On page 59 of The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes writes: “The important thing is to equalize the field of pleasure, to abolish the false opposition of practical life and contemplative life.” I appreciate how mundane Barthes makes the text seem in that paragraph. He relates texts to gardens, dishes, or a voice. It’s one more object among daily life’s many objects. One more thing to interact with and enjoy. Sometimes, I worry that we lend “the text” special status; that, in all our fretting about how to choose the text and justify the text we choose, about how to let the text disclose its own essential means of persuasion and its inner dynamics, we fret away what makes texts worth studying: they are fragments of a material world, and as such, we can fairly assume they impact the world.

Not that we shouldn’t spend so much time precisely defining what textual criticism does and how it works. It’s important to fret. Precision and rigor are virtues. But aren’t virtues all about balance? There is a real danger that we lose ourselves in texts and in our rigorous approaches to them, and treat them like they are special objects whose pursuit is self-justifying.

This is more a reminder to myself than anything, after a semester of textuality. Texts are awash in a wide, wide world, and while we have learned a huge array of procedures and ideas for closely studying them, they are not in some ontological category of their own. Textual critics work in a practical life. Textual criticism’s value comes not from a privileged object, but from a rigorous approach well-suited to objects that often have distinct rhetorical power.

Grounded in the practical life, we can also approach criticism differently: not as a skill useful for scholarship, not as an element of a scholarly persona, but as a way of life. To me, that sounds like more fun.

I couldn’t help but read, in Paul Ricoeur, for ways to apply (to appropriate?) his theories to the work I’m currently doing on my MA thesis. In this post, I try to sketch what that application would look like.

I’ve been reading a lot of late-19th and early-20th century texts that predicted what the world would be like once human flight became possible. What would a hermeneutics of these texts do? By Ricoeur’s philosophy, hermeneutics has two goals: “to reconstruct the internal dynamic of the text, and to restore to the work its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that I could inhabit” (18). To him, texts always seem to be “projecting” or “unfolding,” verb-ing themselves all over the place. Texts move the world, impacting it and re-forming it. Early fantasies about human flight projected worlds that 20th century audiences clearly read themselves into. Novelists wrote many fantasies in which airplanes fought dreadful wars; after the airplane’s invention, everyone spoke of its inevitable use for war. In 1908, H.G. Wells wrote a novel in which roving air-fleets incinerated whole cities. Decades later, Dresden burned. Isn’t it fair, in some sense, to say that the Dresden firestorm took place in the world that Wells and others imagined? Texts that predicted aviation’s future unfolded worlds of aviation in which aviation’s inventors and advocates saw themselves. Thus seeing themselves in-line with those fantasies, they strove to fulfill them.

My thesis is deeply intertextual, so I might have just mis-appropriated Ricoeur. Instead of letting these texts unfold in front of me, here I have made claims about how these texts unfolded in front of the audiences who initially received them. Is this a hermeneutics of the texts, or of their reception? Is the latter possible? What happens when we try to combine Ricoeur’s hermeneutics with an intertextual approach?

He later writes about the “present character of interpretation” (119), emphasizing that any interpretive act beyond linguistic analyses of a text’s structure is rooted in the present moment of reading. And readers do not interpret with impartiality, but carry with them a whole lot of historical baggage, from “History” writ large and from their own life’s history. Thanks to this, an intertextual hermeneutics couldn’t treat texts surrounding the main text in question as “context” or as “receptional evidence,” since they have no better claim on reaching the past than anything else we read. Instead, these other texts are their own worlds, too, and we can compare the worlds that unfold out of them and in front of us to the worlds unfolded out of the other texts being considered. An analysis like this would juggle a whole lot of possibilities at once, and at the end of writing this, I’m not sure how a coherent project would actually juggle all of them. But it’s interesting to think about. Discourse, as Ricoeur writes, “continues to ‘say’ being” (19), and insofar as that saying is mediated into texts, and insofar as we can compare our being as it could live within one of these texts to how it could live in others, Ricoeur seems to offer us a dense way to get a new perspective on both ourselves and the histories we study. I have to leave the fruits of these new perspectives up to the imagination–an imagination, Ricoeur would be quick to point out, that this meditation on Riceour’s text has allowed.

What burden of proof rests on the polysemous critic? How can I prove which meanings are supported by a text, and which are not? This innocent question has led me to question the nature of human consciousness. Help.

So you see where I’m coming from, I’m going to begin with a digression about a painting. I first saw it as it was re-printed and referenced in Simon Schama’s fantastic book, Landscape and Memory. It depicts a window that looks out over a well-kept garden and lawn. Inside, in front of the window, is a painting. The painting is of the garden and lawn that the window looks out over. Anyone in the room can only see the painting, not the actual garden and lawn beyond. The painting is more or less faithful to the actual scene on the other side of the window. If you only ever saw the painting and not the actual lawn, you might confuse the painting’s scene for the real thing.

This, allegedly, is the nature of our consciousness: we never see the world itself, but only the best painting of the world that our brains can put together from whatever senses are available to it. And we get so used to navigating the world by our painting that we forget what we’re really looking at. We only ever see representations of the world, never the world itself. What would it even mean, anyway, to really “see” the world, given that our usual metaphors for encountering the world come through the physical senses?

Polysemy, according to Leah Ceccarelli, is “the existence of determinate but nonsingular denotational meanings” in a text (399). Different people experience the same text and come away with different statements of fact about that text’s meaning.

To me, that seems like a decent metaphor for how humans make sense of everything.

Humans all react to the same world-text, but we all live in our own simulation of how that world “factually” exists. Our experience is determinate—we are bound to our senses. Yet we find nonsingular meanings in that experience. Meaning, like in polysemous texts, is “multiple, but not limitless” (398). In the human condition, as in polysemy, “we acknowledge diverse but finite meanings” (398).

This seems like a sensible consequence of our relationship with the world. We constantly tack back and forth between input and thought, discovery and invention. Our criticism is rooted in such a process, where meaning is made in a conversation between the text and the sense we make of it. Perhaps meaning is, ultimately, that process. Meaning, in other words, is neither objective nor subjective, deterministic nor relativistic; meaning is contingent. And which is the rhetorician who would not agree with that?

Fortunately, at the end of all this business about consciousness lies a more pragmatic question for polysemy in rhetorical criticism. If polysemy is fundamental to how humans react to the world, isn’t polysemous criticism rigging the game? If we look hard enough, shouldn’t it always be possible to find multiple meanings authorized by the text and expressed in discourse about the text? And if that is true, even if only in part, how can I then prove which meanings are more supported by a text than others?

Food for thought. Hopefully, that last question packs some weight even if we pick holes in the hastily assembled thoughts above. Expanding these thoughts into defensible shape would require more space and time than we have here, but I hope I’ve said enough to spark your interest and input.