Prof: So we arrive at
our turn to sociogenesis.
Genesis is, of course,
here obviously--even as we read
both Jauss and Bakhtin for
today--a misleading term in a
certain sense;
because obviously,
the most egregious difference
between Jauss and Bakhtin--
and once again you're probably
saying to yourself,
"Well, my goodness.
 
Why have these two texts been
put together?"--
the most egregious difference
is that Bakhtin's primary
concern is with the "life
world"
that produces a text and Jauss'
primary concern is with the
"life world,"
or perhaps better
"succession of life
worlds,"
in which a text is received.
 
I think you can tell,
however, from reading both
texts,
and will be conscious as you go
through the materials that
remain on the syllabus,
that the relationship between
the production and reception of
literature,
or of discourse of any kind,
once you factor in the social
setting of such a text,
becomes much more permeable,
much more fluid.
There's a certain sense in
which the producer is the
receiver;
in which the author is the
reader and stands in relation to
a tradition, to a past,
as a reader;
and the reader in turn,
in continuing to circulate
texts through history--
that is to say,
in playing a role as someone
who keeps texts current--
is perhaps even in concrete
terms a writer.
 
That is to say,
he or she is someone who
expresses opinions,
circulates values,
and keeps texts,
as I say, in circulation.
I've always felt this about
Jauss's sense of what a reader
is.
 
What kind of reader would it be
who was responsible for the
continued presence,
or influence,
of a text through literary
history who wasn't in some sense
communicating an opinion?
 
This is obviously truer today
than ever before when we have
blogs and discussion groups and
when everybody is circulating
opinions on the internet.
 
Plainly the reader,
plainly the taste-maker,
the reader as taste-maker,
is at the same time a writer.
Just in passing--this has
become a digression but I hope a
useful one--
in this context,
one can think about a really
strange pairing,
Jauss in relation to Bloom.
 
If Bloom's theory of strong
misreading as a principle of
literary historiography can be
understood as a relationship
between writers as readers and
readers as writers,
so by the same token if we see
Jauss's analysis of reception in
these terms,
and if we think of reception as
a necessary circulation of
opinion,
there is, after all,
a sense in which for Jauss,
too, the reader is a writer and
the writer is a reader.
That is undoubtedly a remote
connection,
but it is a way of seeing how
both Bloom and Jauss are figures
who have strong and interesting
and plausible theories about
literary history.
 
All right.
 
To go, however,
back to the beginning--
back to the sense in which
we're at a watershed,
or a moment of transition in
this course,
leaving for the moment out of
the picture the intermediate
step of psychogenesis--
to go back to this sense of our
being in a moment of
transition--
as always, such is the
calendar, just at the wrong
time: we finally accomplish our
transition,
then we go off to spring break,
forget everything we ever knew
and come back and start off once
again as a tabula rasa.
We'll do our best to bridge
that gap.
In any case,
if we now find ourselves
understanding in reading these
two texts for the first time,
really--although it's not that
we haven't been talking about
"life"
before.
Obviously, we have been,
as it's not as though the
Russian formalists culminating
in the structuralism of Jakobson
don't talk about a referential
function.
It's unfair even to the New
Critics to say that somehow the
world is excluded from the
interpretative or reading
process--
even though all along we've
been saying things like this,
we still sense a difference.
The difference is in the
perceived relationship between
the text,
the object of study,
and the life world--
the sense, in fact,
in which a text is a life
world.
This has, after all,
something to do with our
understanding of what language
is.
So far we have been thinking of
language as a semiotic code and
also with the strong suspicion
that this semiotic code is a
virtual one.
 
We have been emphasizing the
degree to which we are passive
in relation to,
or even, as it were,
"spoken by"
this language.
In other words,
it's been a constant in our
thinking about these matters
that language speaks through us,
but we have exercised so far a
curious reticence about the
sense in which this language is
not just a code,
not just something that exists
virtually at a given historical
moment,
but is in fact a code made up
of other people's language:
in other words,
that it is language in
circulation,
not just language as somehow
abstractly outside of networks
of circulation available for
use.
So we begin now to think of
language still,
and the relationship between
language and speech,
but now it's not a language
abstracted from reality;
it's a language which,
precisely, circulates
within reality and as a matter
of social exchange and social
interaction.
 
Language is now and henceforth
on our syllabus a social
institution.
 
