Explanation and Understanding:

The Hermeneutic Arc

Paul Ricurs Theory of Interpretation

Geir Amdal

Cand. Philol. Thesis May 2001

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO Department of Philosophy

Acknowledgements

This thesis is submitted to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Oslo in partial fulllment of the requirements for the degree of Cantidatus philologiae (cand. philol.). I would rst and foremost like to thank professor Bjrn Ramberg, my supervisor, who through his friendly guidance and support, expert knowledge and willingness to go above and beyond the call of duty to help me improve my thesis, has been a major contributing factor to its completion. Thanks are also due to Annette Nordheim, for her encouragement, proofreading and support. I have chosen to write this thesis in English, primarily as a challenge to myself, and much of the credit for that having been a successful decision is due to Annette. I would also like to thank the Student Association at the Department of Informatics for being allowed to use their ofce to write the thesis at all hours, and to my family and friends for putting up with me through rough days and stress-ridden nights. Finally, I wish to express my indebtedness and gratitude to my parents, Astrid and Guttorm, for having always supported me and for encouraging me to choose for myself which path to follow. They have thus given me the possibility to get where I am today through providing me with a foundation upon which it was possible to build my academic work.

Geir Amdal May, 2001

Contents

Acknowledgements Contents 1 Introduction The Hermeneutic Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Openness of Interpretation . . . . . . . . . Expanding the Hermeneutic Circle . . . . A Philosophy of Integration . . . . . . . . . . . The Methodology of Reciprocal Reinforcement Interpreting Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . Strategic Deliberations . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 The Model of the Text Language-system and Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Semiology and Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DistanciationWhen Discourse Becomes Text . . . . . . Semantic Autonomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Loss of Reference Through Emancipation . . . . . . Method of Interpretation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Structuralist Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phenomenological Understanding Appropriation From Circle To Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Epi-reading and Graphi-reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Room For Objectivity? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Tensional Conception of Metaphor Ricurs Theories of Metaphor . . . . . . . . Metaphor and Semantic Innovation . . Metaphor and Explanation . . . . . . . . . . . Polysemy and Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . Detouring through Language . . . . . . Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Traditional Conception of Metaphor . . . Productive Tension . . . . . . . . . . . . Making Sense: Linguistic Impertinence Metaphor and Discourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Contents Metaphor and Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Split Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Ontology of Metaphor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 The Validity of Interpretations The Hermeneutic Dialectic . . . . . . . . . . . Against the Intentional Fallacy . . . . . Interpretative Construal as Guessing . . . . . Validation of Guesses . . . . . . . . . . . Making SenseThe Function of Explanation Monotative and Multitative Meaning . . Construal as Constriction . . . . . . . . From Sense to Understanding . . . . . . The Role of Literary Criticism . . . . . . . . . 5 Reference and Meaning Reversing the Arc . . . . . . . . . . . Metaphoric Reference . . . . . . . . . Split Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . The World of the Work . . . . . . . . Appropriation . . . . . . . . . . The Disciplines of Meaning . . . . . Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . Redening Subjectivity . . . . . . . . Conguration and Reguration The Twofold Function of the Sign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 42 44 47 49 50 50 51 54 54 57 58 59 63 63 64 66 67 69 70 71 72 73 74 77 78 79 80 83 83 85 88

6 Conclusion Restructuring the Hermeneutic Arc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ramications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Challenge of Ricurs Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Formal Thesis Curriculum Texts by Ricur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Secondary Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography

Chapter

Introduction
The Hermeneutic Arc
Ricurs theory of interpretation seeks a dialectical integration of Diltheys dichotomy of erklren and verstehen, while at the same time clearing ground for an objective methodology of interpretation without displacing the texts authenticitya consolidation of sorts, of the Gadamerian split between distanciation and belonging. He envisions a model of the text freed with respects to its author, yet still able to reach beyond pure textuality and retain its relation to a world. Ricur sets off by distinguishing the fundamentally different interpretive paradigms for text and spoken discourse. The former differs from the latter in being, through the act of inscription, detached from the original circumstances which produced it. The intentions of the author are distant, the addressee is general rather than specic and ostensive references are rendered void.

Openness of Interpretation A key idea in Ricurs view is that once the discourse has become an artefact, and is released from the subjective intentions of the author, multiple acceptable

Introduction interpretations become possible. Thus meaning is no longer construed just according to the author or agents world-view, but according to its signicance in the readers world-view. The text is transformed from a mere meaningcarrying vessel to an autonomous party actively contributing to the result of the interpretative effort.

Expanding the Hermeneutic Circle Ricurs hermeneutic arc combines two distinct hermeneutics: one that moves from existential understanding to explanation and another that moves from explanation to existential understanding. In the rst hermeneutic, subjective guessing is objectively validated. Here, understanding corresponds to a process of hypothesis formation, based on analogy, metaphor and other mechanisms for divination. Hypothesis formation must not only propose senses for terms and readings for texts, but also assign importance to parts and invoke hierarchical classicatory procedures. The wide range of hypothesis formation means that possible interpretations may be reached along many paths. Following Hirsch (cf. Hirsch, 1967), explanation becomes a process of validating informed guesses. Validation proceeds through rational argument and debate, based on a model of judicial procedures in legal reasoning. It is therefore distinguished from verication, which relies on logical proof. As Hirsch notes, this model may lead into a dilemma of self-conrmability when non-validatable hypotheses are proposed. Ricur escapes this dilemma by incorporating Poppers (Popper, 1992) notion of falsiability into his methods for validation, which he applies to the internal coherence of an interpretation and the relative plausibility of competing interpretations. In the second hermeneutic, which moves from explanation to understanding, Ricur distinguishes two stances regarding the referential function of the text: a subjective approach and a structuralist alternative. The subjective approach incrementally constructs the world that lies behind the text but must rely on the world-view of the interpreter for its pre-understanding. Although

A Philosophy of Integration the constructed world-view may gradually approximate the authors as more text is interpreted, the interpreters subjectivity cannot be fully overcome. In contrast, Ricur sees the structuralist approach as suspending reference to the world behind the text and focusing on a behavioral inventory of the interconnections of parts within the text. The structural interpretation brings out both a surface and a depth interpretation. The depth semantics is not determined by what what the author intended to communicate, but by what the text is aboutthe non-ostensive reference of the text. Understanding requires an afnity between the reader and this aboutness of the text, that is, the kind of world opened up by the depth semantics of the text. Instead of imposing any xed interpretation, the depth semantics channels thought in a certain direction. By suspending meaning and focusing on the formal algebra of the genres reected in the text at various levels, the structural method gives rise to objectivity while capturing the subjectivity of both the author and the reader. Ricurs transmutation of the hermeneutic circle to a hermeneutic arc can be seen as a bootstrapping1 process, grounded in a hermeneutic phenomenology. The greatest contribution being the incorporation of an internal referential model of the text constructed by the interpreter through a structural analysisa model exhibiting a sufcient set of objective or intersubjectively comparable criteria and elements to ground a methodology of interpretation.

A Philosophy of Integration
The philosophy of Paul Ricur is known as one of reconciliation. As a thinker, he is always open to new insights. When his ideas are challenged, he does not attempt to defend them from the assault, so as to keep them intact. On the contrary, he usually does his utmost to assimilate the objection in his continued
Bootstrapping is a concept more commonly used in Computer Science, where it refers to a self-initiating process. In this context, however, what is intended is the process of initiating hermeneutic movement between interpreter and text. For there to be grounds for an interplay between a literary work and its readers, it must already be constituted as work. Yet this constitution is something the text cannot bring about on its own, but is itself necessarily a product of an act of interpretation. The hermeneutic movement must in other words bring itself into being, lifting itself by its own bootstraps.
1

Introduction deliberations. This applies not only to contemporary philosophers, but indeed also to the thinkers of the past, whose philosophies continue to represent valuable corrections and contributions to the development of Ricurs own philosophy. Ricur has been called a philosophical arbitrator, as he tends to try to incorporate arguments from both sides in an ongoing philosophical debate. As a result, he often ends up in a mediary position, like he did in the GadamerHabermas debate. This mediating position has earned him the title of bridgebuilder between traditions, yet I shall attempt to demonstrate that such a label can give the false impression that Ricur tries to close a gap across a methodological distance by presenting a common vocabulary or model. Rather, he is an integrating philosopher, focusing on assimilating the competing models to the degree they deserve it. In other words, the distance is not bridged, but abolished, as the models are integrated and assimilated, often through a methodological grafting of the one onto the other, or through the subordination of the one under the other in a dynamic tension, where both models contribute effectively to the other while operating on different levels. His philosophy takes on a synthetic quality, not by being a collage of other philosophies, but rather through unifying them as far as possible, and contributing arguments which are non-exclusive. At the bottom of this endeavour lies, naturally, Ricurs fundamentally hermeneutical point of origin, his search for meaning. A fundamental belief in the possibility of always locating meaning in the expressions of man leads him to never reject an opponents arguments until after having considered them thoroughly and having adopted and integrated into his own analysis those that merited it.

The Methodology of Reciprocal Reinforcement

As Hallvard H. Ystad points out in the afterword of Eksistens og hermeneutikk (Ricur, 1999), topics treated with the thoroughness employed in Ricurs works make great demands to stringency. And despite the terminological

Interpreting Interpretation and conceptual precision and exactness necessary to maintain a logical consequence and methodical rigour, Ystad remarks on the noticeable compactness of his articles. A quality derived, he claims, from a tendency to seek reciprocal aspects in the terms he employs in his different elds of study. Whether or not Ricur actively seeks terms especially to obtain the effects of methodological reinforcement through reciprocal concepts is not as vital as the fact that his philosophy has a remarkable tendency of constantly growing or constructing itself through such structures. This reciprocal methodology has the somewhat problematic consequence that the different parts of his philosophy collaborate in constructing his methodological and philosophical foundation. It is thus no straightforward undertaking to analyze or systematically structure his individual argumentsthey are always a necessary element in a greater whole, dependent on other arguments or models for completion and argumentative strength. In what follows, an effort has therefore been made to prioritize thoroughness of study rather than immediate structure where necessary, so as to make the nal resulting image more complete and accurate.

Interpreting Interpretation
The main goal of this document is to deliver a problem-oriented presentation of the interpretation theory of Paul Ricur, performed as a contextual exploration of the elements and aspects it involves. Furthermore, it is hoped that enough light is shed on the constituent elements and models that the patterns or structures I perceive as both methodologically vital to and reciprocally reinforcing in Ricurs conception of textual interpretation, are able to emerge as reiterations of a single common theme in three different spheres: the semiotic sphere of langue, the semantic sphere of discourse, and the hermeneutic sphere of the literary work. Using the thematic exposition as a backdrop, this will enable a structuring overview, (hopefully) shedding some new light on the interconnected dynamics of Ricurs hermeneutic theory.

Introduction I also wish to determine whether Ricur is successful in making room for an objective methodology or science of literary criticism; not by displacing the Gadamerian notion of the hermeneutic circle, but by further developing the model and integrating elements of structuralist methodology into phenomenological hermeneutics.

Strategic Deliberations
The investigation starts where it must; with the object of interpretation. In chapter 2, while examining Ricurs model of the text, I will necessarily recourse to the structuralist concept of language, in order to develop a model of discourse. In the exploration of the symptoms of textual inscription in the transformation of discourse to text, Ricurs central model of distanciation is presented and subjected to discussion. On the basis of a model of the text, a brief overview of the dialectic of the Hermeneutic Arc is attempted, before we are forced again to backtrack and study the tensional conception of metaphor in chapter 3. Armed with the terminology of Ricurs theory of metaphor, we are prepared to embark on the study of interpretation proper, and chapter 4 is dedicated to the function of explanationthe structural analysis Ricur wishes to graft on phenomenological hermeneutics. The hermeneutical issue of existential understanding is the theme of chapter 5, before I attempt to grasp the structure of the theory rather than its thematic content in chapter 6, as promised.

Chapter

The Model of the Text

To the extent that hermeneutics is text-oriented interpretation, and inasmuch as texts are, among other things, instances of written language, no interpretation theory is possible that does not come to grips with the problem of writing.
(Ricur, 1976, p. 25)

Language-system and Discourse

A modern grasp of the phenomenon of language derives from the distinction, introduced in the works of de Saussure, between langue and parole. The former is the system of signs, rules and virtual meanings that constitutes language, the latter is language as it is actually spoken. A structural approach to language implies the choice for the langue. All questions concerning the meaning of speech as it is bound to a specic subject and situation are bracketed. The focus of attention is the common vocabulary that is used in all concrete performances of language. In order to describe this vocabulary, the structural model of language prefers a synchronic approach of language to a diachronic one. It focuses on the state of the system at a given moment. Systems are more intelligible than changes (Ricur, 1976, p. 6). Within the system the relationships between the distinct

The Model of the Text terms or signs are brought to light. Every sign only has a meaning in so far as it is opposed to other signs. Finallyand this is for Ricur the postulate that summarizes and commands all the others (Ricur, 1974a, pp. 250-1) the structural model isolates the langue as a closed universe of signs. Language constitutes a world of its own without any outside reference, a self-sufcient system of inner relations (Ricur, 1976, p. 6). This last postulatethat of the closure (clture) of the object of analysis constitutes for Ricur both the strength of the structural approach and its weakness. The undeniable strength is that the restriction to a nished, complete object brings out the aspect of organization without which there would be no meaningful language at all. This methodological reduction makes a scientic exploration of objective structures possible. However, such a structural description remains abstract. With the parole all those aspects which according to ordinary experience primarily characterize language are left outi.e. that it is spoken by someone about something to someone. The more linguistics are puried and reduced to a science of language, explains Ricur the more it expels from its eld everything concerning the relationship of language to anything else but itself. In fact the reduction of language to its structural aspects implies a twofold forgetting of structures which are prior to language itself. In the rst place it leaves aside the question of man who expresses himself through language. What can be understood by means of a structural model is an anonymous system of signs and codes. Furthermore, limitation to the clture des signes implies that being is forgotten. The fact that language refers to any nonlinguistic reality is lost from sight. It is these forgotten elements, so intimately connected with the presuppositions of structuralism, that cause Ricurs vigorous opposition to all efforts to found some structuralist philosophy on the postulates of the structural method (cf. Ricur, 1974a, pp. 27-61, especially p. 51). Such philosophiesas they have been advocated by such different thinkers as Lvi-Strauss, Foucault and Lacan, among otherstend to hypostatize the codes, the networks of signs. Language is not seen as a medium by means of which man expresses himself,

Language-system and Discourse gives meaning to his world, and transfers a message. It is, rather, suggested that the anonymous structures of his language govern mans consciousness of the world and of himself. Thus the individual capacity for thinking and being creative tends to be denied in favour of the power of codes. To understand man is to understand the structures that constitute his language, the networks of myths and texts that constitute his culture, the social structures that constitute his society. Structuralist philosophy tends to be an absolute formalism (Ricur, 1974a, p. 52). Therefore, Ricur is eager to disconnect structural method from structuralist ideology. Boundaries should be drawn up within which the structural model retains its value as a scientic instrument with claims to objectivity, but beyond which it falls into error. In regard to language the structural model is valid, since a structure of merely interdependent signs or terms can be isolated. But, ultimately, are not the relations between man and language, language and the world, of more importance that relationships within the language-structure? Is not language primarily the way through which man communicates, expresses emotions, gives meaning to his world? That is why Ricur opposes a second approach to the structural one. The model of the immanence of the langue is complemented by a model of the transcendence of speech: the transcendence of what is designated (or more precisely, what is referred to), and the transcendence of the speaking subjects. In this way, he enters the eld of what may be called a phenomenolgy of language. The presuppositions are those of phenomenology: language expresses the meaning of the world and of being; the subject is the bearer of this meaning. Man is the one who, by means of language, brings meaning to his world. It is essential that the phenomenology of language is complementarynot alternative. The phenomenological-hermeneutic approach in which meaning is the central category, has to be based on a pre-hermeneutical, linguistic one, or be cut off from an essential relation with modern science. Phenomenology must, claims Ricur, be structuralat least in its primary stages. It is through and by means of a linguistics of language that a phenomenology of speech is possible today (Ricur, 1974a, p. 251).

