David
J.
Gordon
THE STORY OF A CRITICAL IDEA
A generation ago, some influemial theorists of literature
defended what they called the autonomy of the text. They wanted of
course to say that a work we call art has freed itself from the circum–
stances of its origin and should be judged accordingly. But autonomy
also implied, or came to imply, tha t the meaning of a text ex isted apart
from the minds of individual readers. This idea of meaning is now
widely rejected. We now say that meaning can only be crea ted in the
minds of imerpreters, that we, not texts, are the makers of meaning.
But how do we then escape the morass of relativism?
If
meaning is
created by an interpreter, how can the objectivity of any interpretation ,
the determinacy of any textual meaning, be defended?
That no currem question of literary theory is more troublesome
and divisive is indicated by the intensity with which extreme positions
are advocated and by the difficulty of establishing middl e ground. On
one side are the literary historians who, as if impatiem with the
uncertainties of imerpretation , emphasize the positi ve knowl edge they
gain by connecting a work to its author's life and cultural situation. No
one scorns such inquiry fundamentally, but it is a response to a
noncritical question-how did this work, whose meaning and value I
am taking for granted, come to be? -and the results are bound to be
reductive if pressed into the service of criticism. On the other side are
some dogmatic yet remarkably prestigious rela tivists, progeny of
Heidegger, who assert that an objective or correct imerpretation is an
impossible goal; the meaning of a text is completely indeterminate;
criticism cannot
be
a discipline that accumulates knowl edge, and is
justified only aesthetically.
One explanation for the charm of relativism in our age is tha t, as
children of Kant and his Copernican revolution, we are all more or less
uncertain about the grounds of objective judgment. But, as E. D.
Hirsch poims out in his very able defense of determinacy
(The Aims of
Interpretation),
to proceed from the idea that the knower's mind is
implicated in all knowl edge to the idea that no "obj ective" knowledge