In literary theory it has the
same determinative relationship
with my individual speech,
but we now begin to understand
the claim that I don't speak my
own language in a different
register.
 
Hitherto it's been,
well, "Language is there
before me,
what I speak is just sort of
that which I borrow from
it," but now this takes on
a new valency altogether.
 
What I don't speak is my
language;
it's other people's language.
 
My voice--and the word
"voice"
is obviously under heavy
pressure here,
even though nobody says it goes
away--
my voice is a voice permeated
by all the sedimentations,
registers, levels,
and orientations of language in
the world that surrounds me.
 
I take my language,
in other words,
from other people.
 
I stand here--for my
sins--lecturing in kind of an
ad-lib way, and that makes it
even more pronounced in what I
say.
 
You're hearing the internet.
 
You're hearing newspaper
headlines.
You're hearing slang.
 
You're hearing all sorts of
locutions and rhetorical devices
that I'd be ashamed to call
mine, >
at least in many cases,
because they are in the world;
they are out there, as we say.
 
What's out there gets to the
point where it's in here,
and the next thing you know,
it becomes part of the ongoing
patter or blather of an
individual.
It is, in other words,
the speech of others that
you're hearing when you hear an
individual.
The extent or the degree to
which this might be the case is,
I suppose, always subject to
debate.
We're going to take up a couple
of examples,
but in any case,
you can see that without the
structure of the relationship
between language and speech
having really changed--
and in fact it won't really
change as we continue along--
without the structure of the
relationship between language
and speech having changed,
the nature of this relationship
and the way in which we think of
it in social terms is changed,
and the social aspect of it now
comes into prominence and will
remain there.
Now in order to see how this
works in the case of today's two
authors a little more
concretely,
I wanted to turn to a couple of
passages on your sheet.
You got my grim warning last
night that if you didn't bring
it, I wouldn't have any to
circulate.
We'll see how well that worked,
and if it didn't work,
well, perhaps it'll work better
in the future.
In any case,
first of all turning to the
first passage on the sheet by
Bakhtin--
by the way, if you don't have
the sheet,
maybe somebody near you does,
or maybe somebody near you has
a computer which is being used
for the correct purposes that
can be >
 
held somehow between the two of
you.
These are all possibilities.
 
The first passage on the sheet
by Bakhtin is about the
relationship between what he
takes to be a formalist
understanding of
double-voicedness--
for example,
the new critical understanding
which he's not directly talking
about but which we could use as
an example of irony--
the ways of talking about not
meaning what you say.
 
He's talking about those sorts
of double-voicedness in
relationship to,
in contradistinction to,
what he means by "genuine
heteroglossia,"
and he says,
first passage on the sheet:
Rhetoric is often limited to
purely verbal victories over the
word, over ideological
authority.
[In other words,
I am sort of getting under your
ribs if you're somehow or
another voicing an
authoritative,
widespread, or tyrannical
opinion by some form or another
of subverting it--
in other words,
a kind of a binary relationship
between what I'm saying and
what's commonly being said out
there.]
When this happens [says
Bakhtin]
rhetoric degenerates into
formalistic verbal play but,
we repeat, when discourse is
torn from reality it is fatal
for the word itself as well.
Words grow sickly,
lose semantic depth and
flexibility, the capacity to
expand and renew their meanings
in new living contexts.
 
They essentially die as
discourse, for the signifying
word lives beyond itself;
that is, it lives by directing
its purposiveness outward.
 
Double-voicedness,
which is merely verbal,
is not structured on authentic
heteroglossia but on a mere
diversity of voices.
 
In other words,
it doesn't take into account
the way in which there are
seepages or permeabilities among
the possibilities and registers
of meaning,
depending on extraordinarily
complex speaking communities
coming together in any aspect of
discourse,
ways in which we have to think
about the life world of a
discourse in order to understand
the play of voice.
Heteroglossia is the language
of others.
That's what it means if we are
to to understand the way in
which the language of others is
playing through and permeating
the text.
 
A comparable response to
formalism on the part of Hans
Robert Jauss--
I should say in passing that
both Bakhtin and Jauss have
authentic and close relations
with the Russian formalists.
 
