an Excerpt
The Three Genres and the Interpretation of Lyric
By William Elford Rogers
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1983 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06554-0
CHAPTER 1
Lyric, Epic, Dramatic: Genres as Interpretive Models
* * *
A theory of genre that will produce certainty about the real nature of literary works must await an answer to the question, "How is language possible?" Current theories that treat language "scientifically" in the narrow sense, as an object among other objects, must fail to deal adequately with the consciousness of meaning in the speaking and understanding subject. Precisely where the structuralist enterprise attempts to usurp the task of hermeneutics, as Paul Ricoeur points out, it oversteps its limits as a science. On the other hand, philosophies of language that begin from the thinking subject and postulate a prehnguistic consciousness soon run against the problem of accounting for the objectivity of the spoken or written word. Maurice Merleau-Ponty labels the latter approach "intellectuahst." The intellectualist fails to explain "why thought tends towards expression as towards its completion, ... why the thinking subject himself is in a kind of ignorance of his thoughts so long as he has not formulated them for himself, or even spoken and written them." Merleau-Ponty adopts a phenomenological point of view toward language, and in Phenomenology of Perception he calls the "open and indefinite power of giving significance" in language an "ultimate fact" (p. 194).
We are invited to discern beneath thinking which basks in its acquisitions, and offers merely a brief resting-place in the unending process of expression, another thought which is struggling to establish itself, and succeeds only by bending the resources of constituted language to some fresh usage. This operation must be considered as an ultimate fact, since any explanation of it — whether empiricist, reducing new meanings to given ones; or idealist, positing an absolute knowledge immanent in the most primitive forms of knowledge — would amount to a denial of it. Language outruns us. ... (pp. 390–91)
It follows that "There is no analysis capable of making language crystal clear and arraying it before us as if it were an object. The act of speech is clear only for the person who is actually speaking or listening ..." (p.391).
Kant attempted to place the cognitive knowledge of mathematics and the natural sciences on a firm basis by answering the question, "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?" If Merleau-Ponty is right, there will be no Kant to answer the question, "How is language possible?" If so, then no philosophy of culture is possible that aims at cognitive knowledge in the same sense as the natural sciences. Language is the cultural object par excellence, if not the ground of all other cultural objects. It is clear only that, as Ernst Cassirer says, "A critical philosophy of culture ... must avoid both the Scylla of naturalism and the Charybdis of metaphysics." By "metaphysics" here I think Cassirer means something like Merleau-Ponty's "idealism" or "intellectualism." But scientists and mathematicians were elaborating their concepts and accumulating knowledge before Kant, and there is no reason why historians, philosophers of culture, and literary critics cannot do the same thing in some sense, even if the human studies never find their Kant. The writings of Cassirer himself (The Logic of the Humanities and The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in particular) and of Wilhelm Dilthey, for example, are valuable even if they are unsatisfactory as metaphysics. Dilthey tried to enunciate the categories of the "human sciences" as Kant had done for the natural sciences. If hermeneutics is the central discipline of the human studies, as Dilthey thought, then we must have interpretive concepts before we can take even the first step in the discipline. To "interpret" or to "understand" a cultural object is the counterpart of "knowing" a natural law, and there must be interpretive concepts to bring order to our understanding of cultural objects if our work is to be worthy of the name of "discipline" — or, as Dilthey would have it, the name of "science" in the broad sense. There is every reason, however, to be as clear as possible from the beginning about the nature of these interpretive concepts. The concepts of literary genre are interpretive concepts that belong to a particular branch of the human studies.
But we do not know how language is possible, and we would have to know that to give genre-concepts genuine metaphysical status. When I speak of metaphysics, I mean a philosophical system (therefore logically consistent) that attempts to explain (in one way or another) on rational grounds the totality of being, including the possibility of having knowledge of that being. Until we can fully explain the possibility of language, we can scarcely expect to see how provisional concepts of literary analysis might fit into such a system. The problem of language itself is a stumbling-block for many metaphysical systems, if not all of them. In short, we do not know what metaphysical status, if any, genre-concepts have. Although I shall be concerned only with broad genres (lyric, epic, dramatic), the same holds for narrow genre-concepts, too — even if narrow genres (e.g., ode, sonnet, ballad) should appear to be different sorts of things from broad genres.