10

The Model of the Text De Saussures idea was that only the langue is a proper object for science: parole must be bracketed so as to demarcate a eld for objective inquiry. Ricur exchanges this distinction for another, that of semiology and semantics (cf. Ricur, 1974a, p. 93), (Ricur, 1994, pp. 66-76) and (Ricur, 1976, pp. 6-8).

Semiology and Semantics

Semiology is the structural-linguistic science which looks at closed sets of signs. The presupposition of semantics is that there is also a scientic approach to discourse, language as it is spoken. Semiology tries to make sense of the differences between the signs in the system, whereas semantics investigates what happens when the words come together in a sentence and thus generate a meaning. The rst articulates the sign at the level of potential systems available for the performance of discourse, the second is cotemporaneous with the accomplishment of the discourse (Ricur, 1974a, p. 252). These semiologic and semantic levels of language cannot be understood properly if not in function of each other. Understanding the anonymous patterns of signs and rules only makes sense in view of their actual functioning in spoken language. Outside the semantic function in which they are actualized, semiological systems lose all intelligibility (Ricur, 1974a, p. 253). Reversely, the meaning of discourse cannot be analysed apart from an understanding of the potential of meaning that is contained by the signs in the system.

Attention is now focused on the moment of transition between the two levels of structure and speech. This moment is that of speaking, orwith an expression that Ricur borrows from Emile Benvnistethe instance of discourse, linstance de discours (cf. Ricur, 1976, 1994) or occurence of discourse (Ricur, 1974a, p. 254). In a series of illuminating oppositions Ricur shows how the potentiality of the system is actualized so that language emerges on a new level, that of a genuine and unique meaning (Ricur, 1974a, pp. 86-88), (Ricur, 1994, pp. 70-75) and (Ricur, 1976, pp. 9-12).

Discourse

11

Discourse
Discourse is the event in which language takes on a temporal aspect. From the point of view of semiotics this is a weakness: the sentences of discourse arise and vanish, but the system remains. However, Ricur advocates the ontological priority of discourse (Ricur, 1976, p. 9). The langue is merely potential and a-temporal; its elements only become actual through discourse. This opposition of system and event has important consequences. Whereas the system is a nite and xed set of phonetic and lexical signs, discourse is in the order of creation and innovation. It offers the possibility of conbining words so that new constellations of meaning emerge. It is an innite use of nite means (von Humboldt, cited in Ricur, 1974b, p. 97), (Ricur, 1994, p. 63). Whereas the system is a matter of constraint and rules, discourse is choice, freedom. The acts, events and choices of discourse imply another, decisive, trait: discourse has a subject (cf. Ricur, 1974a, p. 88). In the anonymous system the question who is speaking? is senseless. Language (langue) has no subject, objects Ricur, while discourse refers back from itself to its own speaker thanks to a complex interplay of indicators such as personal pronouns. Discourse is auto-referential. What is within the system an empty signI becomes a living word within discourse. By saying it the subject appropriates language. I make it my language and I anchor discourse in the here and now of my situation. (cf. Ricur, 1974a, pp. 254-6), (Ricur, 1976, p. 13) and (Ricur, 1994, p. 75). Discourse refers away from itself. It is always about something. It refers to a world which it pretends to describe, to express, to represent (Ricur, quoted in van Leeuwen, 1981). Words turn from the pseudoworld of the system to the actual world. This is what Ricur calls reference in its strict sense: the claim of expressing a view on the world, of afrming something about reality. The triad of transcending movements of discourse is completed by the element of allocution. The I of discourse (self-reference) speaks about the

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The Model of the Text world (reference) to a hearer. The subjectivity of the act of speech is from the beginning the intersubjectivity of allocution (Ricur, 1974a, p. 88).

The terminology of J. L. Austin is useful in grasping this structure. Each illocutionary act (act of discourse by which some wish, command, question etc. is expressed) is an interlocutionary act, to which a reaction (obedience, answer, etc.) is expected. Thus dialogue is the basic form of discourse. Even soliloquysolitary discourseis dialogue with oneself (Ricur, 1976, p. 15). On all these traits the openness of language as discourse is evident. As event, choice, innovation discourse is an open and, in principle, unlimited process of creation of meaning. Its triple reference makes it open towards the speaker, a hearer and the world (I, you, it). On the level of discourse language leaps, as Ricur says, across two thresholds (Ricur, 1974a, p. 84). In the rst place, the words arise from their phantomatic state of being dead signs and attain a living meaning: discourse says something, it has a sense (the threshold of sense). Secondly, it says something about something, it has a reference (the threshold of reference). Herein lies precisely the mystery of language; discourse does not only have an ideal sense, a meaningful content, it also has a real reference. It is capable of representing reality with the help of words. This concept of discourse as the event of meaning, of sense and reference, is the nucleus of Ricurs further investigations. These go in the direction of both a theory of the written text and its interpretation, and a theory of the word: its polysemic, metaphorical and symbolic qualities. Finally, also the core issue to this inquirythe specic problems of interpreting poetic and symbolic texts. The sentence is, as has been said, the characteristic unit of discourse. It is the sentence which has a speaking subject; it is the sentence which has a reference; it is the sentence which is addressed to the other. Inquiry thus goes toward the level of unities larger than the sentence, texts, and to that of unities smaller than the sentence, words. When reading the following paragraphs, dealing with the theories of text and word, it should be kept in mind that interpretation always has to do with the interplay of these distinct levels. The meaning of a word cannot be understood apart from the sentence in which it

DistanciationWhen Discourse Becomes Text is used, as this sentence has to be understood in the context of the text. The text cannot be explained except by envisaging the interplay of its parts and the specic strategies by which words are used in it.

13

DistanciationWhen Discourse Becomes Text

Writing is the full manifestation of discourse.
(Ricur, 1976, pp. 25-6)

Ricur conceives of written language as the rst place or locality for hermeneutics (Ricur, 1995d, p. 44). Hermeneutics nds a starting point in the problems posed by the text. What is a text? What happens when discourse becomes xed by writing? What precisely is it we intend to understand when reading a text? How does interpretation proceed and how are the moments of analysis and appropriation of meaning, explanation and understanding related? Two elements of Ricurs theory of the text will be reviewed. 1. It aims at overcoming the romantic, psychologizing prejudice that dominated hermeneutics since Schleiermacher and Dilthey, and which reduced true understanding to an understanding of the intentions of the author, the life behind the text. For Ricur, to understand is to grasp the world opened up in front of the text. In this respect his hermeneutic is in line with Heidegger, who related understanding to projects (Entwrfe) of In-der-Welt-sein, with Bultmann, who sees hermeneutics as governed by what is at issue in the text itself (its message), and with Gadamer, who relates understanding to the Sache on which the text pronounces. 2. Ricur develops a concept of the text as an autonomous work, which makes it possible to include a critical moment of explanation in the process of interpretation. He thus tries to overcome not only Diltheys romantic hermeneutics that sharply opposed Verstehen as the method of the Geisteswissenschaften to Erklren as the method of natural sciences, but he also aims at correcting the three philosophers just mentioned.

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The Model of the Text Heideggers ontologization of understanding leaves no room for a critical theory concerning interpretation. Bultmanns hermeneutics centers interpretation too exclusively on existential decisions, assigning too little importance to the texts objectivity. Gadamers hermeneutics disregards the textuality of the text by regarding writing only as an alienation that should be overcome in a new act of dialogue. It should be noted that Ricur contends that to understand any discourse (be it spoken or written) is to understand the event of discourse as such. In hearing another person speak, what we try to understand is not the speechevent but the meaningthe issue of his speech. We want to grasp what is said and what it refers to (Gadamers die Sache). The axiom of Ricurs interpretation theory is therefore that if all discourse is actualized as an event, all discourse is understood as meaning (Ricur, 1976, p. 12) and (Ricur, 1994, p. 70). Understanding aims at the content of discourse. The event is surpressed in and surpassed by the meaning. This applies specically to written discourse. It only accomplished a trait which is virtual in all discourse: the distanciation of meaning and event (Ricur, 1975, p. 67). Is it not the intention of writing that the meaning should survive the vanishing event of discourse? What is inscribed is not the event as event, but what is said. That the event is surpassed by a meaning thus applies all the more to the text. From the moment of its inscription it starts, so to speak, a career of its own. It becomes autonomous, leaving behind the moment of its creation. What happens in writing is the full manifestation of something that is in a virtual state, something nascent and inchoate, in living speech, namely the detachment of meaning from the event.
(Ricur, 1976, p. 25)

Semantic Autonomy In his essay What is a Text? Ricur gives a more precise description of

this birth of a text as an autonomous work. The text is not a graphic

DistanciationWhen Discourse Becomes Text reproduction of what was rst pronounced orally. Writing is not secondary to the parole. Instead of describing it as the petrication or suppression of living speech, Ricur presents the text as a direct inscription of what could have been said orally. Writing is as original as the spoken word. In this way Ricur breaks away from a long tradition in which the written word is seen as only a derivative of living speech. A recent example of this view is found in Ingardens study on the literary work of art (Ingarden, 1968, p. 13), which speaks of die reine Sprachlautigkeit that suffers eine gewisse Verunreinigung when xed by writing, although the tradition can be traced back to Plato and Rousseau (cf. Ricur, 1976, pp. 38-40). (It is also one of the main suppositions of the romanic view on literature that speech is languages primary and dening form, whereas writing is secondary and derived.) Writing here becomes a merely physical vehicle and even a deceiving disguise of the living word. Its indispensable function is neglected. Against this Ricur states that writing is not reproduction, and even less reduction, but a direct inscription of [an] intention, even if, historically and psychologically, writing began with the graphic transcription of the signs of speech (Ricur, 1995e, pp. 147). With the help of his concept of textual autonomy, Ricur wants to illuminate the specic claim of truth of the text. The autonomous character of the text is explained by what happens to the referential characteristics of discourse when, instead of being spoken, it is written down in the instance de discours. Language refers to a speaker, a hearer, and the world. What happens to these references in writing?

15

Loss of Reference Through Emancipation In a dialogue understanding the intention of discourse coincides with understanding the intention of its speaker. Several non-linguistic aspects (gestures and facial expressions), facilitate understanding. The speaker can be questioned about his intentions. In written language these direct indications of the writers intentions are absent. There is no longer a direct relation between

16

The Model of the Text the said of the text and the psychology of its author. The reader has to do with what the text expresses and this may transcend the authors view to a considerable degree. Therefore, the author is not the best interpreter of his own works, neither does the queary about original intentions offer the right cue for interpretation. To read a book is to consider its author as already dead (Ricur, 1995e, p. 137). In fact, as Beerling remarks, most texts would not lose their value if they were anonymous. Authorship is accidental, be it essentially accidental: it is essential that someone wrote this text; it is accidental who did so (Beerling, 1972, p. 209). Ricurs view should be distinguished from a structuralist one which denies authorship stating that texts are interwoven in and produced by the network of meanings and texts of a culture. Ricur maintains that the text is a discourse produced by an author. But to envisage its autonomy is to bracket authorship.1 As the text is emancipated from its author, so it is liberated from the restriction of a particular audience (cf. Schleiermachers ursprngliche Leser). Speech is directed to a specic you. A text is addressed potentially to whomever knows how to read (Ricur, 1976, p. 31). Texts offer their meaning to an indenite number of readers and, therefore, of interpretations (ibid.). They become a part of the collective memory of mankind. Their importance is determined not so much by the response of the rst readers, as by the degree to which they are capable of evoking new interpretations. Important texts produce a tradition. An essential part of their meaning lies in what Gadamer calls a Wirkungsgeschichte (Gadamer, 1990, pp. 285ff). To interpret is not to erase this history (in an effort to transport oneself into the position of its rst readers), but to promote it. (Gadamer states the rst two elements of the autonomy of the text in the same way (Gadamer, 1990, pp. 369-70).) So hermeneutics begins where dialogue ends (Ricur, 1976, p. 32). Interpretation is not the repetition of some original encounter of writer and readers, but a new event: a confrontation with what the text says. About what, then, is written discourse?
The question may be raised if biographical data concerning the author are in all cases as irrelevant for the interpretation of texts as Ricur suggests. At least as regards clues for possible constructions in explanation.
1

DistanciationWhen Discourse Becomes Text The question of reference, in the strict sense, leads to the heart of Ricurs theory. All discourse refers to something. But again written discourse differs widely from oral discourse. The latter is performed within a situation common to the members of the dialogue. Its references are toward a reality that is present to speaker and hearer and they rely on the possibility of pointing to this commonly perceived reality. The text does not refer to a situation that is present here and now to both reader and writer (Ricur, 1995e, pp. 138-9).2 In this regard the text is worldless. But precisely this abolition of a direct reference to the given world frees the text to project a world of its own. As the meaning of the text is beyond the authors intention and beyond what the reader of any specic time grasps, so its reference is beyond what the ordinary world offers. The text brings about a distantiation of the real from itself (Ricur, 1995a, p. 142). In reading it, man is invited to explore dimensions of reality beyond the limitations of his situation. So interpretation should not seeek for intentions behind the text but explain the sort of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of it. The text opens up a horizon. It should be stressed how crucial the role thus assigned by Ricur is to writing. It is thanks to writing that man and only man has a world and not just a situation (Ricur, 1976, p. 36). In Ricurs concept speech remains anchored in the narrow spatio-temporal network determined by what in Fallible Man was called mans perspectivity. That discourse also has the more existential function of exploring the truth of being and the possibilities of existence, is pre-eminently revealed in that type of discourse which steps aside from the perspectivities of this performer, this audience, and from the narrowness of this situation. It is precisely this remoteness which constitutes a text . By reading texts man escapes from his situatedness in the here and now. The Umwelt of what is available and visible expands into a Welt formed by values, expectations and imaginations. So Ricur comes to call world
Ricur seems to use a rather narrow notion of situation here. Is it true that in a dialogue the participants have one situation? Can situation be dened only referring to the external world? Are the members of a dialogue not often speaking from different situations, cultural backgrounds, interests etc.? In relation to this the question arises whether or not certain texts are determined by a specic cultural situation to such an extent that the work of interpretation cannot abstain completely from projecting this world behind the text.
2

17

18

The Model of the Text the ensemble of references opened by all texts that I have read, understood and loved (Ricur, 1976, p. 37). To have a world is to live within a horizon constituted by the signs, works, texts of mankind. Obviously, in this concept of world Ricurs hermeneutics remains true to major themes of phenomenology. The idea of the world as the horizon of life indissoluble from human signications, is a variation on the Husserlian theme of the Lebenswelt. The denition of understanding as grasping possibilities of being-in-the-world comes close to Heidegger. Did not Sein und Zeit reveal that the most fundamental function of Verstehen, far from being the comprehension of other persons, is the understanding of ones relation to the world? Dasein is an In-der-Welt-sein, and man always lives out of a primordial understanding of this In-der-Welt-sein, an understanding which he tries to elucidate through interpretation (Heidegger, 1993, 31).3 When Ricur states that the world of the text is the offer made by the text to the reader of new possibilities of beingin-the-world, he joins up with this Heideggerian theme. On the other hand, it is crucial for Ricur that he relates this idea of the world to the concept of the text. This enables him to introduce a critical, methodical moment into the work of interpretation, a moment that is missing in Heidegger and his followers Bultmann and Gadamer. When Heidegger conceives of das Dasein als Verstehen (Heidegger, 1993, 31-32), i.e. as the mode of being that exists through understanding being, he introduces a reversal of the hermeneutical problematic. From being epistemological, understanding becomes an ontological category. Every act of explanation of the world (Auslegung) is preceded by pre-understanding (Vorverstndnis) of our being-in-the-world. But how can interpretation account for such an awareness that always precedes? How can it criticize, modify or renew it? [H]ow can a question of critique in general be accounted for within the framework of a fundamental hermeneutics?4 (Ricur, 1995d, p. 59)
Ricur points to the parallels with Husserl and Heidegger in The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation, p. 140 (see also Ricur, 1976, p. 37). 4 [W]ith Heidegger [...] any return from ontology to the eistemological question about the status of the human sciences is impossible. Existence and Hermeneutics (in Ricur, 1974a) contains Ricurs fundamental criticism of the short route along which Heidegger related understanding and being (Ricur, 1974a, pp. 6-8).
3

Method of Interpretation Bultmann elaborated Heideggers idea of Vorverstndnis in a model for reading biblical texts from existential presuppositions. The statement of the text is interpreted in terms of self-understanding. Again a critical moment seems to be missing. Is the world which the text opens only centered on my subjectivity, my personal authenticity? Does not the text interrupt my prejudiced reading and open up broader dimensions than these personal ones? (Preface to Bultmann in Ricur, 1974a, esp. 394ff) Vorverstndnis, prejudice, circularity of understanding are, again, themes in Gadamer. The basis of understanding is a Zugehrigkeit to traditions

19

(Gadamer, 1990, pp. 279ff, 434ff): all understanding is determined by the historicity of man which, in turn, is determined by traditions. The texts which we try to comprehend are part of these same traditions. In fact, the tradition is effectuated by the text through its Wirkungsgeschichte. So man already

belongs to the text which he wants to understand. There is, in Gadamers view, nothing scandalous about this. On the contrary, this belonging makes it possible to overcome the alienating gap between us and the text. Man can start his search for what lies behind the text from a certain expectation concerning the answer which the text may give to him. Again Ricur questions whether a methodical moment can be introduced into the work of interpretation which breaks through the circularity of understanding and Zugehrigkeit. Can we reach a distance from the texts of our tradition so that it is more probable that our prejudices may be corrected, our questions exceeded? (Ricur, 1995d, pp. 60ff) Ricur seeks to overcome the aporias of these one-sided ontological or existential conceptions by re-formulating interpretation as a dialectic of the two attitudes which Dilthey so strictly opposed: explanation and understanding. The interplay of both can be demonstrated most clearly on the autonomous text.