Bakhtin begins,
in a way, at the very end of
the formalist tradition,
as a kind of second generation
formalist,
but quickly moves away--it is
breaking up in the late 1920s--
from that and begins to rewrite
formalism in a certain sense as
a sociogenesis of discourse in
language;
and by the same token,
Jauss in his theory of literary
history--
which is not enunciated in
these terms in the text that you
have,
but rather in the long text
from which I wish your editor
had taken an excerpt,
called "Literary History
as a Provocation to Literary
Theory."
 
You have excerpts from that on
your sheet.
In any case,
in Jauss' understanding of the
relationship between the text
and the life world,
Jauss cobbles together,
as it were,
aspects of Russian formalist
historiography,
particularly that of Jakobson
and Tynjanov,
and a Marxist understanding of,
as it were,
the marketing,
reception, and consumption of
literary production.
 
These pairs of ideas go
together in his developing of
his thesis about literary
reception, to which we'll return
at the end of the lecture.
 
The second passage on the
sheet, which distances him,
in which he wants to distance
himself somewhat from both of
these influences,
goes as follows:
Early Marxist and formalist
methods in common conceive the
literary fact within the closed
circle of an aesthetics of
production and representation.
 
In doing so,
they deprive literature of a
dimension that inalienably
belongs to its aesthetic
character as well as to its
social function,
the dimension of its reception
and influence.
In other words,
the way in which a text,
once it exists,
moves in the world,
the way in which it persists,
changes as we understand it and
grows or diminishes as time
passes in the world:
this is the medium,
the social medium,
in which Jauss wants to
understand literary--
precisely
literary--interpretation,
as we'll see.
 
Coming a little closer to this
issue of the relationship
between thinking of this kind
and the formalist tradition,
Bakhtin on page 592,
the left-hand column toward the
bottom--
I'm not going to quote this,
I'm just going to say that it's
there--
Bakhtin begins a sentence
about, as he puts it,
literary "parody"
understood in the narrow sense.
Now what he's implying here is
that the theory of parody
belongs primarily to Russian
formalist literary
historiography.
 
In other words,
the relationship between a new
text and an old text is one of,
broadly conceived within this
discourse, parody.
 
Bakhtin picks up the word
"parody"
in order to say also on page
592, the left-hand column about
halfway down:
… [A]
mere concern for language is
[and it's an odd thing to say,
"a mere concern for
language"
>
 
]
but the abstract side of the
concrete and active [i.e.,
dialogically engaged]
understanding of the living
heteroglossia that has been
introduced into the novel and
artistically organized within
it.
 
To pause over this,
"parody":
if we linger merely on the
literariness of parody,
we simply don't have any grasp
of the complexity of the ways in
which the dialogic or the
heteroglossal modulates,
ripples, and makes complicated
the surface of literary
discourse.
 
Parody once again leaves us
with a sense of the binary:
the previous text was this,
the secondary text or the next
text riffs off that previous
text in a way that we can call
parodic--
but that's binary.
It's one text against another
and leaves out the whole
question of that flood or
multiplicity of voices which
pervades the text.
 
Okay.
 
So then Jauss has an
interesting moment again,
in the fourth passage on your
sheet,
in which he is obviously
directly responding to that
passage at the end of Tynjanov's
essay on literary evolution
which we've had on the board and
which we've discussed before.
You remember Tynjanov makes the
distinction between evolution--
the way in which a sequence of
texts mutates,
as one might say,
and the way in which,
in other words,
successive texts (again) parody
or alter what was in the
previous text--
and modification,
which is the influence on texts
from the outside by other sorts
of historical factors which may
lead to textual change.
 
Tynjanov says that it's
important,
actually for both studies--for
the study of history and also
for the study of literary
history--
that the two be always kept
clearly distinct in the mind of
the person looking at them.
 
Well, Jauss's response to that
is perhaps chiefly rhetorical,
but it nevertheless once again
does mark this shift in the
direction of the understanding
of language as social that I've
been wanting to begin by
emphasizing.
Jauss says:
The connection between literary
evolution and social change
[that is to say,
those features in society that
would and do modify texts]
does not vanish from the face
of the earth through its mere
negation.
 
What is he saying?
 
He's saying "does not
vanish from the face of the
earth" because Tynjanov
said it did.
>
 
There is no doubt that that's
the passage Jauss is talking
about.]
The new literary work [he goes
on]
is received and judged against
the background of the everyday
experience of life.
In other words,
the work exists in a life
world.
 
There is no easy or even
possible way of distinguishing
between its formal innovations
and those sorts of innovations
which are produced by continuous
and ongoing factors of social
change.
 
