The Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense 9781442675704

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
1. Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context
2. Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community
3. Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction
4. Period and Process: Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process
Notes
Glossary of Specialized Terms from Science and Philosophy
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

HERMENEUTICS OF POETIC SENSE: CRITICAL STUDIES OF LITERATURE, CINEMA, AND CULTURAL HISTORY

THEORY/CULTURE General Editors: Linda Hutcheon, Gary Leonard, Jill Matus, Janet Paterson, and Paul Perron

MARIO J. VALDES

Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense: Critical Studies of Literature, Cinema, and Cultural History

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1998 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-4243-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Valdes, Mario }., 1934Hermeneutics of poetic sense : critical studies of literature, cinema, and cultural history (Theory/culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-4243-0 1. Criticism. 2. Hermeneutics. criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN81.V331997

801'.95

3. Reader-response

C97-931317-1

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Para Maria Elena y Jordi y en memoria de mi madre Juanita San Martin de Valdes (1913-96) Tu vives siempre en tus actos. Con la punta de tus dedos pulsas al mundo, le arrancas auroras, triunfos, colores, alegrias: es tu musica. La vida es lo que tu tocas. Pedro Salinas

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Contents

PREFACE

IX

1: Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context Semiotics and Hermeneutics 3 Indeterminacy 16 Serendipity 29 2: Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community Memory 41 The Cinematic Subject as Other 52 Identity and the Community 63 3: Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction The Parodic Co-Text 75 The Game of Fiction 92 4: Period and Process: Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process Postmodernity in Spain and Latin America 112 The Literary Historical Process 124 NOTES

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GLOSSARY OF SPECIALIZED TERMS FROM SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY WORKS CITED INDEX

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Preface

In his Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics Jean Grondin writes: 'If one understands logos to mean talking with one another and thus mutual interdependence then the hermeneutical logos has its place in conversation' (138-9). For a quarter of a century it has been my privilege to have a continuing conversation with Paul Ricoeur on aspects of the culture we share. This book is not a record of this conversation, but rather a reflection on my part on what was said and what he questioned. The culmination of these reflections for Ricoeur was in June 1994, when he gave a lecture in Paris in celebration of the Ecole Normale Superieure's bicentenary. He spoke about the cultural dimensions of configuration in the dialectic of explanation and understanding. For my part I have written this book taking as the starting point Ricoeur's idea of 'making sense' of the multiple issues that we seek to appropriate into our world. The range of topics I treat in this book is broad but not random, for they were in part determined by the circumstances in Paris and Toronto during these years and they are all aspects of a postmodern cultural hermeneutics. Finally, I want to acknowledge that beyond the explicit reference to Ricoeur's work and to his keen rigorous analysis of cultural life there stands the ethico-moral stratum of his thought. I quote from Ricoeur's 'Intellectual Autobiography': The idea of a polysemy of otherness, articulated as we stated above between one's own body, the other, and the heart of hearts of moral conscience, still appears plausible to me, in contrast to so many philosophies that appeared to me to lack any distinctness in their use of otherness, making it unexpectedly, the same as itself (in Hahn, ed. The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 53). How would I describe my mode of criticism beyond the obvious link

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Preface

to hermeneutics and to Paul Ricoeur's philosophy? I think of my work as a philosophically informed response to a perceived issue or question in aesthetic experiences. Each enquiry begins not with a purported tabula rasa but out of a lifetime of reading experience, perceptive experience and, above all, reflection. The enquiry always begins for me with a question, issue, or problem in the artistic representation that concerns me. The response, out of habit and conviction, begins with formal analysis, follows with historical contextualization before turning to interpretation and reflection. There should be no question that my starting point for this book has been Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative and, specifically, his reworking of representation or mimesis in the realization of human temporality. The idea of prefiguration as the cultural matrix of language is the necessary basis for configuration as the verbal engagement of the other, and for refiguration as the reflective response that adds to the prefigurative depository of ideas, images, values, and relationships. In summary, this book 'posits a mode of literary criticism that is concerned with the relationship between the text and its readers. The literary text remains the mediator in the process of the fusion of present meaning and past significance' (279). I write as a literary critic and my position is drawn from Ricoeur's hermeneutics. The idea of literary criticism that I have developed has received a public reply by Ricoeur. I cite from his 'Reply to Mario J. Valdes' (283-4): Criticism exists because this shared meaning among readers is not self-evident... Literature itself, even in the restricted framework of the three works that I examined [Time and Narrative, II] confirms this. The spontaneous experience of time is extraordinarily diverse. Within the novel, this experience is diversified even further by the dramas enacted; at times, it bursts into fragments without hope of redemption, without any expectation of 'time regained.' How could literature not contribute, by virtue of its critical power, to making more precarious and therefore more controversial - even incommunicable - the experiences of temporality rendered even more discordant by literature? It is here that the notion of 'meaningful shared commentary' [Valdes, 'Paul Ricoeur and Literary Theory' in Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, 275] is put to a harsh test. This sharing is and will continue to be a confrontation. The critic can only help the reader to clarify his or her own reactions, to understand the event of reading as, at one and the same time, an alteration of world view and a transformation of self-understanding. Added to this confrontation between contemporaries is that

