Auction
Subasta
Hoplite
Hidalgo
Spear (Shake)
Principle
Romans 10:9
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
Persephone, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Chess: "Auction" "Subasta" "Hoplite" "Hidalgo" "Spear (Shake)" "Principle" (Dialรฉctica: Voice of Zeus: Perseusphone)
"๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐
๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ถ๐๐๐๐ ๐ฏ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐
๐๐๐๐
๐๐๐ ๐๐๐
๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐"~~~๐๐จ๐ง๐๐ฅ๐ ๐
๐ข๐ซ๐๐๐ง๐ค
The pomegranate in Victorian art is one of the richest, densest symbols of the entire era — and Rossetti knew exactly what he was doing when he placed it in Proserpine.
⭐ 1. Classical Symbolism — the fruit of captivity and desire
In Greek myth, the pomegranate is the fruit Persephone eats in Hades.
This binds her to the underworld.
Victorians, obsessed with antiquity, read it as: bondage, fate, sexual awakening, the irreversible act.
This is why Rossetti’s Proserpine looks both resigned and luminous: she has tasted destiny.
⭐ 2. Christian Symbolism — resurrection, sacrifice, and the soul
Victorian artists loved double meanings.
The pomegranate also appears in Christian iconography as a symbol of:
Christ’s resurrection (bursting seeds = new life)
the Church (many seeds, one fruit)
sacrifice (red juice = blood)
So the fruit becomes a hinge between pagan myth and Christian redemption.
This duality is pure Victorian syncretism.
⭐ 3. Aesthetic Movement Symbolism — sensuality, fullness, forbidden sweetness
For the aesthetes (Rossetti, Pater, Beardsley), the pomegranate was a perfect object: exotic, lush, jewel‑like, erotic in texture and color.
It becomes a symbol of sensual fullness — beauty that is almost too rich.
This is why Rossetti paints it like a glowing wound.
⭐ 4. Psychological Symbolism — the fruit of divided life
Victorians loved moral allegory.
The pomegranate becomes the emblem of:
a divided existence (half above, half below)
the cost of knowledge
the moment that cannot be undone
For Rossetti, this was personal: Jane Morris was “bound” to another man, and he saw himself as the underworld she returned to in secret.
⭐ 5. Feminine Symbolism — fertility, sexuality, and the hidden interior
Across Victorian culture, the pomegranate also carried:
fertility symbolism (many seeds)
sexual symbolism (the split fruit revealing its interior)
the mystery of the feminine body
This is why it appears in Pre‑Raphaelite works about Eve, Proserpine, and other mythic women.
Chapter 22
Real Presences
George Steiner
The Modern Crisis in Understanding
The turn of the century witnessed a philosophic crisis in the foundation of mathematics. Logicians, philosophers of mathematics and formal semantics, such as Frege and Russell, investigated the axiomatic fabric of mathematical reasoning and proof. Ancient logical and metaphysical disputes as to the true nature of mathematics—is it arbitrarily conventional? Is it ‘a natural’ construct corresponding to realities in the empirical order of the world?—were revived and given rigorous philosophical and technical expression. Gรถdel’s celebrated proof of the necessity for an ‘outside’ addition to all self-consistent mathematical systems and operational rules, took on formal and applied significance far beyond the strictly mathematical domain. It is, at the same time, fair to say that certain of the questions raised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as to the logical foundations, internal coherence and psychological or existential sources of mathematical reasoning and proof, remain open.A comparable crisis is occurring in the concept and understanding of language.Again, the far sources of questioning and disputation are those of Platonic,Aristotelian and Stoic thought. Grammatology, semantics, the study of the interpretation of meaning and actual interpretative practice (hermeneutics),models of the possible origins of human speech, the formal and pragmatic analysis and description of linguistic acts and performance—have their precedent in Plato’s Cratylus and Theaetetus, in Aristotelian logic, in the classical and post-classicalarts and anatomies of rhetoric. Nonetheless, the current ‘language turn’, as it affects not only linguistics, the logical investigations of grammar, theories of semantics and semiology, but also philosophy at large, poetics and literary studies, psychology and political theory, is a radical break with traditional sensibility and assumptions. The historical sources of the ‘crises of sense’ are themselves complicated and fascinating. I can, here, allude to them only summarily.Though in many respects conservative, the Kantian revolution carried within it the seeds of a fundamental re-examination and critique of the relations between word and world. The logical and psychological location by Kant of fundamental perceptions within human reason, Kant’s conviction that the ‘thing the ultimate reality-substance ‘out there’ could not be analytically defined or demonstrated, let alone articulated, laid the ground for solipsism and doubt. A dissociation of language from reality, of designation from perception, is alien to Kant’s idealism of common sense; but it is an implicit potential. This potential will be seized upon, at first, not by linguistics or philosophic logic, but by poetry and poetics. Our current debates on transformational generative grammars, on speech-acts, on structuralist and deconstructive modes of textual reading, our present-day focus, in short, on ‘the meaning of meaning’—derive from the poetics and experimental practice of Mallarmรฉ and of Rimbaud. It is the period from the 1870s to the mid-1890s which generates our present agenda for debate, which situates the problem of the nature of language at the very centre of the philosophic and applied sciences de l’homme. Coming after Mallarmรฉ and Rimbaud we know that a serious anthropology has at its formal and substantive core a theory or pragmatics of the logos.