They interact.
 
They seep into one another in
exactly the same way that all
the registers and sedimentations
of human voices interact and
seep into one another in
Bakhtin's heteroglossia.
All right.
 
So these then are the emphases
of both of these writers with
respect to formalist ideas which
have played a prominent part in
most,
if not all, of the literary
theory that we have studied up
until now.
I'd like to linger a little
while with Bakhtin before
turning back to Jauss.
 
Now heteroglossia or diversity
of speech,
as he calls it sometimes--he
says at one point again on page
592 toward the top of the
left-hand column--
heteroglossia is what he calls
"the ground of style."
I want to pause to ask a little
bit what he might mean by this
expression, "the ground of
style," the italicized
passage.
 
It is precisely the diversity
of speech and not the unity of a
normative shared language that
is the ground of style.
In other words,
I've already said,
of course, when I speak I'm not
speaking to you in an official
voice.
 
I am not speaking the King's
English.
In fact, on this view there's
really no such thing as the
King's English.
 
Nobody speaks the King's
English because there is no such
isolated distilled entity that
one can point to.
Language, at least the language
of most of us--
that is to say,
of everyone except people in
hermetically sealed environments
like,
for example,
a peculiarly privileged,
inward-looking aristocracy--the
language of virtually all of us
is the language of the people,
the language of others.
It is that which we have to
continue to think about as we
consider how a style is
generated.
We speak of a style as though
it were purely a question of an
authorial signature.
 
Sometimes we think of style and
signature as synonymous.
"Oh, I would recognize
that style anywhere."
Coleridge said of a few lines
of Wordsworth,
"If I had come across
these lines in the desert,
I'd have said
'Wordsworth.'"
Well,
obviously there is a certain
sense in which we do recognize a
style: for example,
the style of Jane Austen.
 
[Points to quotation on board.]
I suppose arguably you could
think that this is the style of
Dr.
Johnson,
but most people would recognize
it as the style of Jane Austen;
and yet at the same time,
as we'll see in a minute,
it is a style made up,
in ways that are very difficult
finally to factor out and
analyze,
of many voices.
Okay.
 
So this would suggest,
I think--this idea of a style
as a composite of speech
sedimentations--
this idea would suggest that
possibly there isn't a voice,
that to speak of an authorial
voice would be a very difficult
matter and might lead us to ask,
"Does this move the idea
that the sociolect speaks
through the idiolect,
the idea that the language of
everyone is,
in fact, the language that
speaks my speech,
my peculiar individual
speech--does this once again
bring us face to face with that
dreary topic,
the death of the author?"
 
I don't think so,
not quite, and certainly not in
Bakhtin,
who gives us a rather bracing
sense of the importance of the
author in a passage on page 593,
the right-hand column.
 
He says:
It is as if the author [this
is, of course,
sort of coming face-to-face
with the problem of whether
there still is an author]
has no language of his own,
but does possess his own style,
his own organic and unitary law
governing the way he plays with
languages [so style is perhaps
one's particular way of
mediating and allocating the
diversity of voice that impinges
on what one's saying]
and the way his own real
semantic and expressive
intentions are refracted within
them.
 
[And here Bakhtin saves or
preserves the author by invoking
the principle of unifying
intention and the way in which
we can recognize it in the
discourse of any given novel.]
Of course this play with
languages (and frequently the
complete absence of a direct
discourse of his own) in no
sense degrades the general,
deep-seated intentionality,
the overarching ideological
conceptualization of the work as
a whole.
 
So this is not,
though it may seem to be in
certain respects,
a question of the death of the
author as provoked by,
let's say, Foucault or Roland
Barthes at the beginning of the
semester.
It's not that exactly.
 
Everything that we've been
saying so far can be seen to
work in a variety of novels.
 
The novel is the privileged
genre for Bakhtin.
He, I think perhaps somewhat
oversimplifying in this,
reads the novel,
the emergence of the novel,
and the flowering and richness
of the novel against the
backdrop of genres he considers
to be monoglossal:
the epic,
which simply speaks the unitary
voice of an aristocratic
tradition;
the lyric, which simply speaks
the unitary voice of the
isolated romantic solipsist.
 
Over against that,
you get the polyglossal,
the rich multiplicity of voice
in the novel.
As I say, I think that the
generic contrast is somewhat
oversimplified because nothing
is easier and more profitable
than to read both epic and lyric
as manifestations of
heteroglossia.
 