Preface

xi

between generations of readers. The historicality of readers is intertwined with that of texts, creating a two dimensional intertextuality: in coexistence and in succession. The help offered by the critic can finally be placed, as Mario Valdes suggests, under the sign of play. After all, it is in the realm of the imaginary that readers are players, and, as players, participants in the game. The idea of play is essential in correcting whatever aspect of hostility might remain in the very idea of the conflict of interpretations. For it is still together that the readers play. It is in this serene sense that the aesthetic experience is shared and that one can still speak of a community of readers. Confronted, finally, with the accusation of inconsistency, the literary critic can at least call upon what seems to me to be an ethic as much as an epistemology: coherence with one's stated principles, the clear intention of one's aims, the vow to be useful to one's readers, the concern to write well. Then the critic can claim without arrogance, and without resignation, to serve as a guide for judging the achievements of all the other interpreters. This is the forthright manner of 'celebrat[ing] the participation of text and readers in the community of commentary.' Acknowledgments For permission to reprint, the author is grateful to: New Directions Publishing Corporation and David Higham Associates for 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' from The Poems of Dylan Thomas (copyright 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corporation); and to Jose Emilio Pacheco, Octavio Paz, and the heirs of Rosario Castellanos, Pedro Salinas, and Juan Ramon Jimenez for permission to translate and print selections from their published poetry. 'When god decided to invent/ copyright 1944, ©1972,1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Ciimmings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

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HERMENEUTICS OF POETIC SENSE

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1

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context

Semiotics and Hermeneutics The starting point of this study is a review of the classical problem of meaning in order to bring to light the relative cognitive and ontological positions taken on this issue by semioticians and hermeneuticians, with some assistance from philosophy and experimental physics.1 It will be noted that meaning in poetry and the hermeneutic position are privileged, and this is so because of my own research, but my objective is to shed some light on postmodern thinking and the place of both semiotics and hermeneutics in it. The major significance of semiotics in literary criticism in post-World War years is an undisputed historical fact. But fifty years after the semiotic theories of Charles S. Peirce were reintroduced to his native country by Roman Jakobson, and Czech theory was first discussed by Rene Wellek (in Wellek and Warren, 242), it is important to assess how this rational enterprise fares in a postmodern climate of radical scepticism. At stake is the place of formal paradigms in the face of a postmodern deconstruction of all paradigms. The dismissal of formal modes of enquiry is usually based on the charge that semiotics is not sufficiently concerned with the actual use of language, and an even more serious challenge is the rejection of all consideration of meaning as related to norms and reference. The full development of this critique is far beyond the limits of this study, but I can give an outline of my response. This essay is not historical; however, since knowledge of the history of the problem is essential for understanding the significance of new approaches, references are made to classical theories, and interpretations are offered without any pretension that they are either exhaustive or

4 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense definitive, since I consider both possibilities to be not only utopic but hopelessly naive undertakings. I argue here that the problem of meaning, though often appearing as a metaphysical question of universals is, in fact, part of the more general problem of language as a collectively generated, individually realized, mode of living. In other words, my thesis is that the meaning of meaning lies in the relationship between individual discourse and the community of speakers. My examination of shared meaning in literary criticism is an endeavour to retain the idea of knowledge in the face of Derrida's critique. For if semantic elements are indeterminate and in change, all statements are abstractions useful primarily for purposes of constructing some extension of authority. Therefore, in a post-structuralist context, discourse can be deconstructed because the origin of meaning in language is indeterminate. Every serious contemporary theory of interpretation must respond to this challenge and therefore so must I. Plato throughout his work assumes that whenever we apply the same name univocally to a number of things, this name is the name of some entity that things have in common. Aristotle writes that a noun is proper when it has but a single sense (On Interpretation 17). In response, Derrida writes: 'Univocity is the essence or better the telos of language. No philosophy, as such, has ever renounced this Aristotelian ideal. This ideal is philosophy. Aristotle recognizes that a word may have several meanings. This is a fact' (1982: 247). But this fact has right of entry into language only to the extent to which polysemia is finite, the different significations are limited in number, and above all sufficiently distinct, each remaining one and identifiable. Language is language only in so far as it can master and analyse polysemia. Derrida quotes Aristotle: 'If, however, they [meanings] were not limited but one were to say that the word has an infinite number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible, for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning, reasoning with other people and indeed with oneself, has been annihilated for it is impossible to think anything if we do not think one thing, but if this is possible, one name might be assigned to this thing. Let it be assumed then' (ibid., 248). Derrida has taken us to the position of questioning Aristotelian claims to knowledge, recognizing that utility does not endow the truth-claim with validity. Derrida writes: The entire teleology of meaning, which constructs the philosophical concept of metaphor, coordinates metaphor with the manifestation of truth, with

