Abstract
Let us introduce the issue by way of a practicum. Examples from the ambiguous writing of Cervantes, Nietzsche, or Kafka are usually adduced here (the controversy we are entering has a long history), but our practicum, though serving the same purpose, will be a different and therefore possibly a more refreshing one. Our “case in point” will be Flannery O’Connor’s story ‘The River. ’l O’Connor’s compacted plot recounts less than two days in the life of a child named Harry, who is about “four or five” years of age. His mother and father party in their apartment, and send him off to baby-sitters. As the story opens, a Christian woman named Mrs. Connin is about to assume charge of Harry for the day. On the way to her home, she announces she will take Harry and her own family to a healing service, where the Reverend Bevel Summers will preside. When she asks Harry his own name, the boy lies declaring his name is Bevel. Mrs. Connin is astonished that the boy’s name is the same as the preacher’s. At her home, she introduces Harry to Christianity. Immediately afterward, her own children maltreat the boy. Then the whole entourage attends the healing service, conducted at water’s edge. The preacher seems to identify the earthly river and the “river of Jesus’ Blood. ” Throughout, a heckler named Mr. Paradise jeers at the proceedings. At Mrs. Connin’s behest, the preacher then baptizes Harry—immersing him in the river water. When the boy returns home, he finds another party in progress. The next morning he goes to the river, intending “not to fool with preachers any more but to Baptize himself” (p. 50). Mr. Paradise, who lives near the river’s edge, sees the boy headed for the water. Hoping to offer Harry a peppermint stick, he follows. The boy wades far into the water, and is soon sucked under. As the story closes, Mr. Paradise emerges from the water, his attempt at rescue thwarted. Little Harry has drowned.
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Notes
Flannery O’Connor, The River,’ in A Good Man Is Hard To Find (New York: Double-day, Image Books, 1970); cited by page references within the text.
In recent American critical debate, the above issues (or most of them) have been skillfully treated by Monroe Beardsley, Denis Dutton, Joseph Margolis, E. D. Hirsch, and several others, and many of these scholars have disagreed radically with each other. My contribution, I hope, will be to scrutinize these issues in a manner which is of recent European origin. Such a task will involve the suspension of what are some current Anglo-American presuppositions, and a reconstitution of the problematic in phenomeno-logical—and specifically Heideggerian terms.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962); cited by page references in the text. The translation is from the seventh German edition, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Neomarius Verlag); the first German edition appeared in 1927.
Robert R. Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1977).
On the other hand, in his ‘Plausibility and Aesthetic Interpretation’ 7 (1977), 327–40, Denis Dutton argues that interpretation of aesthetic phenomena should operate in terms of a special kind of plausibility, rather than “truth” understood in the commonly accepted scientific sense. The Heideggerian approach to such topics as validity, plausibility, “true” interpretation, “correct” interpretation, and the norms for determining them, will emerge later in my presentation.
In Phenomenology and Literature I demonstrate passim that Heidegger’s critical practice, and even some parts of his theoretical work, seem to imply a heuristic absolutism rather than pluralism. But in regard to theory of multiple interpretation, I think his usefulness depends on another current in his thought, and it is this second and stronger current that I examine in detail.
Heidegger, Being and Time,pp. 188–95.
A definition of “aspect,” and various insights into its functioning, will appear in several places in my presentation.
For definitions of “mutual implication,” see Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 14, 61, 69, 70, 72, 76, and passim. “Implication” here bears the signification of “enfold—ment,” the signification of its Latin etymological root.
By verbal sign, we mean (and in my opinion Heidegger can concur) what Roman Ingarden calls a “word sound” or “typical phonic form,” plus the significations (lexical values) available to this form by way of a culture’s langue. Typical phonic form is to be distinguished, of course, from written or phonic material, such as quality of voice or shape of print, which can be individually new and different with each implementation. Thus, to use an example cited by Husserl, the word sound Hundtranscends any individual articulation of it, and the primary German significations available to this word sound are “a dog” and “a truck used in mining.” See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art,trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 34-56, for a discussion of word sound.