However much the interpretive concepts proposed here resemble metaphysical categories, then, they are valid only as models. The concepts are non-metaphysical, in the sense that Santayana claims in Scepticism and Animal Faith that his philosophy is not metaphysics: it is instead a way to account for human experience as economically and as satisfyingly as possible, and everyone remains free to "clean the windows of his own soul" in some better way if he can. For me, the notion of the model is crucial in genre-theory. That does not necessarily detract from the cognitive significance of genre-theory. There is perhaps not even a sharp distinction between the natural sciences and the human studies in just this specific respect. In this century even the natural sciences conceive of cognition as modeling. Physics, always the exemplary natural science, in the quantum formalism abandons causal explanation for mathematical modeling that results in probabilistic predictions. And indeed, until we have a metaphysics that does everything it is supposed to do, we might do well to avoid drawing a sharp distinction between models and metaphysics. It seems obvious, though, that some models are better than others — but discriminating in the human studies is a tricky business. In physics, the mathematical model that most economically "accounts for" all the data is the best. But in the human studies it is not always so clear what one means by "accounting for." Does it mean causal explanation? Does it mean explaining the significance of a cultural object in its own time, or its significance to the present time? Nor is it clear in the human studies what the "data" are. Indeed, "finding" the datum itself requires an act of interpretation, since the datum represented by a cultural object is never just an event in space and time. A meaning is also "attached" to the event. Thus, the data that a literary critic finds depend on the questions he is asking of his text. That is why R. S. Crane recommends that we accept a "critical pluralism":
The pluralistic critic ... would take the view that the basic principles and methods of any distinguishable mode of criticism are tools of inquiry and interpretation rather than formulations of the "real" nature of things and that the choice of any special "language" among the many possible for the study of poetry, is a practical decision to be justified solely in terms of the kind of knowledge the critic wants to attain.
I do not agree with Crane that criticism is therefore doomed to "strict relativity" (p. 27), and I shall discuss the matter further in Chapter III. Ricoeur tries to reduce, at least, the critical pluralism. He admits that "For a linguistic philosophy, all interpretations are equally valid within the limits of the theory which founds the given rules of reading"; but Ricoeur also says that such interpretations are only "language games" unless the theory grounds the interpretation in "a particular existential function." For Ricoeur the primary interpretations are (1) the psychoanalytic, (2) that of the "phenomenology of the spirit," and (3) that of the "phenomenology of religion" (p. 23). The existential functions in question are Heideggerian — roughly, the human being (1) finds himself "thrown" into the world as a personality formed by a past he cannot control; (2) is in the present as in a "situation" defined by his own possibilities with respect to that situation; and (3) looks toward his end (death) as that which lends "authenticity" to his existence. Thus, while Ricoeur admits that any particular hermeneutic model is to be justified on the basis of what one wants to know from a text, he nevertheless suggests that some things are more important to know than others. Questions still nag, of course. But Ricoeur's remarks do bring into sharp focus the difficulty that follows immediately when we admit that genre-theory constructs models instead of metaphysical systems — namely, the difficulty of knowing just what the models tell us and just what they can reasonably be expected to do.
One way to approach the question is to examine existing genre-theories to see what problems present themselves. But before doing that, I want once again to contrast the methods and assumptions of the natural sciences with those of the human studies, in order to distinguish from each other the three important and problematic concepts "knowledge," "understanding," and "interpretation."
The Nature of Understanding
Many of the most important models of the natural sciences aim at a causal explanation of phenomena. Notable examples of such models are the Copernican universe, classical Newtonian mechanics, and the Bohr atom. Models in the human studies are not fundamentally of the same nature. We can assign causes for a historical event, even for the production of a literary work, and that might be an important part of our task. But cultural objects are essentially characterized by meaning. Causal categories cannot exhaust what is to be understood about the cultural object. As Dilthey says, "Any empiricism which foregoes an explanation of what happens in the mind in terms of the understood connections of mental life is necessarily sterile." Most important, models in the human studies cannot be called upon to predict. Thus, those models are set apart from even the scientific models that, like the quantum formalism, do not necessarily make statements about cause and effect. It is a familiar, and unsatisfactory, distinction that the natural sciences formulate laws subsuming many individual phenomena, whereas the human studies are concerned with fully understanding individual phenomena in their concreteness. A more satisfactory way of formulating this distinction is to say that models in the human studies are not predictive. For the individuals that are objects of the human studies may be anything from a fragment of a poem to the philosophy of Plato to the history of nineteenth-century Britain — and somewhere along the line the word individual seems to lose its application, however much one is concerned with seeing each object as unique. But still, understanding the poetic fragment, the philosophy of Plato, or the history of Britain will only in the vaguest and most indirect way help to predict what another poem, another philosophy, or another state will be like.