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 5 the production of truth as presence without veil, with the reappropriation of a full language without syntax' (ibid., 270). The counter-argument I will begin to outline draws primarily from Philosophical Investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Time and Narrative of Paul Ricoeur, but also seeks to establish a common cause with contemporary theoretical physics, especially chaos theory. Wittgenstein reminds us of the essential flexibility of language usage, which is central to this enquiry: Tor I can give the concept "number" rigid limits in this way, that is, use the word "number" for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier' (1953, no. 68). The actual usage can vary as widely as 'the probability of an event in the absolute square of a complex number' (Feynman, 63) to 'my number is up/ the popular metaphor for anticipated death, or Wallace Stevens' 'A swarming of number over number, not / One foot approaching, one uplifted arm' (296). Wittgenstein in effect points out that meaning is determined by the rules of the game and not by the nature of things and, since there are more situations than the rules cover, the possibility of polysemic expression is greater than univocal sense, but both are part of our reality. We can begin to work on our response to Derrida by saying that meaning can be determinate or indeterminate depending on the criterion one is using in the designation and that both determinate and indeterminate meanings can be shared. As is well known, the basis of post-structuralism, whether deconstructive, psychoanalytic, or hermeneutic, stems from the Saussurian distinction between signifier and signified (65). As long as the distinction holds as valid, the structuralist paradigm is operative, but as soon as it is questioned we are into post-structuralism. Perceptive commentators like Jonathan Culler have pointed out that the roots of post-structuralism were already in de Saussure's program since he insisted that the signified is a concept and not an object (28). The next step, which was not taken until the mid-sixties and which turned out to be a decisive one, was to consider the signified as another signifier in turn. If the signified is another signifier, then its own signified is also a signifier and we are into a chain of signifiers and, consequently, all determination of meaning can no longer be considered fixed. The meaning we construe to any statement or any text is tentative; indeterminacy is controlled by a system of signs we accept as determinate in order to establish a temporary identity to the text. This question of variable and stable identity of texts becomes

6 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense a matter of political concern since nothing remains as absolute; every text can be subverted from the inside (Hutcheon 1989, 2-10; Valdes 1985, 297-311). I am, therefore, proposing that the common denominator of all post-structuralism is that order is an open-ended catalytic agent rather than an isomorphic referential parallel. The similarity of post-structuralist theory to contemporary theoretical physics is so striking that one can hardly attribute it to coincidences. When James Feibleman writes: 'existence is a condition in which order fares only partly well because mixed with disorder' (3), he is pointing to the one conceptual area shared by both theoretical endeavours: the concept of order. The concept of order as a factor in human action functions as a paradigm for control over contingent circumstance. Some years ago in conversation, Jorge Luis Borges and I discussed the idea of order. I asked him about his sense of order and randomness. His answers have remained a fundamental part of my thinking. We were sitting in a nearempty classroom in the university where he was scheduled to speak. He turned to a wastebasket located near the door; it was half-full with debris. He asked if there was any order in the wastebasket. I said that if there was, it was not apparent to me, that it appeared to be the normal random collection of midday garbage. He said that my response in itself could be construed as a sense of order in what I considered to be normal midday garbage, but then he took the basket and turned it over on the table. The empty milk and juice containers, the empty lunch bags, folded newspapers, etc. spilled out. 'Look at it now on the table. Have I not created a special order by putting it on the table?' Order, therefore, is an imaginative configuration that deals in systems and totalizes things. Without the things, garbage in this case, or a system like language, there can be no order except as an idea, a mental need for sense-giving configuration. Furthermore, he stated there can be no order unless there was, and is, the possibility of disorder. The two are dialectically linked. Now, then, he added, if we were to put up a mirror to our table display of garbage we would have begun the process of duplication that is art. It was only a few months later that I read a paper by Paul Weiss in The Concept of Order, edited by Paul G. Kuntz. Weiss writes: 'Disorder is an excess of order; it occurs when there are too many orders imposed upon a set of entities ... Order is selective and restrictive; it provides a channel through which to move from one entity to another; it helps to organize things in such a way that they can be understood. Disorder instead provides too many channels through which to move from one entity to

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 7 another, too many alternative ways in which to understand' (16-17). Weiss then proceeds in the next paragraph to make an observation about the sense of order and disorder much in the way I had discussed with Borges: A case of disorder would be a heap, a miscellany, a heterogeneity of entities which are not similar in color, origin, shape, place, meaning, or value. These entities logicians call members of a class; mathematicians say that they make up an aggregate or a set. Though distinct, they are sufficiently joined to be together in one group. But the ways in which they can be related are too many. It is a disorder, contrasting with the usual arrangement of the positive integers 1, 2, 3, 4,5 ... which offers only one way to move from one number to another. (17)

Of course, Weiss was not concerned either with the spatial order created by Borges or with mirror duplication, which as I have suggested are part of the imaginative order of configuration.2 Therefore, when we speak of order we are also speaking of disorder, and order is always a configuration of something actual or virtual. Although no one particular order is required, there must be some way of grasping the whole. Order 'is a means by which we can move clearly and easily from one entity to another. If we get rid of all particular orders we are left with a set of aggregated elements which can be interrelated in an endless number of ways' (ibid.). The spatial order of the debris on the table is an order of spatial configuration as in the plastic work of art: a configuration of space. The mirror duplication brings into the discussion the whole spectrum of representation and the inversion of the double. The idea of order is imposed by the knowing imagination of those who look upon it as spacial configuration. Why, we should ask, need this be so? Why do we impose order on objects? This imposed order does not invent relationships but rather takes up one aspect of things and ignores others. Again Weiss comments: the order one tries to impose is an order that is present in the original conglomeration of orders. The imposed order is selected out of the indefinitely many that are present. My response to the above query is that sense demands order. As Wittgenstein states, where there is sense there must be order (1953, no. 105) or: 'confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work' (ibid., no. 132) or, in our terms, making sense. But let us enquire how is it that we impose an order onto a poetic text in our quest for sense, metaphorical sense. In 1967 Octavio Paz wrote

8 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense the following poem-letter about writing poetry to the Spanish poet Leon Felipe: Poetic writing is learning to read the empty spaces of writing in writing not traces of what we were paths toward what we are.