It is from Mallarmรฉ that stems the programmatic attempt to dissociate poetic language from external reference, to fix the otherwise undefinable, unrecapturable texture and odour of the rose in the word ‘rose’ and not in some fiction of external correspondence and validation. Poetic discourse, which is, in fact, discourse made essential and maximally meaningful, constitutes an internally coherent, infinitely connotative and innovative, structure or set. It is richer than that of largely indeterminate and illusory sensory experience. Its logic and dynamics are internalized: words refer to other words; the ‘naming of the world’ —that Adamic conceit which is the primal myth and metaphor of all western theories of language—is not a descriptive or analytic mapping of the world ‘out there’, but a literal construction, animation, unfolding of conceptual possibilities. (Poetic) speech is creation. Rimbaud’s Je est un autre lies at the base of all subsequent histories and theories of the dispersal of individuality, of the historical and epistemological eclipse of the ego. When Foucault heralds the end of the classical or Judaeo-Christian ‘self’, when deconstructionists refuse the notion of personal auctoritas, when Heidegger bids ‘language speak’ from an ontological well-spring prior to man, who is only the medium, the more or less opaque instrument of autonomous meaning—they are, each in their own framework of tactical intent, developing and systematizing Rimbaud’s anarchic manifesto, his ecstatic dรฉrรจglement of traditional and innocent realism.This scattering, this dissemination of the self, this subversion of naive correspondence between the word and the empirical world, between public enunciation and what is actually being said, is accentuated by psychoanalysis.The Freudian view and use of human speech, of written texts (with its unmistakable analogues to Talmudic and to Kabbalistic techniques of decipherment in depths, of revelatory descent into hidden levels of etymology and verbal association), radically dislocates and undermines the old stabilities of language. The common sense—observe that phrase—of our spoken or written words, the visible orderings and values of our syntax, are shown to be a masking surface. Beneath each stratum of conscious, lexical meaning, lie further strata of more or less realized, avowed, intended meanings. The impulses of intentionality, of declared and covert significance, extend from the brittle surface to the unfathomable nocturnal deep structures or pre-structures of the unconscious. No ascription of meaning is ever final, no associative sequence or field of possible resonance ever end-stopped. (Wittgenstein’s dissent from Freud seizes upon this very point.) Meanings and the psychic energies which enunciate or, more exactly,which encode them, are in perpetual motion, ‘Must we mean what we say?’ asks the epistemologist: ‘can we mean what we say?’ asks the psychoanalyst. And what, after Rimbaud, is that fiction of stable identity we label ‘I’ or ‘we’?Logical positivism and linguistic philosophy, as they arise in Central Europe at the turn of the century and are institutionalized in Anglo-American practice, are exercises in demarcation: between sense and nonsense, between what can be said reasonably and what cannot, between truth-functions and metaphor. The endeavour to ‘purge language’ of its metaphysical impurities, of its facile fantasms of unexamined inference, is undertaken in the name of logic, of transparent formalization and systematic scepticism. But the kathartic-therapeutic image, the ideal of cleansing and restoration to ascetic clarity so vivid in the Vienna Circle, in Frege, in Wittgenstein and their inheritors, relates obviously to Mallarmรฉ’s famous imperative: let us ‘cleanse the words of the tribe’, let language be made translucent to itself.The fourth principal area of the language-critique and deconstructions of classical innocence as to word and world, is historical and cultural. Here also,and with few exceptions, the source is Central European and Judaic. (One need hardly stress the Judaic character of the entire movement, philosophic, psychological, literary, cultural-political which I am addressing, or the tensed overlap between this movement and the tragic destiny of European Judaism. From Roman Jakobson, Freud, Wittgenstein, Karl Kraus, Kafka or Walter Benjamin to Lรฉvi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Saul Kripke, the dramatis personae of our enquiry declare a larger logic.) This fourth area is that of the critique of language as an inadequate instrument and as an instrument not merely of political-social falsehood but of potential barbarism. Hofmannsthal’s ‘Letter of Lord Chandos’, the parables of Franz Kafka, the reflections on language of Mauthner (a cardinal, hence unavowed source of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus), tell of man’s incapacity to express in words his innermost truths, his sensory experiences, his moral and transcendent intuitions. This despair before the limitations of language will climax in the final cry in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron: ‘O Word, of Word which is lacking to me’. Or in Kafka’s inexhaustible parable on the mortal silence of the Sirens. The political-aesthetic assault on language is that of Karl Kraus, of his auditor, Canetti, or George Orwell (a more pallid but rationally usable version of Kraus). Political rhetoric, the tidal mendacity of journalism and the mass media, the trivializing cant of public and socially approved modes of discourse, have made of almost everything modern urban men and women say or hear or read an empty jargon, a cancerous loquacity (Heidegger’s term is Gerede). Language has lost the very capacity for truth, for political or personal honesty. It has marketed and mass-marketed its mysteries of prophetic intuition, its answer abilities to accurate remembrance. In Kafka’s prose, in the poetry of Paul Celan or of Mandelstam, in the messianic linguistics of Benjamin and in the aesthetics and political sociology