For Heidegger, the word “phenomenology” means “that which shows itself in itself.” Phenomenological description delineates what shows forth concretely, in experience.
I implore the reader’s patience: indications of what Heidegger means by the elusive term “Being” are forthcoming later in my paper.
The phrases “the one and the same” and vis primitiva activa pre applied to Being by Heidegger himself. See Heidegger, ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,’ in his Existence and Being,trans, with introd. by Werner Brock (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965), p. 278; and Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought,trans, with introd. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 100.
Jacques Derrida, the brilliant and chilling contemporary French philosopher, would decry Heidegger’s quest for ontological origin, and even Heidegger’s “logocentricism.” Though there is no space to treat the matter here, my next book (now underway, and entitled Beyond Derrida: The Recovery of Poetic Presence) ill argue at length that Heidegger, in his own way, “deconstructs” metaphysical language, but does so in order to suggest a via negativasimilar to that of traditional mysticism. Heidegger’s Differenzprovides fullness where Derrida’s Différance“closes” ontology.
I owe this apposite definition to my colleague, and internationally recognized phenomenologist, Professor Calvin Schräg.
For a comparison of “correspondence theory,” which “matches,” and “commemorative truth,” which “brings forth,” see Phenomenology and Lieterature,pp. 65, 66.
In order to avoid what may seem to be the jargonistic timbre of the actual Heidegger-ian terms, all of which feature the prepositional “as,” I offer the alternate terms provided within the parentheses. Hereafter, where possible I will substitute the alternate terminology. But it is important to recognize that Heidegger features the prepositional “as” for the sake of precision and emphasis: we shall see that the interpretative question takes the text as something; the textual aspect, for its part, is taken assomething; and the interpretation proper is textual aspect assomething. Heidegger, like Derrida after him, invents new terms because conventional terminology reflects a world view he repudiates. Moreover, Heideggerian terms are no more “jargonistic” than the phraseology of American “New Criticism,” for example, or even “Analytic” philosophy—just less familiar to an Anglo-American audience.
As we shall see, if a relevant aspect is lacking, the interpretation is invalid.
I do not use Husserlian nomenclature—noema instead of “As-which” or “textual aspect,” because Husserl’s noema (at least in his later philosophy) may “be distinguished from the real object” (see Aron Gurwitsch, the great Husserlian specialist, in ‘On the Intentionality of Consciousness,’ Phenomenology,ed. J. Kockelmans, [Garden City: Doubleday, 1967], p. 128). Heidegger’s As-which, on the other hand, is a facet of the real object, the text. Nor is my surrogate term for the Heideggerian As-which, namely, “textual aspect,” to be confounded with Husserlian “aspect”: the latter is usually adjudicated unreal (see R. Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art,sections 40 and 42, where Ingarden speaks as a faithful Husserlian). As for Husserlian noesis,it is unlike Heideggerian “As-question,” since Husserl’s noesisbestows meaning (see Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 98-101) and Heidegger’s As-question does not.
Heidegger’s As-structure reminds one of Husserl’s old maxim—intentionality is at one and the same time the grasp and the grip which grasps it.
Take care not to confuse the terms “fore-structure” and “As-structure.”
Perhaps not enough Heideggerian phenomenologists have realized that Husserl, with his notion of habitus approximates some of what Heidegger means by fore-structure. For example, Husserl says that each experience causes a habitus,or “new abiding property” which further determines the ego; and the ego, thus habituated, goes on to its next experience in a different (i. e., proportionately modified) way. See Husserl, Cartesian Meditations,trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), pp. 66, 67, for his discussion of habitus. However, when dealing with formal interpretative activity, I think Heidegger would validate some fore-structures that Husserl would consider “presuppositions” in the technical sense, and thus “bracket out.”
See Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 97–104.
See ibid., pp. 146, 148, 151, 156, 157, 160, 161, and passim.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Lectures on Aesthetics,’ in Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics from Plato to Wittgenstein,ed. Frank Tillman and Steven Cahn (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 517.