Just think of The Iliad.
 
What are you going to do,
if you really believe that it's
monoglossal, with the speeches
of Thersites?
Okay.
 
In any case,
the basic idea,
however,
is I think extraordinarily rich
and important,
and I thought we could try it
out by taking a look for a
moment at the first sentence of
Pride and Prejudice,
which I'm sure most of you
know [gestures to board,
 
It is plainly an example of the
relationship between what
Bakhtin calls "common
language"--
"It is a truth universally
acknowledged,"
or in other
>
words, it's in everybody's
mouth--and something like
authorial reflection,
or what he elsewhere calls
"internally persuasive
discourse."
Now in traditional parlance,
this would be a speech which
manifests irony,
the rhetoric of irony against
which Bakhtin sets himself in
the first passage on your sheet.
"How ridiculous!"
 
we say.
 
Jane Austen doesn't believe
this.
This is drawing-room wisdom,
and everything in her sentence
points to the ways in which it's
obviously wrong,
even while it's being called a
truth: "universally"
meaning the thousand people or
so who matter;
in other words,
>
there are a great many people
who neither acknowledge nor care
about any such thing.
 
Then, of course,
the idea that "a single
man in possession of a good
fortune,"
or indeed otherwise,
has nothing to do but be
"in want of a wife."
 
Obviously, this is what is
being said not by the man in the
street but by drawing-room
culture.
Now even before we turn to the
complication of the ways in
which the sentence is being
undermined,
bear in mind that the plot of
the novel confirms the
"truth."
 
In other words,
Darcy and Bingley,
both of them "in
possession of a good
fortune,"
do turn out very plainly to
have been in want of a wife and,
in fact, procure one by the end
of the novel.
 
That is precisely what the plot
is about,
so that the conventions
governing the plot of Pride
and Prejudice altogether
confirm the truth that is
announced in this sentence,
even though it is a
truth that is plainly to be
viewed ironically.
That in itself is quite
extraordinary and,
I think, reinforces our sense
that this is one of the great
first sentences in the history
of fiction.
Let's turn now to the way in
which we can think of it as
something other than a simple
irony.
Of course, there is this word
"want."
We've been thinking a lot about
want lately because we have just
gone through our psychoanalytic
phase.
What exactly does this
>
single man really want?
 
In a way, the subtle pun in the
word "want,"
which means both "to
desire" and "to
lack"--
well, if I lack something,
I don't necessarily desire it.
 
I just don't happen to have it,
right?
On the other hand,
if I want something,
I can also be said to desire
it.
Well, which is it?
 
Is it a kind of lack that
social pressure of some sort is
calculated to fill,
or is it desire?
If it's desire,
what on earth does it have to
do with a good fortune?
 
There are elements of the
romance plot which raise
precisely that question.
 
Desire has nothing to do with
fortune.
Convenience,
social acceptability,
comfort: all of those things
have to do with fortune,
but desire, we suppose--having
passed through our
psychoanalytic phase--
to be of a somewhat different
nature.
 
The complication of the
sentence has to do actually with
the question of the way in which
the meanings of these words can
be thought to be circulating and
to create ripples of irony of
their own far more complicated
than "Oh,
the author's much smarter than
that,
she doesn't mean that,"
which is already a complication
introduced by the fact that her
plot bears it out.
How can her plot bear it out if
she's being so ironic?
Of course, there is obviously a
good deal more to say.
A single man in possession of a
good fortune obviously may not
at all want a wife,
for a variety of reasons that
one could mention,
and that can't be possibly
completely absent from Jane
Austen's mind.
So that has to be taken into
account in itself and certainly
does [lights go off in lecture
hall]--
I think you see it's the sort
of sentence that bears
reflection beyond a kind of
simple binary of the sentence as
spoken by the man in the drawing
room,
or the woman in the drawing
room.
"It's idiotic,
it's obviously wrong--
we simply can't say that":
the style of the author is a
style that is sedimented by and
through complexities of
circulated meaning that really
can't be limited by any sense of
one-to-one relation of that
kind.
>
 
All right.
 
What else about Bakhtin?
 
One more thing:
His idea of common language.
This is not a concept that is
supposed to have any one
particular value attached to it.
 