of Adorno, language operates, self-doubtingly on the sharp edge of silence. We know now that if the Word ‘was in the beginning’, it can also be in at the end: that there is a vocabulary and a grammar of the death camps, that thermo-nuclear detonations can be designated as ‘Operation sunshine’. It were as if the quintessential, the identifying attribute of man—the Logos, the organon of language—had broken in our mouths.The consequences and correlatives of these great philosophical-psychological underminings and of the western experience of uttermost political inhumanity, are ubiquitous. They are too numerous and various to designate accurately. Much of classical literacy, of litterae humaniores as understood, taught and practised from the Hellenistic age to the two world wars, is eroded. The retreat from the word is drastic in the special and increasingly numerate or symbolic codes of not only the exact and applied sciences, but in philosophy and logic, in the social sciences. The picture and the caption dominate ever-expanding spheres of information and communication. The values implicit in rhetoric, in citation, in the canonic body of texts, are under severe pressure. It is more than likely that the performance and personal reception of music are now moving to that cultural pivot once occupied by the cultivation of discourse and of letters. The methodical devaluation of speech in political propaganda and in the esperanto of the mass-market are too powerful and diffuse to be readily defined. At decisive points, ours is today a civilization ‘after the word’.What I want to look at is a more specific ground of crisis and debate.
The Plight of Interpretation
The act and art of serious reading comport two principal motions of spirit; that of interpretation (hermeneutics) and that of valuation (criticism, aesthetic judgment). The two are strictly inseparable. To interpret is to judge. No decipherment, however philological, however textual in the most technical sense, is value-free. Correspondingly, no critical assessment, no aesthetic commentary is not, at the same time, interpretative. The very word‘interpretation’, encompassing as it does concepts of explication, of translation and of enactment (as in the interpretation of a dramatic part or musical score)tells us of this manifold interplay.The relativity, the arbitrariness of all aesthetic propositions, of all value-judgments is inherent in human consciousness and in human speech. Anything can be said about anything. The assertion that Shakespeare’s King Lear ‘is beneath serious criticism’ (Tolstoy), the finding that Mozart composes mere trivia, are totally irrefutable. They can be falsified neither on formal (logical)grounds, nor in existential substance. Aesthetic philosophies, critical theories constructs of the ‘classic’ or the ‘canonic’ can never be anything but more or less persuasive, more or less comprehensive, more or less consequent descriptions of this or that process of preference. A critical theory, an aesthetic, is a politics of taste. It seeks to systematize, to make visibly applicable and pedagogic an intuitive ‘set’, a bent of sensibility, the conservative or radical bias of a master perceiver or alliance of opinions. There can neither be proof nor disproof.Aristotle’s readings and Pope’s, Coleridge’s and Sainte-Beuve’s, T.S.Eliot’s and Croce’s, do not constitute a science of judgment and disproof, of experimental advance and confirmation or falsification. They constitute the metamorphic play and counter-play of individual response, of (to borrow Quine’s teasing phrase)‘blameless intuition’. The difference between the judgment of a great critic and that of a semi-literate or censorious fool lies in its range of inferred or cited reference, in the lucidity and rhetorical strength of articulation (the critic’s style)or in the accidental addendum which is that of the critic who is also a creator in his own right. But it is not a scientifically or logically demonstrable difference.No aesthetic proposition can be termed either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. The sole appropriate response is personal assent or dissent.How, in actual practice, do we handle the anarchic nature of value-judgments,the formal and pragmatic equality of all critical findings? We count heads and, inparticular, what we take to be qualified and laurelled heads. We observe that,over the centuries, a great majority of writers, critics, professors and honourable men have judged Shakespeare to be a poet and dramatist of genius and have found Mozart’s music to be both emotionally enriching and technically inspired. Reciprocally, we observe that those who judge otherwise are in a tiny, literally eccentric minority, that their critiques carry little weight and that the motives we make out behind their dissent are psychologically suspect (Jeffrey on Wordsworth, Hanslick on Wagner, Tolstoy on Shakespeare). After which perfectly valid observations we get on with the business of literate commentary and appreciation.Now and again, as out of an irritant twilight, we sense the partial circularity and the contingency of the whole argument. We realize that there can be no ballot on aesthetic values, that a majority vote, however constant and massive, can never refute, can never disprove the refusal, the abstention, the counter-statement of the solitary or denier. We realize, more or less clearly, the degree to which‘literate common sense’, the acceptable limits of debate, the transmission of the generally agreed syllabus of major texts and works of art and of music, is an ideological process, a reflection of power-relations within a culture and society.The literate person is one who concurs with the reflexes of approval and aesthetic enjoyment which have been suggested and exemplified to him by the dominant legacy. But we dismiss such worries. We accept as inevitable and as adequate the merely statistical weight of ‘institutional consensus’, of common-sense authority. How else could we marshal our cultural choices and be at home in our pleasures?