If, therefore, apart from such subsidiary disciplines as philology, paleography, and textual editing, the models of the human studies are not causal and so do not predict, what should they be called upon to do? I cannot do better here than to turn to the reflections of Dilthey and Heidegger on the nature of understanding. I should make it very clear at this point that I do not wish to subscribe wholeheartedly to Dilthey's ideas about the human studies, nor do I wish to "derive" a genre-theory from the philosophy of Heidegger. I do wish, however, to distinguish, with these two philosophers, between the "knowledge" of science and the "understanding" of the human studies. At this point, I do not mean to borrow from Dilthey and Heidegger any more than that distinction — but the distinction is crucial for my genre-theory and for my conception of what a literary critic does. Nor am I interested here in doing full justice to the concept of "scientific cognition" — a very complex matter. I bring scientific cognition into the discussion only to help in clarifying the crucial concept of "understanding." And that is also how Dilthey uses the concept of scientific knowledge:
... the sciences arrive at connections within nature through inferences by means of a combination of hypotheses while the human sciences are based on directly given mental connections. We explain nature but we understand mental life.
Science analyses and develops the general relationships of homogenous facts which it has thus isolated; religion, poetry and spontaneous metaphysics articulate the meaning and sense of the whole. The one knows, the other understands.
[The disciplines of the human studies and those of the natural sciences] differ in the way in which their subject-matter is formed, that is, in the procedure which constitutes these disciplines. In the one a mental object emerges in the understanding; in the other a physical object in knowledge.
In his drafts toward a "Critique of Historical Reason" on the Kantian model, Dilthey points out that understanding requires empathy, that it rests on a "special, personal inspiration" that can nevertheless be developed as a "technique," and that it always "contains something irrational because life is irrational."
Heidegger's Being and Time, on the other hand, stresses the dependence of the natural sciences themselves on the primary understanding of the world as the "there" of Dasein's "There-being." This primary understanding precedes all explicit cognition. In Heidegger's philosophy, "Both the human and the natural sciences are to be derived from the achievements of the intentionality of universal life. ... Understanding is the original character of the being of human life itself." Dasein's (the human being's) understanding of its involvements with the world precedes conceptualization and explicit interpretation.
We need not go far into the difficulties of Heidegger's terminology to see how there arises the concept of the "hermeneutic circle," which he shares with Dilthey. Whether undemanding is set over against knowledge as a distinct species, as with Dilthey, or whether it is seen as the ground of scientific cognition, as with Heidegger, all interpretation already presupposes understanding. Dilthey formulates the problem thus as regards textual interpretation: the "general difficulty of all interpretation" is that "The whole of a work must be understood from individual words and their combination but full understanding of an individual part presupposes understanding of the whole." Heidegger says, "Any interpretation which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted." Heidegger argues that the circle is not vicious, and is not to be avoided in any case: "What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way." That is the central problem of all interpretation, including literary interpretation. We are left, then, with the concept of interpretation as a making-explicit of what is already understood, and understood in a way that is either different from (Dilthey), or more fundamental than (Heidegger), cognitive scientific knowledge. In interpretation,
... the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it. In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Three Genres and the Interpretation of Lyric by William Elford Rogers. Copyright © 1983 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Acknowledgments, pg. v
- Table of Contents, pg. ix
- Introduction, pg. 1
- CHAPTER Ι. Lyric, Epic, Dramatic: Genres as Interpretive Models, pg. 9
- CHAPTER II. The Anomalous Voice and the Impersonal Lyric, pg. 77
- CHAPTER III. Standards of Interpretation and Evaluation, pg. 121
- CHAPTER IV. Gestures Toward a Literary History of Lyric, pg. 176
- Index, pg. 271