Auction

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.”

 

 

 

Hoplite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Persephone, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

 

 

 

Chess: "Auction" "Subasta" "Hoplite" "Hidalgo" "Spear (Shake)" "Principle" (Dialéctica: Voice of Zeus: Perseusphone)

 

 

 "𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒚 𝒂 𝒅𝒊𝒛𝒛𝒚 𝒗𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑶𝒑𝒆𝒓𝒂 𝑯𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒉𝒂𝒅 𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒅 𝒊𝒕𝒔 𝒂𝒖𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒐 𝒉𝒆𝒓"~~~𝐑𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐤 

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. Gödel’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 Mallarmé 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  Mallarmé  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  Mallarmé  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 dérèglement 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 Mallarmé’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 Lévi-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  Hölderlin’s,  Hölderlin’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 écriture. 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’être. 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,  Péguy’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  Péguy,  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 Cézanne.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