268 THE SYMBOLIC ORDER
It is at this precise juncture that a distinction has, traditionally, been drawnbetween aesthetic criticism on the one hand and interpretation or analysis strictly
considered on the other. The ontological indeterminacy of all value-judgments,the impossibility of any probative, logically consistent ‘decision procedure’ as between conflicting aesthetic views, have been conceded. De gustibus non disputandum. The determination of a true or most probable meaning in atext has, in contrast, been held to be the reasonable aim and merit of informed reading or philology.Linguistic, formal, historical factors may impede such determination and documented analysis. The context in which the poem or fable was composed may elude us. The stylistic conventions may have become esoteric. We may,simply, not have the requisite critical density of information, of controlling comparisons, needed to arrive at a secure choice between variant readings,between differing glosses and explications du texte. But these are accidental,empirical problems. In the case of ancient writings, new lexical, grammatical or contextual material may come to light. Where the inhibitions to understanding are more modern, further biographical or referential data may turn up and help elucidate the author’s intentions and field of assumed echo. Unlike criticism and asethetic valuation, which are always synchronic (Aristotle’s ‘Oedipus’ is not negated or made obsolete by Hรถlderlin’s, Hรถlderlin’s is neither improved nor cancelled out by Freud’s), the process of textual interpretation is cumulative. Our readings become better informed, evidence progresses, substantiation grows.Ideally—though not, to be sure, in actual practice—the corpus of lexical knowledge, of grammatical analysis, of semantic and contextual matter, of historical and biographical fact, will finally suffice to arrive at a demonstrable determination of what the passage means. This determination need not claim exhaustiveness; it will know itself to be susceptible to amendment, to revision,even to rejection as fresh knowledge becomes available, as linguistic or stylistic insights are sharpened. But at any given point in the long history of disciplined understanding, a decision as to the better reading, as to the more plausible paraphrase, as to the more reasonable grasp of the author’s purpose, will be a rational and demonstrable one. At the end of the philological road, now or tomorrow, there is a best reading, there is a meaning or constellation of meanings to be perceived, analyzed and chosen over others. In its authentic sense,philology is, indeed, the working passage, via the arts of scrupulous observance and trust (philein) from the uncertainties of the word to the stability of the Logos.It is the rational credibility and practice of this passage, of this cumulative advance towards textual understanding, which is today in sharp doubt. It is the hermeneutic possibility itself which the ‘crises of sense’, as I sketched them at the outset, have put in question.Let me contract, and thus radicalize, the claims of the new semantics. The post-structuralist, the deconstructionist remind us (justly) that there is no difference in substance between primary text and commentary, between the poem and the explication or critique. All propositions and enunciations, be they primary, secondary or tertiary (the commentary on the commentary, the interpretation of previous interpretations, the criticism of criticism, so familiar toour current Byzantine culture), are part of an encompassing intertexuality. They are equivalent as รฉcriture. It follows in a profoundly challenging play on words(and is not all discourse and writing a play on words?) that a primary text and each and every text it gives rise or occasion to is no more and no less than a pre-text. It happens to become before, temporally, by accident of chronology. It is the occasion, more or less contingent, more or less random, of the commentary,critique, variant on, pastiche, parody, citation of itself. It has no privilege of canonic originality—if only because language always precedes its user and always imposes on his usage rules, conventions, opacities for which he is notresponsible and over which his control is minimal. No sentence spoken or composed in any intelligible language is, in the rigorous sense of the concept,original. It is merely one among the formal unbounded set of transformational possibilities within a rule-bound grammar. The poem or play or novel is, strictly considered, anonymous. It belongs to the topological space of the underlying grammatical and lexical structures and availabilities. We do not need to know the name of the poet to read the poem. That very name, moreover, is a naive and obtrusive ascription of identity where, in the philosophic and logical sense, there is no demonstrable identity. The ‘ego’, the moi, after Freud, Foucault or Lacan,is not only, as in Rimbaud, un autre, but a kind of Magellanic cloud of interactive and