It's a little bit like the
rhizome.
It could be good;
it could be bad.
Common language could be a kind
of Rabelaisan,
carnivalesque,
subversive, energetic body of
voices from below overturning
the apple carts of authority and
the fixed ways of a moribund
social order.
It could be that,
but at the same time it could
itself be the authoritative,
the reactionary,
the mindless.
 
Common language could be that
universality of acknowledgement
which seems to go along with
unreflected,
knee-jerk responses to what one
observes and thinks about.
Common language has that whole
range.
The important thing about it is
that it's out there and that it
circulates and it exists in
relationship with what Bakhtin
calls "internally
persuasive discourse"--
in other words,
the way in which the filtering
together of these various sorts
of language result in something
like what we feel to be
authentic:
a power of reflection,
a posing of relations among the
various strata of language,
such that they can speak
authentically,
not necessarily in a way that
we agree with but in a way that
we recognize to constitute that
distilled consciousness that we
still do call "the
author,"
and to which we ascribe,
in some sense, authority.
 
Precisely in the peculiar
self-mocking relationship
between this sentence of
Pride and Prejudice and
the plot of Pride and
Prejudice as a whole,
we feel something like the
internal persuasiveness,
the coherence of the discourse.
 
I think, maybe just to sum up
Bakhtin,
I want to quote you from the
other long excerpt that you have
in your anthology,
which I would encourage you to
read.
 
Sometimes I have asked people
to read it but I decided to drop
it this year--but it's still a
very strong and interesting
argument.
 
It's called "Discourse in
the Novel,"
and I just want to read in the
left-hand column,
near the bottom of the column:
"The ideological becoming
of a human being in this view is
the process of selectively
assimilating the words of
others."
In other words,
the coherence of my mind,
of what I say insofar as
coherence exists,
is the result of selecting out,
of selecting among,
in my assimilation of the words
of others,
such that there is a pattern
of, again, coherence.
All right.
 
So finally, the novel is the
social text par
excellence for Bakhtin for
these reasons,
and it confirms again what we
have been saying about a new way
of thinking of language.
 
Language, as that which speaks
through us, is not just
language;
it's other people's language,
and we need to understand the
experience of the process of
reading and of texts as they
exist and the nature of
authorial composition as an
assimilative,
selective way of putting
together other people's
language.
 
All right.
 
Now quickly Jauss.
 
He takes us back,
obviously by way of Iser--
I think you can see that
Jauss's talk about horizons of
expectation and the disruption
of expectation has a great deal
to do with Iser's understanding
of the role of the reader in
filling imaginative gaps that
are left in the text,
which are based on a complex
relationship with a set of
conventional expectations--
by way of Iser to Gadamer;
because after all,
what Jauss has to say is a way
of talking about Gadamer's
"merger of horizons."
But for Jauss it's not just my
horizon and the horizon of the
text.
 
It's not just those two
horizons that need to meet
halfway on common ground as
mutually illuminative.
It is, in fact,
a succession of horizons
changing as modes of aesthetic
and interpretive response to
texts are mediated
historically--
as I say--in a sequence.
 
It's not just that the text was
once a certain thing and now we
feel it to be somehow different,
hence in order to understand it
we need to meet it halfway.
 
It's rather a matter of
self-consciously studying what
has happened in between that
other time and this,
here and now.
 
The text has had a life.
 
It has passed through life
changes,
and these life changes have to
be understood at each successive
stage in terms of the three
moments of hermeneutic grasp,
as described by Gadamer in the
historical section of Truth
and Method.
 
The distinction between
intelligere,
explicare,
and applicare--
understanding,
interpretation,
and application--
that Jauss talks about at the
beginning of his essay actually
goes back to the eighteenth
century.
 
What Jauss has to say about it
is,
yes: these three moments of
hermeneutic understanding exist
for any reader or reading public
at any moment in the history of
the reception of a text.
 
He makes a considerable to-do
about distinguishing between the
aesthetic response to the text
and a subsequent or leisured,
reflectively interpretive
response to the text.
This may seem a little
confusing because he admits with
Heidegger and others,
as we've indicated ourselves in
the past,
that you can't just have a
spontaneous response to anything
without reflection.
There's always a sense in which
you already know what it is,
which is to say a sense in
which you've already interpreted
it;
but at the same time,
Jauss makes a considerable
point of distinguishing between
these two moments--
the aesthetic,
which he associates with
understanding,
and the interpretive,
which he associates with what
is in the hermeneutic tradition
called interpretation.
Now why does he do this?
 