Method of Interpretation
The autonomy of the text and its world are key concepts in Ricurs theory. Autonomy implies that a text should not be understood from anything

20

The Model of the Text lying behind it, reconstructed psychologically (i.e. the authors intention) or sociologically (e.g. the original context of reception), but from what itself expresses. The idea that texts can not be understood from what their words say but must be interpreted from something behind them is, as Japp says, based on a mistrust of literature itself (Japp, 1977, p. 94). Thus the conception of the text as an authorless and worldless entity invites a rst reading which approaches it as a system existing in itself, that can be explained. On the other hand, its autonomy gives the text a

capacity of projecting a world of its own. In a second reading, the reader is invited to follow the reference towards a project of being-in-the-world and to understand this project as a possibility for him. One of Ricurs contributions to hermeneutics is that it is the same function of autonomization which closes the text as an object that can be explained and which opens it towards a specic world that calls for hermeneutic understanding (cf. Ricur, 1975, p. 73). These two characteristicsthe texts occlusion and ouvertureremind one of the functions which Heidegger in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes attributes to a work of art: das Verschliessen on the one hand and das Welt-Erffnen, die Aufstellung einer Welt on the other (cf. Heidegger, 1994)(Holzwege). However, Heideggers analysis does not use the idea of das Dinghafte, das Insichstehen of the work as a starting point for introducing a method of explanation. This is precisely what Ricur wants to do.

Structuralist Analysis
The suppression of the direct relation of the text to an author, a world, a time of creation, makes it possible to analyse it as a closed universe of words and functions, in the same way in which the langue is analysed as a closed universe of signs. Indeed, the text is discourse and with regard to the langue it has a position which is analogous to that of speech. That is to say, it cannot be conceived as only a structural composition like the language system. On the other hand, it is something essentially different from spoken discourse. The text is the type of discourse which can be analysed in a similar way as the

Structuralist Analysis langue. It can be taken as a self-sufcient system of oppositions, combinations, codes. The unities of higher order than the sentence, are organized in a way similar to that of the small unities of language, that is, the unities of an order lower than the sentence, those precisely which belong to the domain of linguistics (Ricur, 1995e, pp. 140,142) (Ricur, 1975, p. 52) (Ricur, 1976, pp. 82-3). It is beyond the scope of the current chapter to present in any detail the models of structural analysis Ricur proposes to ll this function. In fact, he does not attempt to develop any new model. What he is attempting is to prove that texts can be explained with the help of models which are borrowed from a science, linguistics belonging to the [...] eld of human sciences (Ricur, 1995e, p. 144) and that, therefore, explanation is not, as Dilthey thought, an effort which is alien to the specic object of these sciences. Explanation and understanding can dispute with each other on the same ground (Ricur, 1995e, p. 44). Within one process of interpretation explanation of structures may be connected to hermeneutical understanding. The former can correct or adjust the historicizing, psychologizing, and existential prejudices which often characterize the latter. Considering the present state of linguistic science, Ricur seems to nd it superuous to give further proof of the fact that structural analysis can be extended to the level of texts. Evidence for this lies, he claims, especially in Lvi-Strauss, Propp, Barths and Greimas. Lvi-Strauss applies the structural model to myths. He describes the different paquets de relations between the units which constitute the myth, ordering these paquets in categories such as kinship, economics, etc. A matrix of contradictions, oppositions

21

and relations is thus produced which brings to light the underlying codes of the myth and their inner logic. Propp analysed the structure of folk-tales with the help of an index of 31 narrative functions (absence, prehibitions, violation etc.) and 7 elementary roles (villain, helper, hero etc.). The plot of the narrative is explained from the sequences of functions, the interaction of roles. Barths developed this model further by classifying the units of the narration at three levels, those of functions (meeting, promising, eceiving

22

The Model of the Text etc), actions (connected to their actors), and of narration itself (considered as an act of communication). From Greimas Ricur takes the important notion of the depth-structure which analysis brings to light. There is not

only a level of actions and of thematic roles or functions (the narrations surfacestructure); from beneath the dramatic, narrative surface, an a-chronic, anonymous structure can be unearthed which is at work in the depth of the text. What is mainly of interest here is Ricurs proposal to incorporate this sort of structural explanation in the hermeneutic endeavour. Through it, he hopes to be able to produce an objectivity he nds missing in traditional hermeneutics. This objectivity is vital if one seeks to make the message of the text reachable from without the hermeneutic circle conning it to the existential needs of the reader or his prejudiced questionsan objectivity necessary for literary criticism to be justiable at all. When Ricur speaks of the text as a work (Ricur, 1995a, p. 136-40), this implies, on the one hand, that it can be taken as a nite object; it is dinghaft and can be explained with the help of objective procedures. On the other hand, it is precisely in this way that a process of meaning that is at work in the text may come to light. The text works, it produces certain meanings. Its codes are the vehicles of a certain message.5 To say this is to suggest that the structural reading which holds to the purely immanent character of the text should be transcended by a second reading which tries to understand its message. Fiercely opposed to the fallacy of the absolute text6 , according to which it has no outward relation at all, and to the structuralist ideology (Ricur, 1995e, pp. 148,150), which takes texts only as syntactic arrangements of
5 Ricur emphasizes this point in discussions on Lvi-Strauss structuralism. When LviStrauss holds that myths are logical models which suggest certain solutions for the contradictions of life, this implies that they have a meaningful intention. They give conjectures concerning elementary enigmas. Structural analysis postpones the question of meaning by focusing on the inner logic of myth, but it cannot eliminate it. Such an elimination would be the reduction of the theory of myth to a necrology of the meaningless discourses of mankind (Ricur, 1995e, p. 147). 6 Barths writes: A narrative does not show anything, it does not imitate (. . . ) what happens in narratives is from the referential standpoint actually NOTHING. What happens is language alone, the adventure of language (cited in Ricur, 1975, p. 51). Cf. (Ricur, 1976, p. 30), where Ricur contrarily comments: Discourse cannot fail to be about something. (. . . ) I am denying the ideology of absolute texts.

Structuralist Analysis opposed terms, Ricur returns to his presupposition: the text is discourse. Its autonomy cannot abolish the dimension of discourse (Ricur, 1975, p. 67). That is to say, it is impossible to cancel out the fact that the text is made by someone and intended to convey a message about something to someone. This message calls for understanding by the one who, here and now, reads the text.

23

Phenomenological Understanding Appropriation The ultimate aim of hermeneutics remains the understanding of what the text means to me. One has to make ones own what was previsously foreign (Ricur, 1976, p. 91). Thus Ricur eventually takes up a hermeneutical concept which has been stamped by the romantic tradition: appropriation, Aneignung (Ricur, 1976, pp. 91-4). However, this concept is understood in a new way. What I make my own is not something that lies behind the text, but the world toward which it opens up. In the act of understanding the horizon of the text and the horizon of my self-understanding merge into each otherGadamers Horizontverschmelzung. This appropriation is not just a taking hold of the text by the reader. The text and its project of a world take hold of the reader as well. The apropriation is a dsappropriation of the reader: he is distanciated from himself. Appropriation [. . . ] implies a moment of dispossession from the egoistic and narcissistic ego (Ricur, 1976, pp. 94). The text breaks through the categories of mans self-understanding and his understanding of the world. In this way the world of the reader and his self-understanding may be enlarged.

From Circle To Arc Thus interpretation proceeds in the model of a hermeneutic arc, instead of being contained within a hermeneutic circle. One pillar of this arc is the discourse of the text, its act of projecting a world; this act of the text can be elucidated by explanation. The other pillar is that of the act of understanding, the aim of interpretation proper.

24

The Model of the Text In short, through texts the reader understands himself within a world of immanence and hope, of matters of fact and new possibilities, of good and evil, and texts may offer him ever new perspectives of possible ways of beingin-the-world.

Epi-reading and Graphi-reading

Attempting to account for the ethical function of literature and literary criticism, Robert Eaglestone revitalises Denis Donoghues distinction between epi-reading and graphi-reading, reecting the intrinsic or extrinsic study of literature. Epi-reading is predicated on the desire to hear (. . . ) the absent person (Eaglestone, 1997, p. 3). The epi-reader moves swiftly from print and language to speech and voice and the present person (ibid.). Under this paradigm, reading functions as a translation from words to acts. Epi-reading transposes the written words on the page into a somehow corresponding situation of persons, voices, characters, conicts, conciliations (ibid.). Language is rendered transparent, a window through which the world of actors, actions and events is seen, and the function of literature is reduced to that of a viewport into a world behind it. Graphi-reading has the opposite orientation, prioritizing language, text and reading over a nostalgia for the human and seeks to engage with texts in their virtuality (Eaglestone, 1997, p. 4). The graphi-reader reads the words and refuses to pass beyond, or create a world behind, them. All deconstructive criticism is graphi-reading, claim Eaglestone and Donoghue, and go on to place Derrida, de Man, Barthes and Mallarm among those who experience the eclipse of voice by text. Their placing of Ricur as an epi-reader seems based on his insistence upon the primacy of textual referenceits aboutness. Portraying him as having a view of texts as a window through which a world is made accessible, however, is clearly mistaken. Even though Donoghue does not develop the distinction on the basis of any strict denitions, but rather on the basis of heuristic analyses, is seems

A Room For Objectivity? possible that the attribution both he and Eaglestone make is incorrect. It is quite possible, in fact, that Ricurs theory intergrates both models of reading, and provides a synthesis of both of them.

25

A Room For Objectivity?

A set of questions arise. In the rst place: is this true of all kinds of texts or is Ricur aiming at a specic type of texts? Certainly the latter is the case. His thesis that the text is a disclosure of a world is not as equally valid for various kinds of trivial texts7 as it is for what may be called the great texts of the past. A natural science text does not open up new dimensions of the world in the same way as poetic discourse does either. It is in this last type of discourse that Ricurs interest lies, taking poetic in a broad sense, as applying to all those types of literary discourse which in their referential function differ from the descriptive function of ordinary, everyday language and in particular scientic discourse. Secondly: As becomes clear through the model of Ricurs theory of interpretation as a hermeneutic arc, the object of interpretationthe text itself has a parallel role to that of the langue in Ricurs theory of language. It represents a potential for understanding, a repository of meaning, which can be actualized, unlocked, through a structuring act of explanation. Ricur sharpens this image further. The same processes are in effect in overcoming the polysemic nature of language in communication as in the act of making sense of a text (the function of the structural explanation). To what extent does this guarantee a space for objective criteria and methods in textual interpretation, and thus for the eld of literary criticism as a whole? A nal question: it has been said above that the theory of the text only represents a starting point for Ricurs hermeneutics. It is in connection with the problem of the text that more general questions about the function of language can be brought to light. What is it that gives discourse this capacity
Though these can be argued as opening up visions of the world as well, albeit rather supercial, conventional ones.
7

26

The Model of the Text of creation, of opening new dimensions of meaning? How can the creative function of language be understood? These questions lead to the need to envisage another level of discourse, not of texts but of the words and their capacity of evoking different meanings and creating new meaning. In going into Ricurs theory of the metaphorical function of language we will have to go back to a point that was reached before we entered into the theory of the text, namely where the signs of the language system come to life in actual discourse.

Chapter

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor

Having removed any privileged venues of interpretation of texts through the distancing effects of inscription, and shown that no text, language or discourse is reducable to any closed linguistic system, Ricur needs both a methodology and a theoretical bridgehead to bootstrap his hermeneutic arc into existence. In the essay Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics, Ricur (1995c) claims to link up the problems raised in hermeneutics by the interpretation of texts and the problems raised in rhetoric, semantics, stylisticsor whatever the discipline concerned may beby metaphor. Finding a common ground for the theory of the text and the theory of metaphor in the dynamics of discourse, he seeks to nd the key to unlocking the problematic of interpretation of autonomic texts in semantic innovation, a term deeply entwined in his theory of metaphor. Due to textual distanciation and autonomy, the referential potential of the text is realized in a way parallel to the function of the metaphor. Thus to be able to account for meaning in discourse from the perspective of epistemology and not linguistics or philosophy of language, it is natural to choose the relation between text and metaphor as a starting point. At this point, however, the

28

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor problematic of metaphoric truth is supplanted in favour of a study of the function of metaphor and everyday language. Ricur presents metaphor as the touchstone of the cognitive value of literary works in Interpretation Theory (Ricur, 1976, p. 45): If we can incorporate the surplus of meaning of metaphors into the domain of semantics, he muses, then we will be able to give the theory of verbal signication its greatest possible extension. In The Symbolism of Evil (Ricur, 1967) and Freud and Philosophy (Ricur, 1970), he directly denes hermeneutics through the symbol, an object he found both as broad and as precise as possible. He denes the symbol in turn through its semantic structure of having a double meaning. In later works, Interpretation Theory in particular, he distances himself from his earlier path, choosing instead a less direct route that takes linguistics into account. If the theory of metaphor can serve as a preparatory analysis leading up to the theory of the symbol, however, the theory of the symbol will in return allow an expansion of the theory of signication by including non-verbal doublemeaning as well as metaphoric or poetic content. Our working hypothesis thus invites us to proceed from metaphor to text at the level of sense and the explanation of sense, then from text to metaphor at the level of the reference of a work to a world and to a self, that is, at the level of interpretation proper.
(Ricur, 1995c, p. 171)

Ricurs Theories of Metaphor

Ricurs semantics of discourse reserves a privileged place for metaphors and symbols, whose complex structures shed light on the richness and creativity of language. According to the traditional view, metaphor is regarded as a type of trope, that is, as a rhetorical device whereby a gurative word is substituted for a literal one on the basis of an apparent resemblance. However, Ricur maintains that this account is incapable of explaining the process by which a novel metaphor is produced; and he claims that this difculty can be overcome only if one accepts the view that the primary metaphorical unit is not the word but the sentence. Metaphor presupposes the establishment

Ricurs Theories of Metaphor of a tension between two terms in the sentence through a violation of the linguistic code. The metaphorical utterance then appears as a reduction of this tension by means of a creative semantic innovation or reconguration, within the sentence as a whole. In thereby resolving a paradigmatic tension by means of a syntagmatic innovation, the metaphorical process situates itself at the point of articulation between system and discourse. As Ricur explains, metaphorical meaning is an effect of the entire statement, but it is focused on one word, which can be called the metaphorical word. This is why one must say that metaphor is a semantic innovation that belongs at once to the predicative order (new pertinence) and the lexical order (paradigmatic deviation).
(Ricur, 1994, pp. 156-7)