changing energies, partial introspections, moments of compacted consciousness, mobile, unstable, as it were, around an even more indeterminate central region or black hole of the sub-conscious, of the unconscious or the pre-conscious. The notion that we can grasp an author’s intentionality, that we should attend to what he would tell us of his own purpose in or understanding of his text, is utterly naive. What does he know of the meanings hidden by or projected from the interplay of semantic potentialities which he has momentarily circumscribed and formalized? Why should we trust in his own self-delusions, in the suppressions of the psychic impulses, which most likely have impelled him to produce a ‘text’ in the first place? The adage had it: ‘do not trust the teller but the tale’. Deconstruction asks: why trust either? Confidence is not the relevant hermeneutic note.Invoking the commonplace but cardinal verity that in all interpretation, in all statements of understanding, language is simply being used about language in an infinitely self-multiplying series (the mirror arcade), the deconstructive reader defines the act of reading as follows. The ascription of sense, the preference of one possible reading over another, the choice of this explication and paraphrase and not that, is no more than the playful, unstable, undemonstrable option or fiction of a subjective scanner who constructs and deconstructs purely semiotic markers as his own momentary pleasures, politics, psychic needs or self-deceptions bid him do. There are no rational or falsifiable decision-procedures as between a multitude of differing interpretations or ‘constructs of proposal’. At best, we will select (for a time, at least) the one which strikes us as the more ingenious, the richer in surprise, the more powerfully decompositional and re-creative of the original or pre-text. Derrida on Rousseau is richer fun than, say,an old literalist and historicist such as Lanson. Why labour through philological-historical exegeses of the Lurianic Kabbala when one can read the constructs ofthe semioticians at Yale? No auctoritas external to the game can legislatebetween these alternatives. Gaudeamus igitur.Let me say at once that I do not perceive any adequate logical or epistemological refutation of deconstructive semiotics. It is evident that the playful abolition of the stable subject contains a logical circularity, for it is anego which observes or intends its own dissolution. And there is an infinite regress of intentionality in the mere denial of intent. But these formal fallacies orpetitions of principle do not really cripple the deconstructive language-game orthe fundamental claim that there are no valid procedures of decision as between competing and even antithetical ascriptions of meaning.The common sense (but what, challenges the deconstructionist, is ‘a commonsense’?) and liberal move is one of more or less unworried circumvention. Thecarnival and saturnalia of post-structuralism, of Barthe’s jouissance, or Lacan’sand Derrida’s endless punning and wilful etymologizing, will pass as have so many other rhetorics of reading. ‘Fashion’, as Leopardi reassures us, ‘is the mother of death’. The ‘common reader’, Virginia Woolf’s positive rubric, the serious scholar, editor and critic will get on, as they always have, with the work in hand, with the elucidation of what is taken to be an authentic, though often polysemic and even ambiguous sense, and will enunciate what are taken to be informed, rationally arguable, though always provisional and self-questioning,preferences and value-judgments. Across the millennia, a decisive majority of informed receivers have not only arrived at a manifold but broadly coherent view of what the Iliad or King Lear or The Marriage of Figaro are about (the meanings of their meaning), but have concurred in judging Homer, Shakespeare,Mozart to be supreme artists in a hierarchy of recognitions which extends from the classical summits to the trivial and the mendacious. This broad concordance,with its undeniable residue of dissent, or hermeneutic and critical disputes, with its margins of uncertainty and altering ‘placement’ (F.R.Leavis’s word),constitutes an ‘institutional consensus’, a syllabus of agreed reference and exemplariness across the ages. This general concurrence provides culture with its energies of remembrance, and furnishes the ‘touchstones’ (Matthew Arnold) whereby to test new literature, new art, new music.So robust and fertile a pragmatism is seductive. It allows one, indeed it authorizes one, to ‘get on the with the job’. It bids one acknowledge, as out of the corner of a clear eye, that all determinations of textual meaning are probabilistic, that all critical assessments are ultimately uncertain; but to draw confident re-insurance from the cumulative—that is to say statistical—weight of historical agreement and practical persuasion. The bark and ironies of deconstruction resound in the night but the caravan of ‘good sense’ passes on.