(my translation)3

Line 1, Toetic writing is/ can be read as a metapoetic fold; it states an already-always circle and marks the absence of an origin. The signifiers are the signified in this endless repetition. Line 2, 'learning to read/ at first appears to be a referential statement that makes sense outside the poem because it alludes to a tradition that privileges writers and readers as the custodians of the book. But this security is deceptive and shortlived for the line deconstructs itself; it is not that writing is learned by reading, but that poetic writing is learned by reading what is not written, the empty spaces, the void, the absence that lies behind the presence of the script: 'learning to read / the empty spaces of writing / in writing/ The blank of writing is found in writing itself as the absence that makes the presence possible. 'Poetic writing is' comes to us both as a line in a poem and as an elaboration of differences. What is said can be said only because of what was not said, and what was not said is contained in what was said. In other words, once again we are faced with the concept of the fold in which there is no beginning and no end, only repetition.4 Line 5, 'not traces of what we were/ also appears to be referential and thus invites closure. Apparently the prevailing ambiguity from empty spaces or blankness that is in writing is dissipated, by virtue of an analogy between absence and a forgotten past; the traces of those who lived but have not written are all that is left by the countless dead. But once again the text deconstructs itself in lines 6 and 7. The negation of trace of the past is the path of the present and therein appears the third fold; in this case it is a time fold. Our trace of the past and our rejection of it is the present of living, an already always movement forward. Deconstructive readings, of course, exploit the multiple dualities positioned on opposite sides of the copula as a pure sign of predication. Poetic writing is identified with reading the absences of poetic writing.

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 9 Therefore identification does not distinguish, differentiate, or establish uniqueness through the copulative action; it does the opposite, it merges the two acts into one, which sinks into absence. Thus the identifying power of the copula is turned in on itself, deconstructing the ostensive aim of the enunciation of giving singularity to the subject. The second and third lines also self-destruct, for what is to be read is not the stated, but the not stated. The absent is the object of this reading, not that which is present. Therefore the reading of absence destroys the response to the written presence. Of course, there can be no absence without presence, but the absence that is to be read denies the very presence that makes it possible. In short, reading becomes creative negativity. The last opposition turns on the reader and juxtaposes the traces of what we were to the being that we are. There is a chiasmus of caminos (paths). However, since what we are is fully dependent on these traces of what we were, the being of what we are does not yet exist fully, but can only be sought after. Reality becomes a constant flow out of nothingness into becoming. At this point it is profitable for us to compare random occurrence with the force of purpose in human perspective. It would be a complete muddle if we reverted to logocentric thinking that opposes chance and design or purpose. The act of turning over the contents of the wastebasket is certainly a purposeful action yet the contents of the basket are the result of random occurrences. But my point is that one is necessary to the other. My purpose in examining a miscellaneous gathering of objects could not be effected without random collection. The words of a poem are certainly carefully and purposely selected by the poet, but the response to these words cannot in any way be controlled by the writer. Each reader responds given her or his repertoire. Wittgenstein puts it in these words in Zettel: 'A poet's words can pierce us. And that is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformably to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words' (1970, no. 155). This commentary succinctly sums up the relation of purpose to chance. Let us see how the two, chance and design, come together perfectly by examining another poem by Octavio Paz, 'Apremio' (Compulsion), from Salamandra (1962). It runs and lingers in my head slow and hurtling ahead in my blood

10 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense the hour passes without passing and in me sculpts itself and vanishes. I am bread for its hunger I am the heart it leaves behind the hour passes without passing and this that I write disintegrates it Love that passes and affixes sorrow in me battles in me reposes the hour passes without passing body of quicksilver and ashes Gouges my chest and does not touch me perpetual weightless stone the hour passes without passing and it is an inflamed wound The day is short, the hour immense hour without myself and its sorrow the hour passes without passing and in me flees and is chained.

(my translation)5

The five stanzas of the poem are based on the oxymoron; a series of oxymorons creates an order out of the disorder of internal contradiction. The hour passes without passing, it runs yet awaits, it sculpts yet vanishes. The self is in battle and repose, the body is quicksilver and ashes; nothing can be more contradictory than the empirical designation that it gouges the chest without touching it and that it is a perpetual weightless stone, but the contradiction is also internalized as the self flees and remains chained. The hour that causes this contradiction further turns the self into its bread and its heart and the writing of the poem itself disintegrates time. This series of contradictions, oxymoronic figures, cannot have predictable responses since their very force is tensional explosion, as Poulet would say. These elements in Weiss's terms lead to disorder because they have too many possibilities, not because they do not have any. In other words, polysemic indetermination is a phenomenon of disorder within the ordered sequence of the poem. But we should go further and probe into how the oxymoronic verse causes disorder and how we can respond to it in critical terms.