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Metaphor and Semantic Innovation In situating itself at this point of articulation, the metaphorical process draws upon the phenomenon of regulated polysemy. However, the former cannot be reduced to the latter, for metaphor is the very process by which the polysemy of words is expanded and transformed. This transformative capacity is attributable to the referential dimension of the metaphorical statement, that is, to its power to redescribe reality. In the last analysis, the function of metaphor is to shatter and increase our sense of reality by shattering and increasing our language. Ricur wishes to distance his own theory from the substitution theory of metaphor, which claims that the metaphor is a condensation of meaning which is paraphraseable without necessarily using more words and sentences. In drafting his position on metaphor, Ricur savagely criticises the other theoreticians of metaphor. In their treatment of metaphor, he claims, they do not make room for any dynamic of metaphor. Through an indifferent use of dead metaphors in their expositions, they fail at the outset of their attempts to account for the unique characteristics of metaphor. Ricur writes: These aspects are features of the explanatory process which could not appear so long as trivial examples of metaphor were con-

30

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor sidered, such as man is a wolf, a fox, a lion (...) With these examples, we elude the major difculty, that of identifying a meaning which is new.
(Ricur, 1995c, pp. 171-2)

According to Ricurs theory of metaphor, it represents an abuse of language. It is an anomalyan unatoned incompatibility in the expressionand does not come into its right qua metaphor until the interpreter from this inconsistent proposition of a literal reading draws a meaningful utterance in a reinterpretation through a displacement of the linguistic norm, granting the metaphor new semantic explanation in the moment of interpretation. The central point being that the attribute of the metaphor which makes it unique is that it is new, emergent, and obtained from nowhere. At least not from language itself. To say that a metaphor is not drawn from anywhere is to recognise it for what it is: namely, a momentary creation of language, a semantic innovation which does not yet have a status in the language as something already established, whether as a designation or as a connotation.
(Ricur, 1995c, p. 174)

Metaphor and Explanation

The explanatory function for metaphors consists not in a substitution of the metaphorical expression, but in a construction. The decisive moment of

explanation arises when the interpreter has constructed a web of connections in and through the context constituting it as actual and unique. The semantic event takes place in the crossing between the semantic elds the interpreter has drawn upon in his structural efforts. Through this construction, being the means through which the words together make sense, the metaphorical twist becomes an event and at the same time a meaninga meaningful event and emergent meaning in language. This constructive element is the fundamental feature of explanation which makes metaphor paradigmatic for the explanation of a literary work. We con-

Polysemy and Metaphor struct the meaning of a text in a way similar to the one that grants meaning to the terms of a metaphorical expression through creating a network of possibilities based on guesswork and assumptions, until a revealing breakthrough allows the different pieces, which in the meantime have seemed incompatible, to fall into place. The presupposition of construction in understanding textual meaning derives mainly from the written form. In the asymmetrical relationship between text and interpreter, one of the parties has to speak for them both. Thus construction is necessary to bring the text to languagelend it a voice. The text represents an autonomous space of meaning which is no longer kept alive through the authorial intention, and, bereft of this necessary support, the text in its autonomy delivers itself mute to the readers lonely interpretation.

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Polysemy and Metaphor

This connection between metaphor and discourse requires a special justication, precisely because the denition of metaphor as a transposition affecting names or words seems to place it in a category of entities smaller than the sentence. But the semantics of the word demonstrates very clearly that words acquire an actual meaning only in a sentence and that lexical entitiesthe words of the dictionaryhave merely potential meanings in virtue of their potential uses in typical contexts. In this respect, the theory of polysemy is a good preparation for the theory of metaphor.
(Ricur, 1995b, p. 169)

In studying the metaphor, we are led to the need to envisage another level of discourse; not of texts, but of words, and their capacity of evoking different meanings and especially creating new meaning. In further pursuing Ricurs theory of the metaphorical function of language we will have to backtrack to a point reached before the entry into the theory of the textwhere the signs of the language system come to life in actual discourse.

32 Detouring through Language

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor

The title of one of Ricurs essays gives a concise resum of its contents: Structure, Word, Event (Ricur, 1974b). The essay points to the word as

the place in language where the exchange between structure and event is constantly produced. The word is at the intersection of language and

speech, of synchrony and diachrony, of system and process. Ricur is clearly inspired by Benvnistes linguistic that attributes to the word an intermediary functional position that arises from a duplicity in its nature. Within the language1 there are only empty signs,2 but within the sentence these become real words. Words are signs in speech position (Ricur, 1974b, p. 92). Ricur places the word as the point of articulation between semiology and semantics, in every speech event. This means that the word is at the same time much less and much more than the sentence. It is less because of the fact that only in the sentence does the word comes to life. From another point of view the word is more than the sentence. The latter is a transitory event, but the word is a part of the lasting order of language. The word survives the sentenceit returns to the system after it has been used (Ricur, 1974b, pp. 92-3). This fact is of eminent importance. One of the characteristics of the instance of discourse (Ricur, 1974b, p. 92) is clearly that it is an order of innovation. Even the simplest sentence is new in sofar as it brings words together in a new order and is spoken in a unique situation by this speaker to this listener. As a consequence, every speech act adds to the word, so that it returns from discourse to system heavy with a new use-valueas minute as this may be (Ricur, 1974b, pp. 92-93). Thus signs have an accumulative intention. Returning to the system, these instanciations of the words give language a history. Whenever they are used, words aquire new meanings or nuances of meaning without losing their old ones. This tendency towards expansion is the orilangue In the structural system of language Ricur adopts and modies, symbols and tokens are only dened internally through difference in value. The chain of denition recurs indenately within language, but need never in the original structuralist conception break outside of language to nd meaning.
2 1

Polysemy and Metaphor gin of one of the most crucial phenomena of language: polysemy.3 It is from polysemy that such central problems arise as metaphor and symbol on the one hand, and ambiguity and misunderstanding on the other. All our words are polysemic. Their accumulative character means that they receive a differentiated meaning from previous use and are still made capable of acquiring more meaning from future use. Thus a dimension of history is brought into the synchrony of the system. It is primarily within the system that words have more than one possible meaning, but they have acquired this potential in speech, and there they will gather more meaning. To understand language is therefore to understand it under two aspects, as structure and process, system and innovation. This dual character prevents it from becoming pathological. On the one hand, the process of innovation and the polysemy that results from it safeguard the system. Without polysemy the need to express every possible nuance would require an innite number of signs. A language witout polysemy would violate the principle of economy (Ricur, 1994, p. 115). On the other hand it is the system which guards the word from becoming overloaded. Without the disciplining function of the system the process of accumulation of meaning would cause a surcharge of meaning, rendering the words meaningless. Certain words, because they signify too many things, cease to signify anything (Ricur, 1974b, p. 69). The system has a regulative function. It xes a certain core meaning by preserving the distinctions between the signs. Words have a certain literal meaning, a specic value within the system which advocates a way of using them. The word itself is consequently a tensive entity. It is governed by a

33

system that wants to restrict it to a limited range of possible meanings, and it is involved in a process of innovation and transgression of its possibilities. Based on this understanding of the universal character of words Ricur tries to comprehend the more specic phenomenons, metaphor and symbol. Both are cases of polysemy. An attempt to understand them from the criteria of the normal functioning of words prevents an over-hasty rejection of them as
The capacity of a word (or other discursive token) to have more than one meaning. Selfevident as it might seem in retrospect, this insight has profound implications.
3

34

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor abnormalities of speech. The metaphorical process is the most purely linguistic of the two and has to be considered rst. Within the system signs have multiple possible meanings. In discourse a part of this potential is realized. Here analogous dimensions of wordmeanings reinforce each other, and other meanings are repressed. The context of the sentence and the context of speech exclude them. The word receives from the context the determination that reduces its imprecision (Ricur, 1994, p. 130).4 This process of sifting out unwanted meanings is normally sufcient to make communication possible. Most of the inappropriate meanings of words in a given context do not even cross our mind. But the rest of the semantic possibilities are not canceled; they oat around the words as not completely eliminated possibilities (Ricur, 1974b, p. 71). Ordinary speech does not completely suppress ambiguity.

Consequences Ricur sketches two possible reactions to this situation. It gives rise to the striving for a completely unambiguous language. This is the ideal of all technical languages. In each sentence all the possible meanings of its words should be erased minus one. The poetic strategy is exactly the opposite to this. The equivocity of discourse is not considered as blameworthy confusion, but rather as a possibility of surcrot de sens, a surplus of meaning. Ambiguity is not combated but utilized. Of this creative use of polysemy (Ricur, 1974b, p. 105), the metaphor is the most important example. What is a metaphor? In short, there are sentences in which the clash between the normal meanings of the words is so vigorous that these sentences remain absurd as long as one holds to the accepted meaning of their words. The only way of rescueing such a sentence is to retain all the acceptations allowed plus one (Ricur, 1994, p. 131).5 The old connotations of the
4 It is precisely this reduction in polysemy that is the function and aim of hermeneutic explanation in Ricurs theory. 5 In the case of metaphor, none of the alread codied acceptations is suitable; it is necessary, therefore, to retain all the acceptations allowed plus one.

The Traditional Conception of Metaphor words should be retained but from the tension between them originates a novel dimension of meaning. Thus a hitherto unknown relation of meaning and a new dimension of truth are discovered. Two points in this characterization require more attention: First of all, metaphor is not a specic to the word but to the sentence; secondly, Ricurs theory of metaphor insists that the metaphor opens up new dimensions of truth. In the rst of the eight studies that make up The Rule of Metaphor (Ricur, 1994), Ricur sketches two lines of thought that are to be found in the works of Aristotle. Firstly, Aristotles choice of the word as the locus of metaphor is the seed of the rhetorical tradition Ricur opposes, that regards metaphor as a mere ornament of language. On the other hand, Aristotle developed a theory of poetics as a way of redescribing the reality of man by means of mythical mimesis, and gave a place to metaphor in this mythic-poetical discourse. It is from this model of poetic function the new concept of metaphorical truth germinates. The Rule of Metaphor may be read as, in the rst place, an effort to overcome the word-focused conception of metaphor in the rhetorical tradition, and, secondly, as an elaboration of the aristotelian idea of a poetic redescription of reality. In the terms of the two points formulated above, the linguistic part of Aristotles theory which tied metaphor to the word is rejected, whereas the idea of a poetical reference to new dimensions of truth is expanded. The rst decisive step in Ricurs theory moves from the rhetorical tradition to an understanding of metaphor within a semantics of discourse. It is the step from a substitution theory of metaphor to an interaction theory or theory of tension.

35

The Traditional Conception of Metaphor

Inspired by Aristotle a long rhetorical tradition focused on the word as the place where metaphor occurs. According to Aristotles denition, metaphor is the transposition of one world for another (epiphora). Thing A is referred to

36

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor with the unexpected word B instead of with its proper name A. As everything has its proper name (A is called A1 ), and every word has its literal meaning (A1 belongs to A, B 1 to B), the word B 1 is used improperlyguratively. The metaphor is thus primarily a case of denomination, of substituting a guratively used word for a literally used one. The raison of this substitution is resemblance: there is something in B 1 that has afnity to something in A. In fact, instead of B 1 the proper name for this something might as well have been used. As a consequence the rhetorical theory holds that a metaphor is understood as soon as man has found the proper term for which an improper term has been substituted. The metaphor can be translated, for the proper name can be restored.6 J.J.A. Mooij expands on this theme: According to the substitution view [...] it is always possible to devise an expression which would be literal and equivalent to the metaphorical expression when put in its place (Mooij, 1976, p. 87). In fact metaphor, thus conceived, only functions as an embellishment. It has to decorate discourse, to make it more vivid, expressive or persuasive. In the rhetorical view, metaphor does not provide any new or special information. It only says what it says in a special way. This denial of any revelatory power is the weakest point of this view. According to Ricur the basic mistake is that the meaning of a word is dened as a lexicographical fact, as if a word only has one literal meaning and becomes a metaphor when used in another way. In reality meaning is, as has been said before, a fact of discourse, of language in action.7 Metaphorical meaning is not an accident in denomination (Ricur, 1976, p. 49), but should be understood as a result of the interanimation of words in the living utterance (Ricur, 1994, p. 79).

Productive Tension Study three of The Rule of Metaphor: Metaphor and the semantics of discourse, develops this central thesis. Ricur here links up with I.A. Richards, Max Black
6 7

[S]ubstitution plus restitution equals zero (Ricur, 1976, p. 49). Cf. Wittgensteins assertion in PU, 43: [T]he meaning of a word is its use in the language.

The Traditional Conception of Metaphor and Monroe Beardsley. In their view, metaphor originates from the interaction of the different semantic elds to which words of the sentence belong. In one utterance two thoughts of different things are, as Richards says, active together, and the meaning of the utterance is the resultant of their interaction. This means that the metaphor holds together within one simple meaning two different missing parts of different contexts of meaning. Richards called these parts of the metaphor the tenor (its specic theme or underlying idea) and the vehicle (the image used to carry this tenor). Both suggest a context of associations of their own. The tension of these contexts engenders the metaphor. This prevents one from talking about tenor apart from the gure, and from treating the vehicle as an added ornament. Metaphor results from the clash of two incompatible lines of thought. When Ricur thus takes his starting-point in a semantics of discourse, a question arises. Is he correct in stating that metaphors stem from a tension within a sentence? This is apparently true in, for instance, Blacks example the chairman plowed through the discussion. The context suggested by chairman and discussion clashes with that suggested by plowing. The general idea of the sentence (the tenor) is to say something about the way in which a person leads a meeting; this is expressed by means of a word from another category, to plow (the vehicle). In Blacks terms the tension is one between the frame of the sentence (which speaks about leadership) and the focus (plowing, which expresses the character of this lead; it is on this word that the metaphorical process focuses). There is a tension here between semantic elds. But are there not sentences in which there is no apparent tension and which are nevertheless metaphorical? In the shepherd watches over his ock there is no conict between the common meanings of the words. But it is easy to imagine a context in which there is no question of a real shepherd or ock. Is it not right to call the sentence metaphorical in such an instanciation? Are there not sentences in which the metaphorical process does not focus on the tension between one word and the rest, but in which all the suitable descriptive words are metaphorical (Mooij, 1976, p. 24)? It does not seem right to understand metaphor only from the opposition of words within a sentence.

37

38

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor Is this to say that we should understand metaphor after all primarily as a case of denomination, of substitution of improper names for the proper ones? Could we not rather say with van Es: a metaphor is a case of nominating [...]. A metaphor is not necessarily an unusual combination of words, but an unusual use of a word (van Leeuwen, 1981, p. 97, fn. 91). However, Ricur seems to be right in taking the tension of tenor and vehicle within a sentence as the paradigm of the metaphorical process. In a later stage this functioning of tension will be recognized in units of speech larger than the sentence. The sentence about the shepherd is then recognized as metaphorical because of the tension between the semantic elds of its words and the context of discourse.