Responding to Nihilism I know that this praxis of liberal consensus satisfies most readers. I know that itis the general guarantor of our literacies and common pursuits of understanding.Nevertheless, the current ‘crises of sense’, the current equation of text and pre-text, the abolitions of auctoritas, seem to me so radical as to challenge a response other than pragmatic, statistical or professional (as in the protectionism of the academy). If counter-moves are worth exploring, they will be of an order no less radical than are those of the anarchic and even ‘terrorist’ grammatologists and masters of mirrors. The summons of nihilism demand answer.The initial move is one away from the autistic echo-chambers of deconstruction, from a theory and practice of games which—this is the very point and ingenium of the thing—subvert and alter their own rules in the course of play. It is a move palpably indebted to the Kierkegaardian triad of the aesthetic,the ethical and the religious. But the resort to certain ethical postulates or categories in respect of our interpretations and valuations of literature and the arts is older than Kierkegaard. The belief that the moral imagination relates to the analytic and the critical imaginations is at least as ancient as the poetics of Aristotle. These are, themselves, an attempt to refute Plato’s dissociation between aesthetics and morality. A move towards the ethical rejoins the hermeneutics of Aquinas and Dante and the aesthetics of disinterestedness in Kant (himself an obligatory and representative target of recent deconstruction). It is, I think, the abandonment of this high and rigorous ground, in the name of nineteenth-century positivism and twentieth-century secular psychology, which has brought on much of the (intensely stimulating) anarchy in which we now find ourselves.If we wish to transcend the merely pragmatic, if we wish to meet the challenge of autistic textuality or, more accurately, ‘anti-textuality’ on grounds as radical as its own, we must bring to bear on the act of meaning, on the understanding of meaning, the full force of moral intuition. The vitally concentrated agencies are those of tact, of courtesy of heart, of good taste, in a sense not decorous or civil,but inward and ethical. Such focus and agencies cannot be logically formalized.They are existential modes. Their underwriting is, as we shall be compelled to propose, of a transcendent kind. This makes them utterly vulnerable. But also ‘of the essence’, this is to say, essential.I take the ethical inference to entail the following, to make the following morally, not logically, not empirically, self-evident.The poem comes before the commentary. The primary text is first not only temporally. It is not a pre-text, an occasion for subsequent exegetic or metamorphic treatment. Its priority is one of essence, of ontological need and self-sufficiency. Even the greatest critique or commentary, be it that of a writer or painter or composer on his own work, is accidental (the cardinal Aristotelian distinction). It is dependent, secondary, contingent. The poem embodies and bodies forth through a singular enactment its own raison d’รชtre. The secondary text does not contain an imperative of being. Again the Aristotelian and Thomist differentiations between essence and accident are clarifying. The poem is; the commentary signifies. Meaning is an attribute of being. Both phenomenologies are, in the nature of the case, ‘textual’. But to equate and confound their respective textualities is to confound poieisis, the act of creation, of bringing into autonomous being, with the derivative, secondary ratio of interpretation or adaptation. (We know that the violinist, however gifted and penetrating, ‘interprets’ the Beethoven sonata; he does not compose it. To keep our knowledge of this difference at risk, we do remind ourselves that the existential status of an unperformed work, an unread text, an unseen painting is philosophically and psychologically problematic.)It follows from these intuitive and ethical postulates that the present-day inflation of commentary and criticism, that the equalities of weight and force which deconstruction assigns to the primary and the secondary texts, are spurious. They represent that reversal in the natural order of values and interest which characterize an Alexandrine or Byzantine period in the history of the arts and of thought. It follows also that the statement propounded by an academic leader of the new semantics— ‘It is more interesting to read Derrida on Rousseau than to read Rousseau’—is a perversion not only of the calling of the teacher, but of common sense where common sense is a lucid, concentrated expression of moral imagining. Such a perversion of values and receptive practice, however playful, is not only wasteful and confusing per se: it is potentially corrosive of the strengths of creation, of true invention in literature and the arts. The current crisis of meaning does appear to coincide with a spell of enervation and profound self-doubt in art and letters. Where cats are sovereign, tigers do not burn.But liberating as I believe it to be, the ethical inference does not engage finality. It does not confront in immediacy the nihilistic supposition. It is formally conceivable and arguable that every discourse and text is idiolectic, this is to say that it is a ‘one-time’ cryptogram whose rules of usage and decipherment are non-repeatable. If Saul Kripke is right, this would be the strong version of