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 11 The scientific concept of strange attractors was developed by Edward Lorenz in 1963 in order to respond to the instability in the behaviour of the earth's atmosphere. Lorenz's model uses a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach. The first observation is that the system continuously expends energy and does not gain in momentum; if it were not for new and external forces of energy it would reach a dead end. These points of major dissipation of energy are attractors. There is a convergence of energy that cancels itself out. But these points of convergence are neither stable (that is, always the same in their use of energy) nor are they periodic (they are temporally unstable since they can come and go in the most unpredictable ways). It has become obvious that these points are called strange attractors because they are points of convergence, but they are also radically unstable. Stephen H. Kellert describes this phenomenon aptly: 'This apparent contradiction is reconciled by one of the main geometric features of strange attractors: a combination of stretching and folding. The action of a chaotic system will take nearby points and stretch them apart in a certain direction, thus creating the local divergence responsible for unpredictability. But the system also acts to "fold" together points that are at some distance causing a convergence of trajectories in a different direction' (14). The reading of 'Apremio' (Compulsion) exemplifies our concern with sense as a creation of order and, in this case, a new sense of order both personal and shared. Let us examine the poem, line by line, to expand and clarify these observations. I cite each line of the poem in the original and then give my translation and my description of its function as a strange attractor. 'Corre y se demora en mi frente' (It runs and lingers in my head): The oxymoron is made even more complex because the subject is absent. The contradiction of running and lingering is a mental state wherein an unspecified subject performs opposite and self-contradictory activities. The disorder is unquestionable because the unspecified mental activity rushes ahead and yet stays, creating an unstable condition. '[L]enta y se despena en mi sangre' (slow and hurtling ahead in my blood): The oxymoronic pair of the first line is now underscored but in reverse order. The unnamed is both slow and hurtles ahead in the self's blood. The attractor is now fully operational. It brings forth the sense of passion attributed to 'being in someone's blood' or 'boiling blood.' The metaphor of blood as emotion works in opposition to 'head' of the first line, the metaphors of thought and passion thereby making the oxymoronic opposition operative in both human faculties. The attractor

12 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense has now pulled in the most extensive repertoire of behavioural metaphors, but it is still unstable because of the contradiction and the still unspecified subject. The possibilities of response are enormous. '[L]a hora pasa sin pasar' (the hour passes without passing): The oxymoronic opposition finally gets a subject: an hour, a designated segment of measured human time. The time of an hour passes as it must do if it is more than a designation and yet it also remains because it is a word, a written word. The fixity of writing is contrasted with its meaning, which is movement itself. The attractor's designated noun, hour, adds the greater enigma of human time as lived experience and as verbal sign and perhaps concept. The richness of the possibilities defies a referential system of attributes. However, it appears to be located at least for the moment as the inner contradiction of the self. '[Y] en mi se esculpe y desvanece' (and in me sculpts itself and vanishes): The fourth and last line of the first stanza augments the sense of location of the attractor as its oxymoronic force is making itself, leaving its mark in the self, but also vanishing without a trace. Are we now confronted with an extreme form of assimilation in which time both makes its mark in the self and disappears as a separate entity? Such is the enigma of the first stanza. 'Yo soy el pan para su hambre' (I am bread for its hunger): The self has emerged by self-identification as the sustenance to be devoured by time. The turnabout that makes the self food for time rather than time as human time the consumption of the self, once again radically destabilizes what had been a precarious situation for the attractor as the internal time consciousness for the self. '[Y]o el corazon que deshabita' (I am the heart it leaves behind): The attractor adds the repertoire of dwelling-place; the self's heart as the habitat of time has been abandoned. The instability grows since the very sense of human time is in the abode of the self. Time outside the self is what? '[L]a hora pasa sin pasar' (the hour passes without passing): The now familiar refrain is repeated as it will be in each stanza, but it should be noted that it comes in the third line rather than the customary last line as, for example, in Dylan Thomas' "And death shall have no dominion.' This position is also a destabilizing aspect of the poem. '[Y] esto que escribo lo deshace' (and this that I write disintegrates it): This is perhaps the most challenging of all the lines in the poem. By turning toward the metapoetic realm of self-reference the writing is both fixing time and negating it, but the indeterminacy has been enlarged for

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 13 in Spanish the noun horn would be referred to by the pronoun la, lo cannot refer to horn but may refer to time, tiempo, or even to 'this' (esto). Therefore the writing can be the disintegration of time or of writing itself. The second strange attractor has emerged: the insatiable hunger, the emptiness of the uninhabited and the writing that destroys it; this is internal time consciousness. 'Amor que pasa y pena fija' (Love that passes and affixes sorrow): With this first line of the third stanza some of the earlier ambivalence seems to have dissipated. It now appears that the hidden cause of the turmoil has been a lost or unrequited love, which plunges us into the mundane arena of normal human affairs. The attractor has lost its strangeness because of the poetic canon replete with such oxymoronic figures as 'I die because I do not die' or 'the coldness of your disdain consumes me in flames,' etc. In other words, the attractor is now directed and channelled in a given direction. '[E]n mi combate en mi reposa' (in me battles in me reposes): The second line reaffirms the canonical direction of the first line and of the entire stanza. '[L]a hora pasa sin pasar' (the hour passes without passing): The refrain also is now taken along in the canonical direction. '[C]uerpo de azogue y de ceniza' (body of quicksilver and ashes): The stanza ends with the stable attractor of love consuming the self and also overtaking the entire poem. The question now is whether the powerful stable canonical attractor of lost love will act like a centripetal vortex for all the referents in the poem. 'Cava mi pecho y no me toca' (Gouges my chest and does not touch me): The fourth stanza begins with another oxymoron but this one does not continue the development of the stable referential attractor. Once again there is a challenge to sense. The harm inflicted on the self can be causally contradictory or contradictory in its effects but it cannot be selfcontradictory without cancelling itself out. I can love and hate, be aflame and yet in control, but I cannot be gouged out and not be touched at the same time if the attractor is to remain stable. Another strange attractor has appeared that stops the referential direction the poem had begun to take in the preceding stanza. '[P]iedra perpetua que no pesa' (perpetual weightless stone): The strange attractor has now opened up numerous possibilities. The weightless stone is always there like presence and like presence has a thousand faces, all necessary in order to make sense but, nevertheless, is an imposition. '[L]a hora pasa sin pasar' (the hour passes without passing): The