Making Sense: Linguistic Impertinence Metaphor is a semantic event that takes place at the point where several semantic elds intersect. The metaphorical utterance is characterized by semantic impertinance.8 When its words are taken according to their currently accepted meanings the sentence is paradoxical. It will remain nonsensical unless it is interpreted in a new, metaphorical way. A metaphor does not exist in itself, but in and through an interpretation (Ricur, 1976, p. 50). Metaphor, conceived as a dissonance between words, cannot be dissociated from an interpretation that intends to reduce dissonance, and which transforms the sentence from an absurd contradiction into a meaningful self-contradiction. The work of interpretation is then to nd that sphere of meaning in which the hitherto incompatible words generate a new sense so that this unusual network of interactions becomes meaningful. This search for a a new dimension of meaning may be compared to the resolution of an enigma (Ricur, 1976, p. 52), (Ricur, 1991, p. 107). This turns the metaphor into the central problem of hermeneutics:9 it offers the paradigm for the work of interpretation as an interplay of guess and validation. A real live metaphor requires interpretation. This becomes all the more
8 9

J. Cohen, cf. (Ricur, 1994, pp. 131-2) Cf. the article of that name.

The Traditional Conception of Metaphor apparent from a comparison with a third type of metaphors in which Ricur distinguishes between the live and dead metaphors.10 This third type is that of the trivial metaphors (Ricur, 1991, p. 107). These are not novel and do not require special interpretation, but they carry some informative value all the same. In Blacks example: man is a wolf, wolf evokes qualities which are without difculty associated with qualities of man. One does not really need to question what qualities respectively a wolf and a man have an in which surprising way they may have been compared. However this metaphor is not a dead one, for it is not common speech to call man a wolf. It is not exactly a live one either, because it functions by means of what Black calls a system of associated commonplaces (Black, 1962). What is meant is easily grasped, and yet this trivial metaphor gives some information that is not expressed by completely common combinations of words. As contrasted with trivial metaphors, novel metaphors need interpretation. They are not easily understood from common associations. One has to question what new association has been made. The real metaphor initiates a leap into a new dimension of meaning. The crucial question now is: from where does this dimension of meaning come? According to the rhetorical tradition, the basis of metaphor is resemblance: a word can be used metaphorically because of a resemblance between one of its established connotations and some aspect of the designated thing. As a consequence the metaphorical word can be replaced by a literal one once the point of resemblance is found. As an advocate of an interaction-theory Ricur rejects this concept of resemblance. Metaphor as an instantaneous semantic event cannot be understood from the established connotations of the words used. This is not to say that Ricur rejects resemblance completely as a clue for understanding metaphors. But the work of resemblance11 has to be redened. In Ricurs view a metaphorical statement indicates resemblance between categories that were hitherto distinct. Things that until that moment were "far
Dead metaphors are those which have been repeated so frequently that they became part of the standard language of a linguistic community, i.e. part of the polysemy of a word. 11 Used as title of the sixth study of The Rule of Metaphor
10

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The Tensional Conception of Metaphor apart" suddenly appear as "closely related". A kinship is brought to light that was neither seen nor expressed before. So Ricur agrees with Aristotle that to metaphorize implies the perception of the similarities in dissimilarities. But he stresses that this similarity was not already implied in the words but is disclosed in the sentence. Good metaphors are those which institute a resemblance more than those which simply register them (Ricur, 1975, p. 79). Metaphors are, to quote Jngel, ausgesprochene Entdeckungen (Jngel, 1974, p. 104). The expression is ambiguous. Metaphors are real discoveries and their discovery is bound to specic moments of speech. As a consequence a metaphor, contrary to what rhetorics supposes, is untranslatable. It refuses to be paraphrased minutely, while its discovery is bound to a certain tense construction of discourse. So the metaphor exists in a dialectics of difference and identity, incompatibility and sameness. The newly discovered resemblance does not rule out the initial absurdity, but is bound to it in a paradoxical way. The similar is perceived despite difference, in spite of contradiction. The tension is not only one between conicting semantic elds, or between a literal and a metaphorical interpretation, but it is eventually one between an apparent incongruity and a newly discovered likeness. Such is the logical structure of metaphor.12

Metaphor and Discourse

Ricur contends that the semantics of discourse must acknowledge a distinction between the sense of an expression and its reference. Thus, following this Fregean distinction in a Strawsonian or Wittgensteinian direction, Ricur proposes that an expression has reference only in its use. Whether an expression succeeds or fails to refer depends upon the particular circumstances in which the act of discourse is performed, and not upon some aspect of the propositional content alone. If the referent of an expression or narrative is sought as a denotation in a strict sense, Ricurs theory dictates that all reference must
12

Cf. (Ricur, 1994, p. 247) for these three applications of the theory of tension.

Metaphor and Reference neccessarily fail. The metaphor, which Ricur posits on the level of the sentence, is not a unit of substitution, a placeholder for another denotation. Rather it representsthrough a tension in the sentencea linguistic collapse which renders a meaningful construction impossible. The metaphoric potential

41

present can be realized through a constructing explanation, where new meaning is created through actual linguistic innovation. A metaphor is thus characterized by Ricur as a potentialnot a unitand it is realized only in and through the constructing interpretation. Indeed, semantic innovation is the tool Ricur employs to separate structural method from its ideology and subsequently graft it onto a phenomenological hermeneutic. The gure of speech which we classify as metaphor would be at the origin of all semantic elds, since to contemplate the similar or the sameand we know now that the similar is also the sameis to grasp the genus, but not yet as genus; to grasp the same in the difference, and not yet as above or beside the difference. To grasp the kinship in any semantic eld is the work of the metaphoric process at large.
(Ricur, 1991)

Metaphor and Reference

Theoretical interest in recent years has focused on where to locate these thoughts, ideas, images, and so forth, that a good metaphor brings to mind. That is where the parallel with literature, and literary understanding, arises again, particularly in debates about the status (objectivity, etc.) of interpretation.
Paul Ricur

Thus far metaphor has been described as an event within language. What information does it provide about the world? What dimension of our beingin-the-world is opened up by this paradox in discourse? What is its truthclaim? After the transition from a rhetorical to a tensional theory of metaphor, the transition from the question of the immanent sense to that of the outward reference is the second decisive step in (Ricur, 1994). This step is taken in the

42

The Tensional Conception of Metaphor seventh study, Metaphor and Reference. It should be noted that, whereas the semantics of metaphor focused on the sentence, the question of reference leads the attention back to the larger units of discourse. A singular sentence does not open up a world. If the metaphorical statement is to have a reference, it is through the mediation of the poem as an ordered, generic, and singular totality (Ricur, 1994, pp. 221-2). Here we nd the relation between Ricurs theories of metaphor and text. The theory of the text revealed the existential-phenomenological function of language, namely that of projecting a world. Metaphor is the preferred strategy of a specic type of texts, the poetic ones. It is the poetic work as a whole, the poem, that projects a world (Ricur, 1994, p. 243). The poem does so with the help of metaphors. The theory of metaphor is a theory of the poetic work. In fact, this theory of poetics is intended to bring to light a more general function. As writing served as a paradigm to the existential function of language, so the poem is the paradigm of its poetic function. The tendency of the theory of the text is thus reinforced by that of metaphor.

Split Reference According to Ricur, the poem suppresses direct reference to the world. In a certain sense it abolishes reality (Ricur, 1994, p. 222). But this abolishment may be compared to the Husserlian project of destroying the world: it is a destruction which intends to establish a new way of relating to the world.13 Ricurs thesis is that the suspension of reference in the sense dened by the norms of descriptive discourses is the negative condition of the appearance of a more fundamental mode of reference, whose explication is the task of interpretation (Ricur, 1994, p. 229). It is true that metaphorical-poetic language does not have a reference that can be compared to that discourse which describes the world objectively. But the reduction (or destruction) of the world-as-it-is, is the condition for a new approach. The ordinary referential power of discourse is suspended in order to allow a second-order-reference
13

Cf. (Ricur, 1976, p. 59)

Metaphor and Reference to come into force.14 When we receive a metaphorical statement as meaningful, we perceive both the literal meaning which is bound by the semantic incongruity, and the new meaning which makes sense in the present context. Metaphor is a clear case where polysemy is preserved instead of being screened. Two lines of interpretation are opened at the same time and several readings are allowed together and put into tension.
(Ricur, 1991, p. 83)

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Ricurs thesis applies his understanding of metaphorical meaning as a tension between a literal, absurd meaning and a new, metaphorical one, to metaphorical reference. Behind its rst reference which abolishes the normal world, metaphor hides a second reference which is informative in a new way. It is not only a provocation as regards the literal meaning of words, but also as regards our common vision on reality. Wallace Stevens is cited by Hawkes (1972) as saying: Reality is a clich we escape by metaphor. Ricur (1994) compares this work of metaphorical redescription with the functioning of art in general and with that of the scientic model. With Nelson Goodman he says that art reorganizes, remakes reality. A painting does not only express emotions. It also reveals qualities of the world; it projects a world on a level beyond objectivity. A grey painting invites us to look at the depicted thingwhich, in fact, may not be grey at allfrom a specic angle and to see its grey quality. This quality is not just emotional: it is an aspect of this thing (Ricur, 1994, pp. 234-5). In the same way metaphor re-describes reality. It applies labels and schemas to things that, by the standard of ordinary speech, do not t each other. The grey picture is said to be sad. This is logically absurda picture cannot be sad, nor a landscape cheerful. Yet it expresses something that is no less real than the visible greyness. Like art, metaphor does not merely copy reality, nor does it only express an emotion. It has an explorative, heuristic function, in that it discovers new qualities of reality. A second comparison is made between metaphors and scientic models, following the argument of Black (1962). The model is a heuristic instrument
14

Cf. (Ricur, 1976, pp. 67-8)

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The Tensional Conception of Metaphor describing certain better known structures of reality, in order to make their description a source for new hypothesses on what is lesser known. Scientic imagination consists in seeing new connections via the detour of the thing that is described (Ricur, 1994, pp. 241-2). An imaginary device helps to uncover new interpretations of reality. This power of discovery is, again, the point of comparison with the metaphor. Like a model a metaphor uses images which are well-known from one domain and transfers them to another in order to explore unknown relations of meaning. Metaphor and model reveal new relationships (Black, 1962, p. 238). Ricurs reection on the referential power of metaphor nally takes him to the Aristotelean idea of poetics as a redescription of reality. Poetics

is an imitationmimsisof human reality by means of tragedies, stories (Ricur, 1994, pp. 244-5). It does not describe reality in an ordinary way, it is ction; mythos. But this very ction brings to light structures of life that are more essential than those revealed by ordinary discourse. Poetry redescribes life at a higher level, by means of the tension which is created between ordinary life and ction. This tension between poetry and reality is, on a larger scale, what the tension between the poetic metaphor and reality is in miniature. Ricur writes: [Metaphor] takes part in the double tension that characterizes this imitation: submission to reality and fabulous invention, unaltering representation and ennobling elevation. This double tension constitutes the referential function of metaphor in poetry (Ricur, 1994, p. 40). Metaphor instructs and enables man to look at his reality in a new way so that he detects deeper structures and higher possibilities of life.

The Ontology of Metaphor Ricur (1994) draws far-reaching conclusions from his key concept of tension. At the level of meaning the tension is one between an incompatibility of meanings and a newly discovered identity. This tension is found in the referential function of metaphor as well. It cannot be veried objectively that a thing is as metaphor says it to be, but in spite of the is not metaphor reveals

Metaphor and Reference qualities of reality that are for the one who looks at reality in a new way. Thus, Ricur posits, the place of metaphor, its most intimate and ultimate abode, is neither the name, nor the sentence, nor even discourse, but the copula of the verb to be (Ricur, 1994, p. 7). The is does not only bring incompatible words into a new relation of meaning. The function of the copula is ontological: the expression claims to say something on what nature is. But in this is, the tension of identity and difference remains. Thus Ricur reaches a concept of metaphorical truth which preserves the is now within the is (Ricur, 1994, p. 249), a truth which includes the critical incision of the (literal) is not within the ontological vehemence of the (metaphorical) is (Ricur, 1994, p. 255). Making the literal is not absolute, however, would cause the claim that metaphor refers to reality to be forgotten. Then scientic language would be the only one that really explores the structures of the real world, turning the world of poetry into a ctive, unreal one. A second navet acknowledges the claim of metaphor to re-describe in its own, secondary way what is beyond the critical demythologization of the literal is (cf. Ricur, 1994, 253).

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Chapter

The Validity of Interpretations

For the sake of a didactic exposition of the dialectic of explanation and understanding, as phases of a unique process, I propose to describe this dialectic rst as a move from understanding to explaining and then as a move from explanation to comprehension. The rst time, understanding will be a nave grasping of the meaning of the text as a whole. The second time, comprehension will be a sophisticated mode of understanding, supported by explanatory procedures. In the beginning, understanding is a guess. At the end, it satises the concept of appropriation, which was described [. . . ] as the rejoinder to the kind of distanciation linked to the full objectication of the text. Explanation, then, will appear as the mediation between two stages of understanding. If isolated from this concrete process, it is a mere abstraction, an artifact of methodology.
(Ricur, 1976, p. 74)

Ricurs points of departure in his treatises on hermeneutics are the two distinctions of classical hermeneutical history, namely Diltheys division between the explaining nature of the natural sciences and the understanding nature of the social and humanistic sciences, and the Gadamerian dichotomy of alienating distanciation and belonging. His theory seeks to integrate explanation and understanding in a constructive dialectic which is rooted in the properties of the text.

48

The Validity of Interpretations Departing forcefully from the Romanticist hermeneutical traditions search for the authorial intention, Ricur explores a very different concept of understanding, more resonant with the Gadamerian and Heideggerian existensiale, where understanding is a mode of being rather than an activity possible to make explicit object of an inquiry. Leave the problematic of existensial understanding and its importance for the next chapter, I shall join Ricur in an attempt at showing the possibility of having a methodology of interpretation without giving up claims of reference to a world, and in this showing how distanciation in the Gadamerian sense of Verfremdung is constitutive to the interpretative process. The aspect of reference is rendered problematic by this, however, and is the proper place for the treatment of understanding in the next chapter. As a result, the present exposition of the constructing process of explanation will be awed, since understanding is both a prerequisite for the constructing process itself, and that the understanding process of appropriation requires an explained whole to be active. I shall attempt to show in these two chapters how Ricur operates with two very different concepts of understanding, while still demonstrating a reciprocal codependency between the processes of explanation and understanding, and I shall attempt to place them both within the realm demarcated by Gadamer as the locus of the hermeneutic circle. However, the treatment of explanation per se will be lacking as a result until the concepts of reference and existential understanding are covered, so only in the concluding chapter will a true representation of the hermeneutic arc emerge. Both the objectivity resulting from it, and the room it carves out for the activity of literary criticism, can then be evaluated. The tensional theory of metaphor has a pivotal role in both chapters, as will become clear. The case of the metaphor parallels the constructing process of explanation in the resolution of metaphorical meaning, and its tensional character also shows how the sense arrived at through explanation releases an excess of signication that unfolds a secondary signication by way of the primary signication it represents. The paradoxical point that it manages this

The Hermeneutic Dialectic excess of meaning through being constrained through explanation is also a point most easily grasped through the theory of metaphor.

49

The Hermeneutic Dialectic

One of the central problems inherited from classical hermeneutics is the alleged irreducible differences between the natural and the human sciences. The traditional dichotomy between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften has been on both the epistemological and ontological levels On the epistemological level, the dichotomy is between explanationin the sense of causal explanation characteristic of the natural sciencesand understanding, which, for Dilthey, meant understanding the psychic life of another person through its manifestations in texts. The epistemological dichotomy is supported by the ontological claim that the objects of these ways of knowing, Natur and Geist, are irreducibly different. Another way of stating the dichotomy is to say that explanation stands for the claim that there is no epistemological break between the natural sciences and the human sciences, while understanding is the ag of the camp which claims that the social sciences are irreducible to the natural sciences. How is this important to hermeneutics? Hermeneutics was taken by

Dilthey to be the method of the social sciences, while explanation was the method of the natural sciences. For him, any form of explanation was taken from the domain of the natural sciences and so its use in the social sciences was illegitimate. Ricur, in his characteristic way, wants to mediate this dichotomy and turn it into a dialectic. His main contention with the Romantic hermeneutics seems to be that the problem of interpretation is derived not from the incommunicability of the psychic experience of the author, but because of the very nature of the verbal intention of the text. The surpassing of this intention by the textual meaning signies that understanding takes place in a nonpsychological and properly semantical space, which the text has carved out by severing itself from the mental intention of its author (Ricur, 1976, p. 76).

50 Against the Intentional Fallacy

The Validity of Interpretations

The rst move Ricur therefore makes is to reemphasize, against classical hermeneutics, that to understand a text is not to rejoin the author or immediately grasp his subjective intentions. This means that the text can be construed in various ways and the authors intention does not determine the correct interpretation. The fact is that the author can no longer rescue his work. His intention is often unknown to us, sometimes redundant, sometimes useless, and sometimes even detrimental with regard the interpretation of the verbal meaning of his work. In the cases where circumstances demand that information about the author be taken into account, effort should be made to incorporate this information in light of the text itself (Ricur, 1976, p. 76). This is the locus of Ricurs branching of erklren and verstehen. If the objective meaning is something other than the subjective intention of the author, it may be construed in various ways. When one no longer has a xed point of gravitation, so to speak, misunderstanding is possible and even unavoidable. The problem of the correct understanding can no longer be solved by a simple return to the perceived or alleged authorial situation. Hence, even [t]o construe the meaning as the verbal meaning of the text is to make a guess (Ricur, 1976, p. 76). Verstehen, or understanding, is what E. D. Hirsch calls the guess or the attempt to construe the meaning of the text as a totality (cf. Hirsch, 1967).

