BOOKS
627
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
A PRIMER OF IGNORANCE. By R. P. Blackmur. Edited by Joseph Frank.
Harcourt, Brace and World. $5.95.
VALIDITY IN INTERPRETATION. By E. D. Hirsch. Yale University Press.
$6.50.
THE METAMORPHOSES OF THE CIRCLE. By Georges Poulet. Translated
by Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman. Johns Hopkins Press. $10.00.
E. D. Hirsch divides criticism into two moments, of which the
first is intuitive and deeply sympathetic, the second reflexive and logical.
Presumably, criticism as art and criticism as science. He focuses his own
book exclusively on the second moment, although he seems unwilling
to note how the first moment always influences the second. Nevertheless,
his demand for a logical method for weighing evidence about verbal
statements, and a means to secure validity, is a fair one. What it involves
is that the critic turn himself on the work he criticizes, asking himself
questions that will either legitimize his statements about the work, or,
hopefully, correct them; in either case, he makes himself aware of what
he is doing. Works of literature, Hirsch argues, have a meaning that is
neither arbitrary nor changeable, and it is to
his
great credit that he
recognizes the vast difficulties of construing the meaning not only of a
work but of meaning itself. Consequently his book argues painstakingly
(and rather drily) for a very modest "hermeneutic," in which intention
(in Husserl's sense of the word) or meaning, as opposed to significance,
is common to every use of language. Even nonsense has meaning, albeit
nonsensical meaning. In literature, the broadest category of intention is
genre: each literary utterance belongs to a "type" that performs a defin–
able task, so that we can understand
Paradise Lost
because it is an epic
which will always fulfill specific social and historical expectations. Hirsch
proposes little that is more definite than this, for he is prudently ham–
strung by a couple of limitations: 1), "there are no general rules which
are at once general and practical," and 2), there are "no rules for gen–
erating insights." The rest of the time he spends in useful groundwork:
making distinctions between meaning and significance, attacking relativ–
ism,
generalizing about verbal meaning and probability.
Hirsch's most interesting observation is that
in
criticism "to under–
stand is to understand as necessary." I doubt that his modesty will let