14 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense oxymoronic refrain has now a renewed sense of destabilization. Time passes since it is movement itself in human consciousness, yet a time remembered is time that does not pass and remains. The aporia of time passing even as I am remembering time past and stationary is clearly before us. '[Y] es una herida que se encona' (and it is an inflamed wound): The self's wound inflamed returns some semblance of sense and stability to the stanza but not enough to control it. 'El dia es breve la hora inmensa' (the day is short, the hour immense): This inversion of duration puts all of the emphasis on the perceiver, for the day and the hour are neither short nor immense; they are always the same twenty-four hours and sixty minutes. When one is waiting an hour can appear to be immense or when one is pressed to do a great deal, a day can be all too brief. By shifting the focus from time to time consciousness, the inversion renews the strength of the earlier stanzas. '[H]ora sin mi yo con su pena' (hour without myself and its sorrow): The hour without the self is an hour not experienced; it is an arbitrary designation to measure activity. If the hour is not experienced by the self, who bears the fixed sorrow of the third stanza, it is not conscious time. '[L]a hora pasa sin pasar' (the hour passes without passing): The refrain has come to a clear resting place in this last stanza, for the hour that passes without passing is the hour that has not been experienced. '[Y] en mi se fuga y se encadena' (and in me flees and is chained): The strange attractor from the first stanza is renewed with this last line. Fleeing and restrained time is in the self and his internal time consciousness has exploded into the metaphor for human action. The four stanzas and twenty lines of the poem provide us with formal sequence that has a marked similarity to other poems by Octavio Paz that utilize contradiction and oxymoron. In order to map out the sense-making possibilities of this configuration of strange attractors and stable attractors we need a conceptual space encompassing all the referential attractors of the poem. Each one will be a point in the conceptual space that can be related to any number of the paradigmatic sets that each other attractor contains. The reconstruction of the attractors I have done above creates a configuration of possible relationships or, in terms of physics, a simulated phase space. This map of possibilities takes each as a topological point with a set of coordinates to the other attractors and each with a varying length of paradigmatic attributes. The linkage between the attractors is mapped out, but the possibility of which of the numerous attributes will be connected is random depending on the reading.

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 15 The problem of meaning is in fact the problem of representation - the problem of representing the heterogeneous diversity of types of knowledge in the different contexts of understanding. We understand and interpret texts to the extent that we are able to contextualize them. On this most important point, semiotics, hermeneutics, and experimental physics are very close. The common concern is to connect understanding to contextual pre-understanding through the work of the process of enquiry. The postmodern intellectual revolution of the end of the millennium, which has been subject to journalistic caricature as a breakdown of all rules and norms, is in fact a time of realism and an acutely self-conscious use of reason. If modernism was the age of arrogance and, in literary studies, the ultimate arrogance was the fable of definitive interpretations, then postmodernism will yet come to be known as the age of acknowledged limitations. The latest inclusion into the spirit of postmodernity is mathematics. John Morgan writes in Scientific American: 'Mathematics, that most tradition-bound of intellectual enterprises, is undergoing profound changes. For millennia, mathematicians have measured progress in terms of what they can demonstrate through proofs that is, a series of logical steps leading from a set of axioms to an irrefutable conclusion. Now the doubts riddling modern human thought have finally infected mathematics. Mathematicians may at last be forced to accept what many scientists and philosophers already have admitted: their assertions are, at best, only provisionally true, true until proved false' (October 1993, 93). Has postmodern debate so undermined the build-up of scholarly knowledge that we have come to accept any interpretation as valid? Or, to put it differently, is there any interpretation that can be rejected as false? There are two classes of possibilities for error in interpretation. The questions being asked of the text can be muddled, self-contradictory, or inconsistent with their own presuppositions, which can make them invalid. A second class of errors is the result of a lack of formal response to the text itself that is a failure to make sense. There are, of course, performance texts that change from one performance to the next, but at each performance, as willed action, they have been constituted with specific formal features that must be concretized by a reader. The first class of errors can be addressed through hermeneutic commentary, the second through semiotic analysis. As I have argued here, there is a strict complementarity between hermeneutics and semiotics in postmodern interpretation. Postmodernity, therefore, should be construed as a time of a questioning of authority, an increased conflict of interpreta-

16 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense tions and the acceptance of more than one valid interpretation of the literary text. The philosophical foundations for this period have been developing throughout the twentieth century, but the breakdown of the legitimizing narrative of western philosophy did not come until the decade following the Second World War. Writing today, within planning projection of the end of the twentieth century and the millennium, we can assess the fallout of the debates of the immediate past. The fact that multiple answers are entertained as valid meanings of the same phenomenon does not condemn our thinking to unrestricted relativism or irrationalism. By having a clearer sense of how we interpret texts and human action, in general, we have become both more modest in our claims and more daring in our critique. Rational proof has been given its primary function of being one tool among others in the explanatory dialectic with understanding. It should not be a surprise therefore that in this climate of rapid change, intense debate, and rejection of all unscrutinized claims to authority, we should be not only involved in post-colonial discourse as a decentred discursive mode, but also recognize the emergence of a postMarxist position and a post-feminist stance. What I have been looking at in this study are the ontological issues that are the ground rules for our debates. In order to play the game of life effectively, we must begin with knowing the rules of the game it has been our fortune to fall into and then play. Indeterminacy I want to develop the deep link that runs from the imaginative configuration of phenomena in experimental science and the educated imagination that is called into play when we read poetry. I begin with commentaries made by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. On the strength of these observations, I go on to examine the process of investigation Ricoeur has named configuration, and do so in both physics and poetry. One of Wittgenstein's most striking observations on the topic of imagination is that it is the creative act of living a form of life. There is, he writes, a deep analogy between aesthetic appreciation and having understood some problem, question, or issue. A poem makes an impression on us as we read it. 'Do you feel the same while you read it as when you read something indifferent?' - How have I learnt to