Interpretative Construal as Guessing

The necessity of guessing the meaning of a text is related to the semantic autonomy ascribed by Ricur to all textual meaning. In the case of writing, the verbal meaning of the text no longer coincides with its mental meaning or intention. This intention is both fullled and abolished by the text, which is no longer the voice of someone present. The text is mute, and the interpretative situation thus represents an asymmetric relation between a text and its reader, wherein one of the partners speaks for the both of them.

Interpretative Construal as Guessing The text, Ricur claims, is like a musical score and the reader like an orchestra conductor who obeys the instructions of the notation. Consequently, to understand is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event, it is to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the initial event has been objectied. In other words, we have to guess at the meaning of the text because the authors intention is beyond our reach. In fact, as we have already seen, not only is the authors intention distanced, but transcended in the act of inscription. And the resulting semantic autonomy is what enables the subsequent process of interpretation. Hermeneutics presupposes distanciation. Transcription is therefore not merely duplication (or reduplication), but a complete metamorphosis of the message. Why do we have to construe texts? Not only because of symbols and other multiple-meaning expressions which the text contains, but also because of the plurivocity of the text which opens up to several reading or constructions. If, in this gure of the dialectic, understanding is the guess or initial attempt to grasp the text as a whole, erklren, or explanation, is the attempt to validate an interpretation. The act of understanding is at rst a genial (or a mistaken) guess and there are no methods for making guesses, no rules for generating insights. The methodological activity of interpretation commences when we begin to test and criticize our guesses.
(Hirsch, 1967, p. 203)

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Validation of Guesses Validation does not mean, of course, verication. Rather it refers to a process of falsication and probable reasoning which aims at establishing one interpretation as more probable than another. That a text allows for more than one interpretation does not mean that all interpretations are equal. The logic of validation, says Ricur,allows us to move between the two limits of dogmatism and skepticism. It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek

52

The Validity of Interpretations for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach (Ricur, 1995b, p. 213). The elimination of inferior interpretations is not an empirical matter of verication and proof, but a rational process of argumentation and debate. Ricur uses the example of H. L. A. Harts account of juridical reasoning to provide a link between validation in literary criticism and in the social sciences. The key is the polemical character of validation. Ricur says: In front of the court, the plurivocity common to texts and to actions is exhibited in the form of a conict of interpretations, and the nal interpretation appears as a verdict to which it is possible to make appeal. Like legal utterances, all interpretations in the eld of literary cricitism and in the social sciences may be challenged, and the question what can defeat a claim? is common to all argumentative situations. Only in the tribunal is there a moment when the procedures of appeal are exhausted. But it is because the decision of the judge is implemented by the force of public power. Neither in literary criticism, nor in the social sciences, is there such last word. Or, if there is any, we call that violence.
(Ricur, 1995b, p. 215)

The acceptability of an interpretation resides rst in the arguments and evidence that support it, and ultimately in the consensus of those who are knowledgeable in the area and participate in the debate. This is the rhetorical element in hermeneutics. In principle, every interpretation is defeasible (to use Harts term), and the interpretitive results of the regional hermeneutics are not only the rules for producing an interpretations; they are also the rules for refuting an interpretation. The example of judicial reasoning is especially tting because the courts are one of the main intersections of text and action, of words and deeds. But the dialectic needs to be read inversely, from explanation to understanding. In literary cricitism, the pole of erklren is the structuralist interpretation of the text as a subjectless, closed system with no reference to anything outside the text. As we have seen, Ricur grants this kind of structural explanation a very limited legitimacy. Ricurs position is rather that explanation in both the social sciences and

Interpretative Construal as Guessing in literary criticism serves understanding. Thus empirical and causal explanations are not eliminated from the social sciences any more than structural analyses are eliminated from literary criticism. Both play a limited role within the dialectic of explanation and understanding. His thesis is that the analogy between text and action calls for a hermeneutic model in the social sciences within which the empirical methods borrowed from the natural sciences would play a subordinate role. In his article, Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable Connections Among the Theory of the Text, Theory of Action, and Theory of History, the dialectic of explanation and understanding is more fully developed. He says that in all three elds, a blunt opposition between explanation and understanding developed. He argues for a dialectic. By dialectic, I understand the view that explanation and understanding would not constitute mutually exclusive poles, but rather relative moments in a complex process called interpretation. (Ricur, 1978a, p. 150). Ricur begins with the theory of text because semiotic explanation remains within the domain of signs within which Dilthey made his plea for Verstehen. Thus it is not the case of an explanatory method borrowed from the natural sciences. With respect to the text, a dichotomy is uncovered. On one side stand those who take the text to be a closed system with only internal relations. Analysis of the text would exlude any psychologizing about the intentions of the author or the message as received by the reader. For Romantic hermeneutics, on the other hand, understanding a text means to recreate the intentions of the author and to reestablish between the author and the reader the kind of communication which occurs in a face-to-face dialogue. In place of this dichotomy, Ricur argues for a dialectic which calls for a movement from understanding to explanation whenever the dialogical situation no longer occurs. As he has already claimed, the text is always independent from its author, its original references, its situations of production, and, nally, its original audience. Literature, Ricur says, in the etymological sense of the word, innitely exploits this gap and creates a totally different situation from that of dialogical understanding. Reading is not simply a

53

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The Validity of Interpretations kind of listening (Ricur, 1978a, p. 153). Thus, explanation is not an alternative to understanding, but is a necessary step in achieving it. Ricur grants that structural analysis is perhaps the most developed form of explanation in literary criticism.

Making SenseThe Function of Explanation

Despite the need for construction of a new sense and a holistic construal of meaning, the text possesses an inherent plurivocity that allows it to be construed in more ways than one. At the lowest level, that of semiology, this plurality of possible interpretations has two main sources, namely the polysemy of language, even as an immanent system, and the historical character of language, whereby the terms that constitute it are able to vary in meaning over time.

Monotative and Multitative Meaning In his article On Different Kinds of Meaning and Discourse (Pedersen, 1999), Arild Pedersen attempts a characterization of two different kinds of meaning on the basis of their properties as given. He proposes a phenomenological description of different types of meaning, one of multiplicity, and the other one of constraint of polysemy. He claims that his strategy is both descriptive and normative. Descriptive in the sense that it explains (or describes) the phenomological characteristics of the two modes as givens in a situation of actualization (though only one of the two modes displays the characteristics of an event), whereas the analysis is normative in the sense that it describes how such different objects (meaningtransmitting objects) should (could?) be accurately interpreted, according to their different natures. As we shall see, if the conceptual pair is remapped onto Ricurs interpretational theory, a slightly different topography emerges (but nonetheless one which seems to be true to the underlying idea behind the dichotomy),

Making SenseThe Function of Explanation granting a valuable pair of conceptual tools for use in an analysis and critique of Ricurs project. As shall be demonstrated, they especially help to shed some light on the theme of explanation. We should already be familiar with the concepts of denotative and connotative meaning(s). Pedersen passes beyond this schism by pointing out that even denotative meaning is an ideal structure, achieved though abstraction or suppression of connotative meanings. A view more in tune with Ricurs theory of polysemy, then, is the conception of monotative meaning, wherein restraints appear in the dynamic multiplicity of a sign, constraining the polysemy and allowing mastery of a single meaning over subordinate connotative meanings (. . . ) to such an extent that they become virtually invisible. A further adjustment opens monotative meaning further, claiming its dominant meaning need not be denotative, but can also be emotive. Though the concept of emotive meaning in this context may prove a freshly opened can of worms, the widening of focus beyond purely denotative meaning is necessary to be able to account for literary meaning through this model on a general basis. What makes meaning monotative, says Pedersen, is that there is one such mono-meaning dominating over other meanings. In the opposite concept, multitative meaning, no single meaning rules predominantly over other, suppressed meanings. The abstract, hierarchical suppression of meanings is relaxed, allowing the multiplicity of connoted meanings to stand forth simultaneously. Some meanings may still play a central role within this internal multiplicity of meanings. The main shift is in the internal relationship within the meaningcarrying constituents or aspects of the symbol, which shifts from one of mastery and constraint to one of contact or communion and synergy (network effects). The individual meanings are allowed room to be individually identied, or, as in Pedersens words, they are on an equal level, giving room to each other, so they may appear as themselves within this multitude. The presentation of this multitudous meaning thus allows for an accur-

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The Validity of Interpretations ate presentation of polysemic tokens or signs in language, where synergistical effects keeps them dynamic through a continual potential interplay, as Pedersen puts it, interplay in a counter point-like way so as to make new qualities emerge. Here the remapping of the terminology must depart from Pedersens conception of these two kinds of meaning, for it is clear that he intends both kinds to be actualized meanings, rather than a potential and an actualized form. In Ricurs interpretational theory, language as polysemy is language as virtuality, the well from whence meaning is poured back into reality. As language is clothed in the guise of discourse, and is realized as event, the multiplicity of meaning is constricted, and thus in actualization, this time through the shaping of the speakers intention and other circumstances, constricts the potentiality for meaning, and leaves discourse in a mode of meaning which can only be monotative. When discourse becomes writing, however, these constraints are weakened through the effects of distanciation up to the point where it loses its grip on the written discourse. It follows, then, that the textwritten discourseis a very special case with regard to meaning. Its meaning is shaped through structure, but has lost its constraint, and is thus returned to an actualized yet multitative meaning, which has lost its character as event, and gained that of artefact. Thus it is necessarily subject to interpretation. Unlike Pedersen, I choose to conceive of multitative and monotative meaning as modes of meaning, rather than as kinds. Two different tasks of interpretation are then demanded from the structural analysis or process of explanation (construal); rst, to make sense of the text as a whole through the constraining of polysemy of its parts, the process of establishing monotative meaning on the basis of a presented multitative meaning. Through this process of explanation, the/a structure of the work is uncovered, rendering a structural explanation and inferring or implying a depth semantics of the text. Secondly, the analysis must account for the poetic language of the text,

Making SenseThe Function of Explanation which presents itself as linguistic impertinences defying explanation withing the existing conguration of language. It necessitates, therefore, a linguistic innovation and a contributing to the constrained monotative meaning a multitative addition which refuses subsumption into the existing monotativity whilst not crumbling the existing structure, since the meaning is new and a result of the structure rather than a threat to it.

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Construal as Constriction The function of explanation in the case of metaphors does not consist in a substitution of the metaphorical expression, but in a construction. The

decisive moment in the process of explaining arises when the interpreter has constructed a web of connections within the reading context, constituting it as actual and unique, and restoring to it a character of event. This semantic event takes place in the intersection between the semantic elds upon which the interpreter has drawn. Through this construction, being the means whereby the words as a whole make sense, the metaphorical twist becomes an event and simultaneously a meaning, a meaningful event and an emergent meaning in language. This constituting element is the fundamental feature of explanation which makes the metaphor paradigmatic to the explanation of a literary work. We construct the meaning of a text in a way similar to that of giving meaning to all the terms in a metaphorical expressionthrough building a web of possibilities on the basis of guesses and assumptions, until a releasing breakthrough lets the different pieces, having until now seemed incompatible, fall into place. In a semiotic sense, the web has the function of constraint on the operative symbols or terms of the text, forcing them to act upon each other and at the same time constrain each others potentiality for polysemy and mesh into a richer web of meaning. Ricur points out the texts status as a work, a singular whole, as an element necessitating the process of construction. Qua whole, the literary work is not reducible to sentences which are individually understandable. It consists

58

The Validity of Interpretations rather of an architecture of themes and purposes which lend themselves to different ways of construction, where the relationship between the whole and the part necessarlily is circular. The interpretative movement of the work as a whole presupposes the dis-covering of a given construction of parts. And it is by constructing the detailsi.e. the metaphorsthat we construct the whole. Understanding of a text at its expression of Sinn, sense, is to Ricur strictly homogenous with the understanding of metaphorical expressions. In both cases there is a making-sense-of, a question of producing as great a comprehensibility as possible from a multiplicity seemingly full of internal opposition or inconsistency. Construction rests, in both cases, on the threads contained in the text itself. These lead the further construction in given

directions, and at the same time closes off other venues as no longer valid. The seemingly problematic aspect of the constructionist model of explanation consists in one of the points already mentioned, namely the possibility for several different and mutually exclusive explanatory construnctions based on the same text. Ricur replies that it is possible to discern between the probability of different constructions, but not to say that one of them is more true than the others. The most likely construction is the one which on the one side accounts for the largest number of facts presented by the text, including its potential connotations, and on the other hand offers a qualitatively better match between the features it brings into account. The consideration of such constructions will have the form of a debate or argumentation, not one of empirical verication and display of evidence. Thus is the movement from understanding to explanation brought to fullment.

From Sense to Understanding But the movement must also go in the other direction, from explanation to understanding. For why would we be interested in an explanationany kind of information of a text including structural analysisif it were not to lead back to understanding the text? The texts we explain belong to a tradition

The Role of Literary Criticism which denes a cultural community. We come to understand ourselves and our community by understanding the denitive texts which constitute that community. But, Ricur is quick to add, this does not mean that we fall back in the trap of psychologism. It is not the psychic life of the author lying behind the text that we seek to understand. It is the world of the text, the possible wrld projected by the text, a world which is redescribed and refashioned by the text. What a reader receives is not just the sense of the work, but, through its sense, its reference, that is, the experience it brings to language and, in the last analysis, the world and the temporality it unfolds in the face of this experience.
(Ricur, 1988, pp. 78-9)

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In this quote from Time and Narrative, Ricur makes explicit in the mode of reception a split between sense and reference also with regard to meaning.

The Role of Literary Criticism

To interpret. . . is to appropriate here and now the intention of the text. . . the intended meaning of the text is not essentially the presumed intention of the author, the lived experience of the writer, but rather what the text means for whoever complies with its injuction. The text seeks to place us in its meaning, that isaccording to another conception of the word sensin the same direction. So if the intention is that of the text and if this intention is the direction which it opens up for thought, the depth semantics must be understood in a fundamentally dynamic way. I shall therefore say: to explain is to bring out the structure, that is the internal relations of dependence which constitute the statics of the text; to interpret is to follow the path of thought opened up by the text, to place oneself en route towards the orient of the text.
(Ricur, 1995e, pp. 161-62)

Literary criticism is left not only with a goal in Ricurs theory, it also has a general methodological road to follow. The initial dialectical situation between text and reader is the one of the conict between the forces of distanciation proper to the text and those of appropriation belonging to the reader. Out of

60

The Validity of Interpretations this conict the creative gain in metaphorical meaning is produced. Literary criticism is not accidental, it is neither a subjective intuition of the poem nor a search for the historical clue to the true meaning of the text. The stress here is rather on conguration, that is, the second classication of mimesis of the threefold mimesis Ricur presents in Time and Narrative. Conguration is the realm of the world of the work itself. It is an inquiry into the mode of organization, of composition of that world that looms as the necessary task. In other words, it is the analysis of the very principle of internal order that gives the work its unity and identity and that is, of course, the object of all formal inquiry. The only notable difference between this mode of inquiry and the many valuable formalist approaches of narratology, is that in this case, this is one phase in the process of interpretation that will not attain its nal goal until the reguration of the reader is considered in Ricurs third denition of mimesis. The examination of textual conguration proceeds through a dialectic of inquiry. The two levels of inquiry are the organizational structure of the work and the world-making which emerges from the work. This is not a mere recasting of the form-content bifurcation of traditional criticism, for Ricur is arguing for interaction, not for separation. With structure the critic moves from the parts toward a total organization, and with world-making from a unitary understanding toward an illumination of the parts. Rather than a transposition of meaning from author to readers reader to reader, literary criticism becomes a process, a movement back and forth between text and critic for the benet of the critic and all those who share in the textual commentary. There can be no completion to the interpretive process, but only a temporary pause necessary to allow another player to enter the court. This does not mean that there is no sense of truth or of knowledge in the interpretive process, for the very goal of interpretation must be to share ones insights with others. But what this theory does mean is that there can be no valid claim to denitive meaning of the text, for this claim would kill the text, would remove it from the process and render it consumed and empty. Nor can a critic substitute the reconstituted historicity of the text for the text itself. The historical context of the text must be inserted into the dialectic process

The Role of Literary Criticism of interpretation as part of the thrust of explanation. Similarly the formal considerations of a text are not the text itself, but only one factor among many that are needed to move the analytic structure of the text into an engagement with the intentional unity of the text as the essential feature of understanding. The driving force behind the desire to know is the need to make the world over in terms that are meaningful. This is the polar force of the readers appropriation. On the other side the thought of another when separated from that other by writing and thus forced to stand alone comes to me as otherness, as an alien and disturbing view of the world. If I choose to engage the otherness as constituted by a text I have entered into the struggle between appropriation and distanciation. The theory of phenomenological hermeneutics is the theory of the productive engagement between text and reader as a process of redescribing the world, my world rst, and the worlds of others subsequently. This interpretive process begins with the analytic power of explanation and is then challenged by the unitary force of understanding. The engagement of explanation and understanding will thus produce the interpretation which in return responds to the initial need to engage distanciation and appropriation. Literature is consequently the corpus of texts that have the capacity to promote the redescription of the world in their readers. Interpretation is the process by which disclosure of new modes of beingor if you prefer Wittgenstein to Heidegger, of new forms of lifegives to the subject a new capacity for knowing himself. If the reference of the text is the project of a world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The reader rather is enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself.
(Ricur, 1976, 94)

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Chapter

Reference and Meaning

Reversing the Arc
The interpretation of a text cannot rest with a structural study no matter how well done. On the contrary, the structural analysis is only the starting point. At this stage, the interpretation has yet to reach past the level of textuality, and strive towards what the text is aboutthe realm of hermeneutic understanding proper, on the level of appropriation. Yet in order to apply his semantic theory of imagination beyond the realm of discourse, Ricur must show how even in a metaphorical utterance we refer, by and beyond words, to the reality of the world. Metaphor has thus far been described as an event within language. What information does it provide about the world? What dimensions of our beingin-the-world is opened up by this paradox in discourse? What is its truthclaim? After the transition from a rhetorical to a tensional theory of metaphor, the transition from the question of a texts immanent sense to that of its outward reference requires consideration. Does the dynamic and semantically productive new model of metaphor have ramications for literary reference? This study is attempted by Ricur in the seventh study of The Rule of Metaphor, entitled Metaphor and Reference.