It's a question of what he
means by "the
aesthetic."
 
A text enters historical
circulation and remains before
the gaze of successive audiences
in history because it has been
received aesthetically.
 
Aesthetics is the glue that
keeps the text alive through
history.
 
In other words,
people continue to say,
to one degree or another,
"I like it."
If they don't say,
"I like it,"
there will never be a question
of interpreting it
>
 
or transmitting it
historically,
because it's going to
disappear.
As Dr.
 
Johnson said,
"That book is good in vain
which the reader throws
away."
In other words,
from the standpoint of
interpretation or from the
standpoint of philosophical
reflection or whatever you might
wish to call it,
a book may be good,
just incontestably good--
but if it didn't please,
if it didn't give pleasure,
if it didn't attach itself to a
reading public aesthetically by
means of pleasing,
none of what would follow in
the hermeneutic process could
ever take place.
So that's why Jauss makes such
a point of distinguishing
between the aesthetic and the
interpretive.
Then of course the historical
study of reception is what shows
us the degree to which any set
of moments of aesthetic and
interpretive reception is
mediated by what has gone before
it.
 
In other words,
a text gradually changes as a
result of its reception,
and if we don't study
reception, we are left naively
supposing that time has passed
and that the past has become
sort of remote from us so we
have certain problems
interpreting;
but these problems as far as we
know haven't arisen from
anything that could properly be
called change.
There has been an unfolding
process of successive
interpretations whereby a text
has gone through sea changes:
it's become less popular,
more popular,
more richly interpreted and
less richly interpreted,
but tends to keep eddying out
from what it was sensed to be
originally,
to the point where all sorts of
accretive implications and
sources of pleasure may arrive
as we understand it.
 
In a certain sense,
once again it's like
"Pierre Menard,
Author of the
Quixote,"
but now it's not just Pierre
Menard and Miguel de Cervantes.
 
It's as though a succession of
people,
perhaps whose native language
was not French necessarily but
who knows--
German, Russian,
whatever--continued to write in
Spanish a text which turns out
to be word-for-word Don
Quixote as the centuries
pass,
each one acquiring a whole new
world of associations and
implications and giving pleasure
in successively new ways.
 
When we finally get to the
point in the late nineteenth
century,
when we encounter this
Frenchman, Pierre Menard,
writing Don Quixote,
the important thing would be
to understand that lots of
people have done it between him
and Cervantes.
This is a kind of skeletal
model of how a reception history
according to Jauss might work.
 
Now the history of reception
studies two things.
It studies changing horizons of
expectation,
and that's something you're
familiar with from Iser--
that is to say,
the way in which a reader has
to come to terms with
conventions surrounding
expectation in any given text,
in order to be able to
negotiate what's new and what's
nearly merely culinary in the
text--
it involves changing horizons
of expectations which don't just
change once in the here and now,
but have changed successively
through time.
It also involves changing
semantic possibilities or,
if you will,
changing possibilities for and
of significance--
what does the text mean for me
now?--
but understood again not just
as something that matters for
me,
but has successively mattered
for successive generations of
readers in between.
 
Just to take examples of how
this might work in the here and
now,
there is just now on Broadway a
revival of Damn Yankees,
which is about a baseball
player who sells his soul in
order to beat the Yankees.
One can't help but think that
the revival of interest in
Damn Yankees has
something to do with the steroid
scandals and the way in which so
many baseball players do sell
their souls in order to win and
in order to have good careers.
It occurs to one that it is in
this sort of atmosphere of
social and cultural censure that
we're suddenly interested in
Damn Yankees again.
 
Perhaps there will be a revival
of Tony the Tow Truck
because in the economic
downturn,
obviously to be rich or to be
glamorous like Neato or to be
busy like Speedy--
all of this becomes obsolete,
more or less irrelevant and
beside the point,
and what really matters is
little guys helping each other.
So Tony the Tow Truck
could be revived today as a
parable of the good life in the
downturn,
and so it will probably be read
by everyone,
it will give pleasure,
it will therefore be
interpreted,
and it will survive to live
another day historically,
fulfilling the three moments of
the study of the history of
reception required by Jauss.
All right.
 
So with that said,
it's been a very interesting
fifty minutes I think.
 
>
 
With that said,
I hope you all have a good
break and we'll see you when you
get back.