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 17 answer this question? Perhaps I shall say 'Of course not!' - which is as much as to say: this takes hold of me, and the other not. 'I experience something different' - And what kind of thing? - I can give no satisfactory answer. For the answer I give is not what is most important. - 'But didn't you enjoy it during the reading?' Of course - for the opposite answer would mean: I enjoyed it earlier or later, and I don't want to say that. But now, surely you remember sensations and images as you read, and they are such as to connect up with the enjoyment, with the impression. - But they got their significance only from the surroundings: through the reading of this poem, from my familiarity with its language, with its metre and with innumerable associations. (1970, no. 170)

This is a view of poetry that phenomenological hermeneutics fully accepts, but the question of how an aesthetic appreciation of a poem, or a painting, musical composition, or other work of art is similar to understanding a problem in physics, and how it is different, still awaits an answer. In physics, is there a difference between meaning that can be explained and another meaning that is not part of the explanation? The use of language in the poem appears to be quite different from the use of language in scientific explanation. Wittgenstein continues: 'But isn't understanding shewn e.g. in the expression with which someone reads the poem ... Certainly. But what is the experience during the reading?' (ibid., no. 171). "The peculiar experience of meaning is characterized by the fact that we come out with an explanation and use the past tense: just as if we were explaining the meaning of a word for practical purposes' (ibid., no. 178). Wittgenstein is going further than any philosopher before him. He is prepared to say that the inquiry of an 'as if' situation rests wholly on the possibility of shifting between simile and reality, of moving from a hypothetical comparison to a judgment about phenomena of reality. The main point Wittgenstein is making is that the imagination not only plays a primary role in aesthetic appreciation, but is also the essential foundation of all understanding. The reader, or spectator, of a work of art must have the imaginative capacity to concretize what the text or the work proposes. Similarly the scientist must be able to consider a 'what if situation in the laboratory in relation to the physical world in order to question that reality. One step beyond experimental science lie the philosophical questions about order and disorder in the world we live in, of chance and randomness as opposed by necessity, and finally, of freedom and determinism.

18 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense These are but convenient binary oppositions that enlarge the arena of enquiry; they cannot offer us a direction, for if one thing is clear in this enquiry both from a humanistic point of view as well as a scientific one, it is that we live in a dynamic unfolding and the universe must be seen with the same kind of dynamic understanding that Wittgenstein and Ricoeur have proposed. But there is another side to scientific research, which can be seen as an ideology of domination over natural phenomena. E. Schachtel puts it this way: 'Modern natural science has as its main goal prediction, i.e., the power to manipulate objects in such a way that certain predicted events will happen. This means that only those aspects of the object are deemed relevant which make it suitable for such manipulation or control' (171). This view, which may be overstated and not representative of science today, nevertheless has prevailed in the minds of most non-scientists until only recently. A profile of Philip W. Anderson characterized him as 'writing with lyrical fervor on how the interplay of order and disorder found in condensed-matter systems can serve as a metaphor for life' (Horgan 1994, 34). Part of the explanation for this crossing of boundaries by a Nobel Prize physicist may be explained by his early research experience: 'At Bell Labs, theorists such as Anderson were encouraged to work closely with an experimentalist. In the 1950s his partner, George Feher, found that once impurities in semiconductors reached a certain density, they suddenly became barriers to the conductance of electrons. The results disagreed with current theory, and so most theorists ignored them. Not Anderson. He showed that such results could be a generic property of a lattice whose atoms are randomly arranged' (ibid., 34). The drive to impose stasis on dynamic systems is fundamental for the search for sense. If the phenomenon is always moving, stop it, in order to examine it and perhaps understand what it is. But the idea never arose that perhaps the system on which stasis had been imposed was no longer the same system as the dynamic one. This blindness toward dynamics in general generated a series of metaphors about life. If the aim was for a superior life-form to control and dominate an inferior one in general terms of nature, would it not be a basic expansion to go from the lower animals to humans who were different - West Africans and natives to the Americas or, in another context, women? Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature has drawn the parallel between 'wild' nature and women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1526) gives a remarkably direct view of humanity's relation to nature and, specifically, to that basic medieval concept of

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 19 fortune. A turn of bad or good fortune is largely dependent on control and domination. It is no accident that fortune is allegorically depicted as a woman. Machiavelli makes the connection explicit in chapter 25 of The Prince: I conclude then that fortune varying and men remaining fixed in their ways, they are successful so long as these ways conform to circumstances, but when they are opposed then they are unsuccessful. I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for for tune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly. And therefore, like a woman, she is always a friend to the young, because they are less cautious, fiercer, and master her with greater audacity. (94; emphasis mine)