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Reference and Meaning

Metaphoric Reference
It should be noted that, whereas the semantics of metaphor focused on the sentence, the question of reference leads attention back to the larger units of discourse. A singular sentence does not by itself have the potential to break free from the restraints of textuality and burst forth into the world of the interpreter. The possibility for a direct, literal reference retreats as a result of distanciation. If the metaphorical statement is to have a reference, it is through the mediation of the literary work or poem as an ordered, generic and singular totality. We nd here the relation in Ricurs theories between the levels of metaphor and text. The theory of the text reveals an existential function of language, namely that of projecting a world. Metaphor is the preferred stategy of a specic type of texts, namely the poetic ones. It is the poetic work as a whole, the poem, that projects a world (Ricur, 1994, p. 243). The poem does so with the help of metaphors. The theory of metaphor is on this level a theory of poetic language as actualized in the poetic work. In fact, this theory of poetics is intended to bring to light a more general function. As writing served as a paradigm of the spiritual or existential function of language, so the poem is the paradigm of its poetic function. The tendency of the theory of the text is thus reinforced by that of metaphor. The step across the threshold of reference is a decisive one. It is not too much to speak of a decision, for it is not self-evident that metaphorical-poetic language should have a reference. Ricur has to deal with objections raised by a current in contemporary literary criticism. According to it the poem has only an inner constitution. It constitutes a closed world in itself, without any outward reference. Language is used as a material worked on for its own sake. The critics Ricur has in mind are not in the rst place structuralists, but stheticians who conceive the poem as a prolonged oscillation between between sense and sound, going nowhere like a dance. The informative power of poetry is reduced to zero in favour of its evocative power. It expresses

Metaphoric Reference according to Northrop Fryea mood, and evokes a mood. Its movement is not outward towards a world, but inward towards a state of the soul. Ricur argues that the presupposition of this conception is in fact a positivistic one: all language that is not descriptive, in the sense of giving information about facts, must be emotional. The choice for poetry as a language of pure interiority is the reverse of the positivistic rejection of all non-objective language. According to Ricur the poem does, indeed, supress direct reference to the world. In a certain sense it abolishes reality. But this abolishment may be compared with the Husserlian project of destroying the world: it is a destruction which intends to establish a new way of relating to the world. Ricurs thesis is that the suspension of reference in the sense dened by the norms of descriptive discourse is the negative condition of the appearance of a more fundamental mode of reference, whose explication is the task of interpretation. It is true that metaphorical-poetic language does not have a reference that can be compared to that discourse which describes the world objectively. But the reduction (destruction) of the world-as-it-is, is the condition for a new approach. The ordinary referential power of discourse is suspended in order to allow a second-order-referance to come into force. Ricurs thesis consists in the application of his understanding of metaphorical meaningas a tension between a literal, absurd meaning and a new, metaphorical oneto metaphorical reference. As the primary, direct reference fails to counteract distanciation, the normal world is abolished. But behind the literal reference, metaphor hides a secondary, indirect reference, whose potential is of an altogether different nature. Thanks to the receding of the primary reference, the second is disclosed. It is not only a provocationIn the words of Lacan. as regards that literal meaning of words, but also as regards our common vision on reality. Reality is a clich which we escape by metaphor. My contention now is that one of the functions of imagination is to give a concrete dimension to the suspension proper to split reference. Imagination does not merely schematize the predicative assimilation between terms by its synthetic insight into similarities; nor does it merely picture the sense thanks to the display of images aroused and controlled by the cognitive process. Rather, it contrib-

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Reference and Meaning utes to the suspension of ordinary reference and to the projection of new possibilities of redescribing the world. . . . Image as absence is the negative side of image as ction. . . . Fiction addresses itself to deeply rooted potentialities of reality to the extent that they are absent from the actualities with which we deal in everyday life under the mode of empirical control and manipulation.
(Ricur, 1978b, pp. 154-55)

Split Reference
Ricur suggests that the expression split reference adequately conveys the full understanding of the referential function of metaphor. Poetic language is no less about reality than any other use of language but refers to it by the means of a complex strategy. This strategy implies a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language. This suspension, however, is only the negative condition of a second-order reference, an indirect reference built on the ruins of the direct reference. But this second-order reference appears as such only with respect to the primacy of reference of ordinary language, which obeys our interest for control, manipulation, pragmatic activities. This second-order reference is actually our fundamental, rst-order reference, and expresses our ontological belonging to life, to beings, to the world, to Being. The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous. The doublesensed message nds correspondence in a split addresser, in a split addressee, and what is more, in a split reference, as is cogently exposed in the preambles to fairy tales of various people, for instance, in the usual exortation of the Majorca story tellers: it was and it was not.
(Ricur, 1978b, p. 152)

This referential concept must take into account the eclipse of a rst level of reference and the emergence of a second level of reference, that is, the concept of split reference. The task of interpretation demands an understanding of poetic meaning grounded in the eclipsed literal meaning. Ricur is saying that the referential power of poetic discourse is linked to the eclipse of ordinary

The World of the Work meaning, to the creation of a heuristic ction, and nally to the redescribed reality brought to the reader. The concluding chapter of The Rule of Metaphor brings this argument to fruitition, and indicates the future course of Ricurs development in his philosophy of language. The gain in meaning in poetic discourse is inseparable from the tension not just between the terms of a metaphorical statement, but also between two levels of interpretation: the literal level, which is restricted to the established value of words in the lexicon, and a metaphorical level resulting from innovation thrust upon these words in order to make sense of them in terms of the whole work. The resulting gain in meaning is not yet the conceptual gain of interpretation; it is a kind of semantic shock that produces the need for interpretation. Because the gain in meaning is caught in the conict of same and different, it is unstable and volatile. This tensional situation of the split reference is lodged within the copula of the utterance. The ontological ramications are fascinating: Being as (. . . ) means being and not being. In this way, the dynamism of meaning allowed access to the dynamic vision of reality which is the implicit ontology of the metaphorical utterance (Ricur, 1994, p. 297, my emphasis).

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The World of the Work

In order to develop the referential potential of metaphor, Ricur underlines the mediating role of the suspension (epoch). This role in the functioning of the reference in metaphor is in agreement with the interpretation he gives to the functioning of sense. In the same way as the metaphorical sense not only abolishes but preserves the literal sense, the metaphorical reference maintains the ordinary vision with the new one it suggests.(Ricur, 1978b, p. 154) All transitions from discourse to praxis are rooted in the outwards redirection of poetic language to redescribe the world, to remake reality, according to iconographic augmentation, a phrase Ricur borrows from the french philosopher Franois Dagognet.(Dagognet, 1973) Every icon is a graph that remodels reality at a higher level of realism. To nullify perception is the condition to

68 increase our vision.

Reference and Meaning

Taking the notion of depth semantics as his guideline, Ricur returns to the problem of the reference of the text, and is this time able to give a name to the non-ostensive reference. It is, he explains, the kind of world opened up by the depth semantics of the text, a discovery, which haas immense consequences regarding what is usually called the sense of the text (Ricur, 1976, p. 87). The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it. It is not something hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points towards a possible world, thanks to the non-ostensive reference of the text. Understanding passes by the author and his situation and seeks to grasp the world-proposition opened up by the reference of the text. To understand a text under this mode, is to follow its movements from sense to reference; from what it says to what it talks about. In this process, the mediating role played by the structural analysis constitutes both the justication of the objective approach and the rectication of of the subjective approach to the text.

This is the reference borne by by the depth semantics. The text speaks of a possible world and of a possible way of orientating oneself within it. The abolition or suspension of a rst order reference, an abolition effected by ction and poetry, is the condition of possibility for the freeing of a second order reference, which reaches the world not only at the level of manipulable objects, but at the level that Husserl designated by the expression Lebenswelt and Heidegger by the expression being-in-the-world (Ricur, 1995a, 141).

Yet if we can no longer dene hermeneutics in terms of the search for the psychological intentions of another person which are concealed behind the text, and if we do not want to reduce interpretation to the dismantling of structures, then what remains to be interpreted? I shall say: to interpret is to explicate the type of being-in-the-world unfolded in front of the text (ibid.).

The World of the Work Appropriation Ricur presents the readers subjectivity as an extention of the fundamental aspect of discourse he claims addressing is. But contrary to the case of

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dialogue, no vis--vis is given in the written situation. The relation is, so to speak, created by the work itself. A work opens up its readers, and thus creates its own subjective vis--vis. As the work involves the interpreter and opens itself up to him, a dialogue is initiated in an existential sensenon-linguistic, but through having the interpreter risk his own being and open himself up to being inuenced by what he reads. Ricur admits that the theme is well known in traditional hermeneutics; it is the problem of the readers access to the text, understood as its use in the present situation of the reader. In his treatment of the theme, however, he wishes to underline how a transformation takes place by the points he raises through his theory. Appropriation is dialectically linked to distancing in written discourse. This distance is not dissolved through appropriation, but is rather its opposite. Thanks to the distancing of the text, appropriation no longer bears the mark of affective connection to the authors intention, and lacks all contemporaneousness with the creative process or agreement with an original intention. Appropriation represents understanding over distance. Appropriation is at the same time dialectically linked to the objectifying features of the work. It is communicated through all the structural objectications displayed by the work, since Ricur claims that to the degree appropriation is not directed towards the author, it is directed towards the meaning of the work, represented by the Fregean Sinn. Above all, the vis--vis of appropriation is what Gadamer calls the matter of the text, and what Ricur calls the world of the work. Henceforth, to understand is to understand oneself in front of the text. It is not a question of imposing upon the text our nite capacity of understanding, but of exposing ourselves to the text and receiving from it an enlarged self, which would be the proposed existence corresponding in the most suitable way to the world proposed.

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Reference and Meaning

(Ricur, 1995a, 143)

Understanding is then, to Ricur something quite other than a reconstructing constitution that the subject possesses a privileged key to. It would be more correct to say that the self is constituted by the world of the text.

The Disciplines of Meaning

The signicance of Ricurs philosophy of language for a major rethinking of literary criticism becomes clear in Metaphor and Reference. Ricur introduces his commentary with clear awareness of the consequences for literary criticism: The postulate of reference requires a separate discussion when it touches on those particular entities of discourse called texts, that is, more complex compositions than the sentence. The question henceforth arises in the context of hermeneutics rather than semantics. For which the sentence is at rst and the last entity (Ricur, 1994, p. 219). The disciplines of meaning have been matched to their corresponding problematics; semiotics to the word, semantics to the sentence, and hermeneutics to the text. Ricur continues: The question of reference is posed here in terms that are singularly more complex; for certain texts, called literary, seem to constitute an exception to the reference requirement expressed by the preceding postulate (Ricur, 1994, p. 219). The challenge of highly structured, gurative language texts is taken up. The point of departure is yet again Ricurs concept of the textwritten discourse that has been produced as a work, as a totality irreducible to a simple sum of sentences. Fourthermore, a work is organized not as language but as discourse with clearly codied perimeters, and nally it has an identiable character that makes it an individual among the other individuals with which it cannot be merged or confused. The more complex nature of the literary text demands a more elaborate concept of reference. Although the literary text suspends the descriptive reference that is common to didactic texts, there can be no doubt that, if all reference to the world of action had been eliminated, literary discourse would

Understanding have been locked into a closed circle with no possibility of communication. Ricur puts it this way: The literary work through the structure proper to it displays a world only under the condition that the reference of descriptive discourse is suspended. Or to put it another way, discourse in the literary work sets out its denotation as a second-level denotation, by means of the suspension of the rst-level denotation of discourse (Ricur, 1994, p. 221). The immediate question of how an absence of denotation can have a contributive function is resolved through recourse to the metaphoric model as paradigmatic for interpretation and semantic creativity. Just as the metaphorical statement captures its sense as metaphorical amidst the ruins of the literal sense, it also achieves its reference upon the ruins of what might be called (...) its literal reference (Ricur, 1994, p. 221). As the image Ricur is attempting to show us is gradually sharpened, it grows clear that the emergence of this double reference, or split reference, of literary texts is not to be located at the semantic level of the sentence, but rather at the hermeneutic level of the work. The primacy of the poetic function over the referential function does not eliminate reference, only makes it ambiguous. Thus literature has a double-sensed message that is in dynamic tension and, as Ricur shall point out, is the basis of creativity. A theory of literary criticism is now in view, for it is within the very analysis of metaphor as paradigm that the referential nature of poetic language is revealed.

71

Understanding
Ricurs concept of understanding is an existential one, which he has chosen to reserve for the development of a works reference, and which is wholly shaped by its object. Through a conception of the nature of reference in literary works as a meaning which is not to be found behind the text, but in front of it, the foundation is already in place for a strong displacement with regard to the Romantic hermeneutic conception of interpretation. The meaning sought by the interpreter is no longer something hidden, which the reader must make an effort to locate, but something disclosed.

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Reference and Meaning What makes understanding possible, is according to Ricur that which points towards a possible world, through the non-ostensive references of the text. Texts addresses the interpreter about possible worlds, and about ways of orienting in these worlds. In this way Ricur claims to nd a parallel in the disclosure of the text to the role ostensive reference plays in discourse. Understanding is following the dynamics of the work, he claimsfollowing its movement from what the work says to what it says something about. Beyond his situation as a reader, and beyond the role of the author, the interpreter offers himself up to the possible modes for being-in-the-world the text opens up and discloses for him. This is how Ricur understands Gadamers concept of fusion of horizons. As is made evident through the presentation of Ricurs concept of reference, the activity in exegesis consists in its explication through an interpretation in a self-understanding beings meeting with the world disclosed by the text, and the resulting redenition of its being-in-the-world. Reference has the function of rewriting the interpreters reality in the confrontation with the work through a disclosure of new possibilities for being. Interpretation is thus not completed through the readers insight into the meaning of the work, but in his insight into his own being which is placed in new light, a new perspective through the reference of the work. The function of reference is thus fullled through the interpreters appropriation of what is disclosed by the worknot as dening for the work, but for the interpreter himself. This movement, which only is understandable on the basis of the existentialphenomenological exposition of the concept of reference Ricur here uses as a foundation, he calls the understanding appropriation of the text.