In my essay, I use the term “signification” in lieu of the more common term “sense,” because of what has been a knotty problem for translators. Husserl’s and Ingarden’s word Sinn as been customarily translated “sense,” but Heidegger’s word Sinnis translated “meaning,” and Heideggerian “meaning” is very different from the Husserlian or Ingardenian notion of “sense.” When I mean an idea and/or image operativein a culture’s langue,I resort to the word “signification” —not to be at all confused, by the way, with E. D. Hirsch’s term “significance.”
Contrast Roman Ingarden, who speaks of the “bestowal of meaning” by the author’s “sense-giving acts.” See Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 110, 115, 116.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method,trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming from the second German edition (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. xix.
Gadamer, Le Problème de la conscience historique (Louvain; Publications universitaires de Louvain, and Editions Béatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1963), p. 75.
See Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 73–78. Notice, however, that Heidegger uses As-questions even when involving the author’s “willed significations.” Heidegger is by no means “objective” in his own practical literary criticism.
Consult also ibid., pp. 185, 186, for the examples I provide from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.”
Ibid., pp. 186, 187.
Cited from Heidegger’s Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929) by Theophil Spoerri in’ style of Distance, Style of Nearness,’ in Essays in Stylistic Analysis,ed. Howard Babb (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), p. 78.
Heidegger ‘Dialogue on Language,’ in On the Way to Language trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 1-54. Professor Chang Chung-yuan’s book is Tao: A New Way of Thinking: A Translation of the Tao Tû Ching with an Introduction and Commentaries (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial Library, 1977).
Heidegger, Poefry, Language, Thought,pp. 131, 132.
Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being,trans, with introd. by William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (New Haven: College and University Presses, 1958).
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference,trans, with introd. by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969).
See Being and Time,pp. 193, 194.
Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art,p. 142 (though it must be kept in mind, of course, that the Ingardenian norms for “opalescence” are somewhat different from Heidegger’s).
See Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 67, 73, and passim.
For the convergence of “das Gevierte” to generate human Dasein,and for the “Differenz”between Weltand Seienden,see ibid., pp. 69-72, and its composite of quotations from Heidegger.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought,p. 40.
For the communal nature of Dasein see Heidegger’s ‘Remembrance of the Poet’ and ‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,’ in Existence and Being.
R. H. Blyth, Games Zen Masters Play (New York: New American Library, 1976), p. 14.
The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha,ed. E. A. Burtt (New York: New American Library, Mentor Books, 1955), p. 228.
William Barrett, to his great credit, and long before the idea seemed due, recognized the possibility of correlating Heideggerian and Oriental thought. See Barrett, Irrational Man (1958; New York: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1962), p. 234 and passim.
Chang, Tao: A New Way of Thinking,p. 108.
Ibid., p. 106.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 63.
Chang, Tao,p. 150.
Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 21.
For more passages where Heidegger affirms the simultaneous validity of contradictories, see the quotations from Heidegger in Chang, Tao pp. 14, 61, 108, 124, and passim.
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature,3d. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), pp. 177, 178.
E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Take care not to confuse “signification” and Hirsch’s term “significance.”
Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation,p. 230.
Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. and C. Merriam, 1963), p. 154.
See Heidegger, Being and Time,pp. 377–80, and On the Way to Language,p. 34.
But see my discussion of an inconsistency in Heidegger’s practical criticism of literary works, Phenomenology and Literature,pp. 77, 78.
Denis Dutton, in his own way, also argues effectively that norms for “scientific truth” should not function as models for the adjudication of literary interpretations (see my Note 5, above).
But see Dutton’s article, pp. 331, 332, his footnote 2. Some scientists are coming to regard the “scientific method” as “plausible,” not “certain.”
Heidegger, Being and Time, p.197.
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners,ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), p. 153.
O’Connor, ibid., p. 41.
Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought,p. 5.
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Magliola, R. (1982). Permutation and Meaning: A Heideggerian Troisième Voie. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-7720-4_19
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