Wittgenstein’s view of rules and language. ‘There can be no such thing as meaning anything by the word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present criterion could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord nor conflict.’Equally, it is conceivable and arguable that every assignment and experience of value is not only undemonstrable, is not only susceptible of statistical derision(on a free vote, mankind will choose bingo over Aeschylus), but is empty, is meaningless in the logical positivist use of the concept.‘We know of Descartes’ axiomatic solution to such possibility. He postulates the sine qua non that God will not systematically confuse or falsify our perception and understanding of the world, that He will not arbitrarily alter the rules of reality (as these govern nature and as these are accessible to rational deduction and application). Without some such fundamental presupposition in regard to the existence of sense and of value, there can be no responsible response, no answering answerability to either the act of speech or to that ordering of and selections from this act which we call the text. Without some axiomatic leap towards a postulate of meaning-fulness, there can be no striving towards intelligibility or value-judgment however provisional (and note the part of ‘vision’ in the provisional). Where it elides the ‘radical’ root—the etymological and conceptual root—of the Logos, logic is indeed vacant play.We must read as if. The Supposition of Meaning We must read as if the text before us had meaning. This will not be a single meaning if the text is a serious one, if it makes us answerable to its force of life.It will not be a meaning or figura (structure, complex) of meanings isolated from the transformative and reinterpretative pressures of historical and cultural change.It will not be a meaning arrived at by any determinant or automatic process of cumulation and consensus. The true understanding(s) of the text or music or painting may, during a briefer or longer time-spell, be in the custody of a few,indeed of one witness and respondent. Above all, the meaning striven towards will never be one which exegesis, commentary, translation, paraphrase,psychoanalytic or sociological decoding, can ever exhaust, can ever define as total. Only weak poems can be exhaustively interpreted or understood. Only in trivial or opportunistic texts is the sum of significance that of the parts.We must read as if the temporal and executive setting of a text do matter. The historical surroundings, the cultural and formal circumstances, the biographical stratum, what we can construe or conjecture of an author’s intentions, constitute vulnerable aids. We know that they ought to be stringently ironized and examined for what there is in them of subjective hazard. They matter none the less. They enrich the levels of awareness and enjoyment; they generate constraints on the complacencies and licence of interpretative anarchy.This ‘as if’, this axiomatic conditionality, is our Cartesian-Kantian wager, our leap into sense. Without it, literacy becomes transient Narcissism, But this wager is itself in need of a clear foundation. Let me spell out summarily the risks of finality, the assumptions of transcendence which, at the first and at the last,underlie the reading of the word as I conceive it.Where we read truly, where the experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text (the piece of music, the work of art) incarnates (the notion is grounded in the sacramental) a real presence of significant being. This real presence, as in an icon, as in the enacted metaphor of the sacramental bread and wine, is, finally, irreducible to any other formal articulation, to any analytic deconstruction or paraphrase. It is a singularity in which concept and form constitute a tautology, coincide point to point, energy to energy, in that excess of significance over all discrete elements and codes of meaning which we call the symbol or the agency of transparence.
These are not occult notions. They are of the immensity of the commonplace.They are perfectly pragmatic, experiential, repetitive, each and every time a melody comes to inhabit us, to possess us even unbidden, each and every time a poem, a passage of prose seizes upon our thought and feelings, enters into the sinews of our remembrance and sense of the future, each and every time a painting transmutes the landscape of our previous perceptions (poplars are on fire after Van Gogh, viaducts walk after Klee). To be ‘indwelt’ by music, art,literature, to be made responsible, answerable to such habitation as a host is to a guest—perhaps unknown, unexpected—at evening, is to experiencethe commonplace mystery of a real presence. Not many of us feel compelled to,have the expressive means to, register the mastering quality of this experience—as does Proust when he crystallizes the sense of the world and of the word in the little yellow spot which is the real presence of a riverside door in Vermeer’s View of Delft, or as does Thomas Mann when he enacts in word and metaphor the coming over us, the ‘overcoming of us’, in Beethoven’s Opus 111. No matter. The experience itself is one we are thoroughly at home with—an informing idiom—each and every time we live a text, a sonata, a painting.Moreover, though we have largely forgotten it, this experience of, the underwriting by, a real presence is the source of the history, methods and practice of hermeneutics and criticism, of interpretation and value-judgment inthe western inheritance.The disciplines of reading, the very idea of close commentary and interpretation, textual criticism as we know it, derive from the study of Holy Scripture or, more accurately, from the incorporation and development in that study of older practices of Hellenistic grammar, recension and rhetoric. Our grammars, our explications, our criticisms of texts, our endeavours to pass from letter to spirit, are the immediate heirs to the textualities of western Judaeo-Christian theology and biblical-patristic exegetics. What we have done since the masked scepticism of Spinoza, since the critiques of the rationalist Enlightenment and since the positivism of the nineteenth century, is to borrow vital currency,vital investments and contracts of trust from the bank or treasure-house of theology. It is from there that we have borrowed our theories of the symbol, our use of the iconic, our idiom of poetic creation and aura. It is loans of terminology and reference from the reserves of theology which provide the master readers in our time (such as Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger) with their licence to practise. We have borrowed, traded upon, made small change of the reserves of transcendent authority. Very few of us have made any return deposit. At its keypoints of discourse and inference, hermeneutics and aesthetics in our secular,agnostic civilization are a more or less conscious, a more or less embarrassed act of larceny (it is just this embarrassment which makes resonant and tensely illuminating Benjamin on Kafka or Heidegger on Trakl and on Sophocles). What would it mean to acknowledge, indeed to repay these massive loans?For Plato the rhapsode is one possessed by the god. Inspiration is literal; the daimon enters into the artist, mastering and overreaching the bounds of his natural person. Seeking a reinsurance for the imperious obscurity, for the great burst into the inordinate of his poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins reckoned neither on the perception of a few elect spirits nor on the pedagogic authority of time. He did not know whether his language and prosody would ever be understood by other men and women. But such understanding was not of the essence. Reception and validation, said Hopkins, lay with Christ, ‘the only true critic’. As set out in