Redening Subjectivity
Ricur criticizes the cogito tradition for the claim that the subject has a possibility to grasp itself in an immediate intuition. We only understand ourselves, he claims, through the long detour through the signs of humanity as recorded in the works of culture. This is what causes his break with Heideggerian

Redening Subjectivity thought, by accusing Heidegger of taking an ontological shortcut to Daseins perception of its own being, whilst he ought to have taken the road through a self-dening process through Daseins meeting with itself in written discourse. This is what is the real task of appropriation, claims Ricur. What would we know about morality and, in general, all we know of as the self, if these had not been brought to language and articulated by literature? What is most visible in opposition to subjectivity, which structural analysis uncovers as the pattern of the text, is the very medium wherein we can understand ourselves.

73

Conguration and Reguration In Time and Narrative Ricur introduces two guiding conceptsthose of conguration and regurationas a better way to approach the questions we have examined in The Rule of Metaphor under the title of metaphorical reference. In both cases, but especially in Study 7 in the latter, he is concerned with the problem posed by the capacity diplayed by language to reorder the experience of the reader. When language is reorganized in a creative way by metaphor, a breakthrough is made in experience, that is to say, we are invited to read our own experience in accordance with the new modalities of language. But there was a link missing in this analysis when it is kept at the level of metaphor: the role of the reader. This problem is Ricurs reason for revisiting trodden ground, which he claims to avoid unless it is necessary. In Time and Narrative two entire distinct sections are devoted to the problematic: one concerned with conguration, namely the narrative operations at work within language, in the form of emplotment of actions and characters; the other concerned with reguration, namely the transformation of ones own experience under the effect of the narrative. In tackling the problem of the question of ctional narrative, Ricur runs up against the problem of the permanence of great narrative structures; and in

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Reference and Meaning a constructive manner he goes to battle with structuralism in the arena where it has always operated best - the narrative. But it is the third volume which is of interest to us at present, the volume devoted to the problem of reguration. How does a language restructured by emplotment lead to a rereading of our own experience in accordance with the main lines of the narrative? Ricur returns to a thesis present already in The Rule of Metaphor, as a sort of grand postulate of language, namely that the relation between language and reality, experience or the world, whatever term you like, is a dialectical one: given that the sign is not the thing, that the sign is in retreat in relation to it, language is constituted mariginally, in a sense, in relation to experience and becomes for itself a spoken universe. Whence the legitimacy of the discourse of linguists who exclude the extralinguistic from their eld and resolutely conne themselves to language; this is the strength of the Saussurean school considering that it is from sign to sign, then from book to book, in a vast relation of intertextuality, that the universe of language is constituted. Unlike Saussure, who constructed his theory on the sign and on the differential relations between signs, -Benveniste began with the sentence, which he called the instance of discourse. It is the sentencenot the lexical signthat posesses not only a signied but also an intended, that is to say, it aims at reality. Ricurs thesis is that languages power of reguration is proportional to its power of distanciation in the moment of its self-constitution in the universe of the signier. Language, in his opinion, means the world because it has rst left the world; in this way it initiates a movement of reconquest of the reality lost by the prior conquest of meaning in itself and for itself.

The Twofold Function of the Sign

Ricur sets the function of the sign particularly appropriate to the narrative, in distinguishing conguration, which is the capacity of language to provide a conguration of itself in its own space, and reguration, which expresses the capacity of the work to restructure the world of the reader in unsettling, challenging, remodeling the readers expectations.

The Twofold Function of the Sign He denes this function of reguration as mimetic. But it is extremely important not to be mistaken as to its nature: it does not consist in reproducing reality but in restructuring the world of the reader in confronting him or her with the world of the work; and it is in this that the creativity of art consists according to Ricur, penetrating the world of everyday experience in order to rework it from inside. The third volume of Time and Narrative is devoted to the problem of reguration. How does a language restructured by emplotment lead to a rereading of our own experience in accordance with the main lines of the narrative? Ricur returns here, in a more plausible and better argued fashion, to a thesis present in The Rule of Metaphor as a sort of grand postulate of lanugage, namely that the relation between language and reality, experience or the world, is a dialectical one. Given that the sign is not the thing, but the sign is rather in retreat in relation to it, language is constituted marginally, in a sense, in relation to experience and becomes for itself a spoken universe. As a foundational platform for legitimacy of discourse, Ricur nds this to be the strength of the Saussurean schoolconsidering that it is from sign to sign, then from book to book, in a vast relation of intertextuality that the universe of language is constituted. This is perfectly legitimate, he claims, as a rst stagethe moment of exileof the operation of language (Ricur, 1998, p. 86). The counterpart to this exile is the moment when, following Benvenistes expression, language is poured back into the universe (Ricur, 1998, p. 173).

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Chapter

Conclusion
In the preceding chapters, I have explored the contributions of the philosophy of Paul Ricur to the eld of literary interpretation in general and the philosophy of phenomenological hermeneutics in particular. The problem-oriented exegetical analysis is invited and motivated both by its eld of study, interpretation, which has presented itself as a most diverse and unstructured tradition, and by Ricurs tendencies as a philosopher, as mentioned in the introduction, towards mutually reinforcing structures and an ideal of integration. These two aspects of Ricurs philosophical orientation make a structured and accurate representation of his ideas difcult if combined with an attempt at closure and completeness. What has been presented, therefore, is the dynamics of Ricurs theory, and the processes interacting to constitute both the phenomenona we know as literature and understanding. The present commentary, then, should not attempt to draw out this aspect of what has been presented, or it will suffer a reiteration of what has already been said. The challenge is rather to deliver the element of the whole of Ricurs theory which is still missing, namely that of a coherent and consistent structure, enabling us to view the dynamic again, only this time from a distance, focusing instead on the interplay of parts that results from Ricurs integration and

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Conclusion assimilation of such different strains of philosophy as semiotics, structuralism, hermeneutics and fundamental ontology.

Restructuring the Hermeneutic Arc

The immediate outline of the structures put in play are implied in Joseph Margolis rst piece of advice to anybody working with a theory of interpretation: [I]t is impossible to disjoin the account of the nature or logic of interpretation from one theory of the nature of what it is that may or must be submitted to interpretation (Joseph Margolis, cited in Pedersen, 1999, p. 10). The basic elements, of course, are dened in Ricurs treatment of language. The three units of language he presents; word, sentence and text, all correspond to a level of designation. The word properly belongs in the langue, or language-system, the sentence in discourse and the text properly constitutes a work. As Ricur puts the model to use, however, interconnections start to appear, and the internal structure of the three levels grows more complex. On all three levels there are recurring patterns. Between each of the adjacent ones, a dynamic of interrelation appears. The word, for instance, coexists in discourse and langue, and thus has both a character as virtual multitativity and actualized monotative denotation. In the extension of this, we can see that it is the constriction of the polysemy of word that enables metaphoric use of the same in the event of discourse. The result is an introduction of tension, and a subsequent surplus of meaning, as the new polysemic content returns to enrich the language-system at the same time as the metaphoric reference bursts out of the textuality of the sentence or text and contributes to the world of the work. The pattern repeats on the next level, albeit with a slight permutation. Here, the sentence is subjected to a construal through structuralist construction (explanation) effectively constraining its potential at the same time as a structure of interconnections and tensions are erected in the work as a whole. As the structure gains stability through increased constriction, a depth semantics

Restructuring the Hermeneutic Arc comes to the fore, being an actualization through constriction of possibility. This resultant structure, being at the same time a template for appropriation and an actualized and intersubjectively (or objectively) interchangeable interpretation, is only one of a potentially innate set of congurations.

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Ramications The implications of the uncovered structures are quite subtle, but far-reaching nonetheless. Firstly, the daring move on Ricurs part of opening a text up to an indenite number of valid interpretations does not have the result of making its resulting depth structure more subjectiverather the other way around. The process of distanciation is effectively the guarantee that the arrived at construction is intersubjectively interchangeable. Secondly, the process of construction is shown to be dependant upon language, which in turn is shown to be in constant drift. The implication of this is that what counts as a valid interpretation of a text will necessarily change over time, and (conversely) the interpretation of poetic texts contribute to the drift of language, perpetuating the process. This means, in turn, that there is room for a concept of tradition or Wirkungsgeschichte in Ricurs theory, and that the control of this tradition in turn is shown to be (at least to some extent) inuenced by the degree of language competency, since Ricur posits that not all linguistic innovations are adopted into the langue, but that the development is guided by those with high esteem for language competency. Last, but not least of the features deducible from the structure laid out by Ricur, is the modication of the hermeneutic circle. What has happened to it is not so much a displacement, as the grafting on it of a structural bootstrapping procedure. To engage in a self-understanding exchange with the work presupposes a constricting construction of structural interrelations in the sense-potential of the text, and this in turn creates the room for an objective methodology within or in connection with the hermeneutic spiral movement.

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Conclusion

The Challenge of Ricurs Theory

Ricur suggests that his dialectic of explanation and understanding only may provide an answer to the extent that it constitutes the epistemological dimension of the existential dialectic. On the basis of this dialectic, productive distance means methodological distanciation (Ricur, 1976, p. 89). The existential concept of appropriation is enriched by the hermeneutic dialectic. To make ones own what was previously foreign, remains the ultimate aim for Ricur in all hermeneutics (Ricur, 1976, p. 91). Yet the appropriation of the meaning of a text by an actual reader places the interpretation under the empire of the nite capacities of understanding by this reader. And if we must believe in order to understand, then there is no difference between pre-understanding and mere projection of our prejudices. Clearly this cannot be a goal for Ricurs dialectic. The function of appropriation thus conceived, must be erroneous. And so it is. Far from saying that a subject already mastering his own way of being in the world projects the a priori of his self-understanding of the text and reads it into the text, Ricur presents interpretation as the process of disclosure of new modes of being giving the subject new capacity for knowing himself (Ricur, 1976, p. 94). If the reference of the text is the project of a world, then it is not the reader who primarily projects himself. The interpreter is rather enlarged in his capacity for self-projection by receiving a new mode of being from the text itself. Appropriation conceived in this mode ceases to appear as a kind of posession. Instead it implies a moment of disposession of the egoistic and narcissistic ego through the universality and atemporality implied by explanatory procedures. Only the interpretation that complies with the injunction of the text, initiates new self-understanding. In this self-understanding, Ricur opposes the self, which proceeds from understanding of the text, to the ego, which claims to precede it. It is the text, in other words, with its universal power of world

The Challenge of Ricurs Theory disclosure, which gives a self to the ego.

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Appendix

Formal Thesis Curriculum

Texts by Ricur
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning Complete text. (100 pages)

A Ricoeur Reader: Reection and Imagination Word, Polysemy, Metaphor: Creativity in Language (65-85) Writing as a Problem for Literary Criticism and Philosophical Hermeneutics (320-337) Between the Text and Its Readers (390-414)

Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation (131-144) What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding (145-164) Metaphor and the Central Problem of Hermeneutics (165-181) Appropriation (182-193) The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text (197-221)

84 Semeia 4, 1975 Biblical Hermeneutics (115 pages)

Formal Thesis Curriculum

The Conict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics Existence and Hermeneutics (3-24) Strucure, Word, Event (79-96) Structure and Hermeneutics (27-61) The Problem of Double Meaning as Hermeneneutic Problem and as Semantic Problem (62-78)

The Rule of Metaphor Study 7: Metaphor and Reference (216-256)

Total by Ricur: 500 pages

Secondary Literature

85

Secondary Literature
John B. Thompson: Critical Hermeneutics Part I, Section 2: Paul Ricur and Hermeneutic Phenomenology (36-70) Part II: Constructive Critique (113-213)

John C. Mallery, Roger Hurwitz and Gavan Duffy: Hermeneutics: From Textual Explication to Computer Understanding? Complete text. (32 pages) Published in The Encyclopedia of Articial Intelligence, Stuart. C. Shapiro (ed.), John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1987. Available for download at ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/jcma/papers/1986-ai-memo-871.ps.Z and for browsing at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/jcma/papers/1986-ai-memo-871/memo.html

Charles E. Reagan (ed.): Studies in the Philosophy of Paul Ricur Patrick L. Bourgeois: From Hermeneutics of Symbols to the Interpretation of Texts (83-95) David Pellauer: The Signicance of the Text in Paul Ricurs Hermeneutical Theory (97-114)

Richard Kearney (ed.): Paul Ricur: The Hermeneutics of Action Domenico Jervolino: Gadamer and Ricur on the Hermeneutics of Praxis (63-79)

Jeanne Evans: Paul Ricurs Hermeneutics of the Imagination Chapter III: Ricurs Turn to Hermeneutics (47-85) Chapter IV: Ricurs Rule of Metaphor and the Philosophy of the Imagination (87-149)

Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.): The Philosophy of Paul Ricur Don Ihde: Paul Ricurs Place in the Hermeneutic Tradition (59-70) Mario J. Valdz: Paul Ricur and Literary Theory (87-149)

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Formal Thesis Curriculum David Wood (ed.): On Paul Ricur: Narrative and Interpretation J. M. Bernstein: Grand Narratives (102-123) Don Ihde: Text and the New Hernemeutics (124-139)

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Wahrheit und Methode Zweiter Teil, II: Grundzge einer Theorie der hermeneutischen Erfahrung (270-384)

Opuscula 2, 1999 Arild Pedersen: On Different Kinds of Meaning and Discourse (10-23) Arild Pedersen: On the Distinction Between Understanding and Interpretation (24-36)

Total Secondary Literature: 509 pages Total Pages: 1009

Curriculum approved by Bjrn T. Ramberg April 2nd, 2001

Bibliography

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Gadamer, H.-G. (1990). Wahrheit und Methode, Volume 1. Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr. Hawkes, T. (1972). Methuen. Metaphor. Number 25 in The critical idiom. London:

Heidegger, M. (1993). Sein und Zeit. Tbingen: Niemeyer. Heidegger, M. (1994). Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Hirsch, E. D., J. (1967). Validity in Interpretation. Yale University Press. Ingarden, R. (1968). Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tbingen : Niemeyer. Japp, U. (1977). Hermeneutik: der theoretische Diskurs, die Literatur und die Konstruktion ihres Zusammenhanges in den philologischen Wissenschaften. Mnchen: W. Fink. Jngel, E. (1974). Metaphorische wahrheit. In Metapher: zur Hermeneutik religiser Sprache. Mnchen: Kaiser. Mooij, A. A. J. (1976). A study of metaphor: on the nature of metaphorical expressions, with special reference to their reference. Number 27 in NorthHolland linguistic series. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company. Pedersen, A. (1999). On different kinds of meaning and discourse. Opuscula (2). Popper, K. R. (1992). The Logic of Scientic Discovery. London: Routledge. Ricur, P. (1967). The Symbolism of Evil. Number 17 in Religious perspectives. New York: Harper & Row.

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Bibliography Ricur, P. (1970). Freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Ricur, P. (1974a). The Conict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ricur, P. (1974b). Structure, word, event. See Ricur (1974a), pp. 7996. Ricur, P. (1975). Biblical hermeneutics. Semeia (4), 27148. Ricur, P. (1976). Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press. Ricur, P. (1978a). Explanation and understanding: On some remarkable connnections among the theory of text, theory of action and theory of history. In C. E. Reagan and D. Stewart (Eds.), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work. Boston: Beacon Press. Ricur, P. (1978b). The metaphorical process as cognition, imagination and feeling. Critical Inquiry (On Metaphor) 5(1), 14359. Ricur, P. (1988). Time and Narrative, Volume I. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ricur, P. (1991). Word, polysemy, metaphor: Creativity in language. In M. J. Valds (Ed.), A Ricur Reader: Reection and Imagination. Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ricur, P. (1994). The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. London: Routledge. Ricur, P. (1995a). The hermeneutical function of distanciation. See Ricur (1995b), pp. 131144. Ricur, P. (1995b). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricur, P. (1995c). Metaphor and the central problem of hermeneutics. See Ricur (1995b), pp. 165181. Ricur, P. (1995d). The task of hermeneutics. See Ricur (1995b), pp. 4362. Ricur, P. (1995e). What is a text? explanation and understanding. See Ricur (1995b), pp. 145164. Ricur, P. (1998). Critique and Conviction. Polity Press. Ricur, P. (1999). Eksistens og Hermeneutikk. Oslo: Aschehoug. Translated by Hallvard H. Ystad. van Leeuwen, T. M. (1981). The surplus of meaning: ontology and eschatology in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Amsterdam studies in theology. Amsterdam: Rodopi.