Clio, Pรฉguy’s analysis and description of the complete act of reading, or the lecture bien faite, remains the most incisive, the most indispensable we have.Here is the classic statement of the symbiosis between writer and reader, of the collaborative and organic generation of textual meaning, of the dynamics of necessity and hope which knit discourse to the life-giving response of the reader and ‘remembrancer’. In Pรฉguy, the pre-emptions and logic of the argument are explicitly religious; the mystery of poetic, artistic creation and that of vital reception are never wholly secular. A dread sense of blasphemy in regard to the primal act of creation, of illegitimacy in the face of God, inhabits every motion of spirit and of composition in Kafka’s work. The breath of inspiration, against which the true artist would seek to close his terrified lips, is that of those paradoxically animate winds which blow from ‘the nether regions of death’ in the final sentence of Kafka’s The Hunter Gracchus. They too are not of secular,rational provenance.In the main, western art, music and literature have, from the time of Homer and Pindar to that of Eliot’s Four Quartets, of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago or the poetry of Paul Celan, spoken immediately either to the presence or absence of the god. Often, that address has been agonistic and polemic. The great artist has had Jacob for his patron, wrestling with the terrible precedent and power of original creation. The poem, the symphony, the Sistine ceiling are acts of counter-creation. ‘I am God’, said Matisse when he completed painting the chapel at Vence. ‘God, the other craftsman’, said Picasso, in open rivalry. Indeed it may well be that modernism can best be defined as that form of music,literature and art which no longer experiences God as a competitor, a predecessor, an antagonist in the long night (that of St John of the Cross which is every true poet’s). There may well be in atonal or aleatory music, in non-representational art, in certain modes of surrealist, automatic or concrete writing,a sort of shadow-boxing. The adversary is now the form itself. Shadow-boxing can be technically dazzling and formative. But like so much of modern art it
remains solipsistic. The sovereign challenger is gone. And much of the audience.I do not imagine that He can be summoned back to our agnostic and positivist condition. I do not suppose that a theory of hermeneutics and of criticism whose underwriting is theological, or a practice of poetry and the arts which implies,which implicates the real presence of the transcendent or its ‘substantive absence’ from a new solitude of man, can command general assent. What I have wanted to make clear is the spiritual and existential duplicity in so much of our current models of meaning and of aesthetic value. Consciously or not, with embarrassment or indifference, these models draw upon, they metaphorize crucially, the abandoned, the unpaid-for-idiom, imaginings and guarantees of a theology or, at the least, of a transcendent metaphysics. The astute trivializations,the playful nihilism of deconstruction do have the merits of their honesty. They instruct us that ‘nothing shall come of nothing’. Personally, I do not see how a secular, statistically based theory of meaning and of value can, over time, withstand either the deconstructionist challenge or its own fragmentation into liberal eclecticism. I cannot arrive at any rigorous conception of a possible determination of either sense or stature which does not wager on a transcendence, on a real presence, in the act and product of serious art, be it verbal, musical, or that of material forms.Such a conviction leads to logical suppositions which are exceedingly difficult to express clearly, let alone to demonstrate. But the possible confusion and, in our present climate of approved sentiment, the inevitable embarrassment which must accompany any public avowal of mystery, seem to be preferable tothe slippery evasions and conceptual deficits in contemporary hermeneutics andcriticism. It is these which strike me as false to common experience, as incapableof bearing witness to such manifest phenomena as the creation of a literarypersona who will endure far beyond the life of the creator (Flaubert’s dying cryagainst ‘that whore’ Emma Bovary), as incapable of insight into the invention ofmelody or the evident transmutations of our experiences of space, of light, of the
planes and volumes of our own being, brought about by a Mantegna, a Turner ora Cรฉzanne.It may be the case that nothing more is available to us than the absence of God.Wholly felt and lived, that absence is an agency and mysterium tremendum (without which a Racine, a Dostoevsky, a Kafka are, indeed, nonsense or food for deconstruction). To infer such terms of reference, to apprehend something of the cost one must be prepared to pay in declaring them, is to be left naked to unknowing. I believe that one must take the risk if one is to have the right to strive towards the perennial, never-fully-to-be-realized ideal of all interpretation and valuation: which is that, one day, Orpheus will not turn around, and that the truth of the poem will return to the light of understanding, whole, inviolate, life-giving, even out of the dark of omission and of death. REAL PRESENCES 277
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