The metaphors we live by come about through the narrativity of life; the Renaissance concepts of an incipient science depicted nature as an unpredictable force, threatening, sometimes wild, that had to be tamed, dominated by science. Stephen H. Kellert expresses this in a key passage: One of the strongest metaphors operating in science is the image of the universe as a machine and the scientist as an investigator seeking to discover its hidden workings. This picture of the world arose during the scientific revolution and answered pressing needs for social order, and it bequeathed to science a concern for certainty, law and predictability. But the vision of the world as a clockwork mechanism implies that physical matter is inert and dead. Thus the metaphor of the world as machine functioned as justification for power and dominion over nature. (156)

The implicit hierarchy in these images is still a part of our world with the notions of the purported inability of women to master mathematics and the statistically generated hypothesis of the superiority of specific races. For the moment, I postpone dealing with the important question of the differences between the use of the imagination in aesthetic appreciation and in scientific understanding. We must first attend to each in turn, with close scrutiny of how they create before elaborating on what separates them. I return to this part of the Wittgenstein proposition in my conclusion. In 1977 Albert Libchaber, a French physicist at the Ecole Normale Superieure, set out to build an experiment that would demonstrate the onset of turbulence. Fluid motion, from smooth flow to turbulence, is

20 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense characterized as motion through space. Its complexity appears, therefore, as spatial complexity, its disturbances and vortices as a spatial chaos. But Libchaber was looking for a map of change over time. Time was the added dimension, it was to be the playing field, and the means through which change could be examined as a process with its own internal rhythms. This experiment is a model of the 'as if imagination in science. Liquid helium was placed in a highly controlled situation at a temperature of almost absolute zero. The helium began rolling inside a cell the size of a lemon seed, which was inside a vacuum container inside a nitrogen bath. There were two microscopic temperature probes in the sapphire upper surface of the cell. The output of the temperature probes was recorded continuously by a pen plotter. This miniature construction took Libchaber and his assistant, a French engineer, Jean Maurer, months of painstaking work to build and two years of detailed observation to come up with results. The construction and execution of the experiment is in the highest traditions of great physics; the idea behind dynamic form is pure poetry. The title of the experiment, which was published in 1982, is 'Experimental Study of Hydrodynamic Instabilities: Helium in a Small Box/ It is the equivalent in science of a haiku in the tradition of Basho. It has an explicit direct meaning, but has a far greater significance when the scientific imagination dwells on it. The experiment showed the patterns that announce the onset of turbulence. Libchaber succeeded in taking a scientifically precise calculation of flow. In classical philosophy, flow is a platonic idea that reveals that change in itself is possible because of some reality independent of the particular instant. Libchaber writes: 'There has been since the eighteenth century some kind of dream that science was missing the evolution of shape in space and the evolution of shape in time. If you think of flow, you can think of a flow in many ways, flow in economics or a flow in history. First it may be laminar, then bifurcating to a more complicated state, perhaps with oscillations. Then it may be chaotic' (259). A universal of natural shapes, similarities across scales, the recursive power of flows within flows are some of these greater significances that lie just beyond Libchaber's elegant haiku in physics. His experiment succeeded in isolating the first period-doubling and the next and the next. The bifurcations produced a geometry with precise scaling. He would remember the feeling years later, the eerie sense of being witness to flow revealing itself through one bifurcation after another and then coming to the realization that he was seeing an infinite cascade unfold in front of him. In our terms, he had moved from the imaginative 'what if experimental construct of the physicist to the

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 21 reality of dynamic systems or, in poetic terms, he had gone from writing the haiku to getting a glimpse of flow. The construction of the experiment called for the imaginative utilization of the experimental physicist's professional skill. All details had been calibrated to the maximum precision not unlike the writing of an eloquent haiku. But my interest here is primarily with Libchaber's analysis and, subsequently, his explanation of the experimental data. The temporal factor, which started with the extended observation of bifurcations in motion, had to be imagined as a series, but as an infinite series. The scientific understanding came through the process of explanation, but the breakthrough came earlier as an insight, once the process began to unfold. This experience of an imaginative leap forward is the same type of mental activity we use in reading a poetic metaphor.6 This is the human faculty Paul Ricoeur has designated as the process of figuration in his major work, Time and Narrative. In 1987, some ten years after Libchaber's experiment, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, also concerned with the temporal dimensions of reality, wrote the following lines in 'Regreso' (Return): Our bodies flow over the plains of the night: they are of time that ends. Presence dissipated in an embrace but they are infinite; on touching we are immersed into rivers of palpitations. We come back in an eternal return.7

This poem is also about motion in time and about exhaustible matter. The flow of time is concomitant with the consuming of matter. The human body, that centre of the universe for the subject, is organic matter and as such is consumed, used up, dissipated until the very presence of the subject is threatened. But, at this point, the lyric voice makes a sudden radical reversal of imagery. He moves from the finite flow of expendable matter, like so much fuel being burned up in moving over the plains of the night, to the idea of the infinite. This is a quantum leap in scale. The lyric voice has abandoned the earlier focus on the human body, on touching, on one person touching another. The scale is now that of a river's flow, a river of palpitation or the never-ending story of the chain of human existence; there emerges a first person plural, a we that comes back in a succession of other future first-person plurals that will follow.

22 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense The poet's leap of the imagination is not arbitrary although it is sudden and radical. Beneath the reversal of fortune for the lyric voice lies the rejection of a dualism of human existence constantly wavering between the materiality of the body and the spirituality of the soul. The lyric voice is here emblematic of the shattered cogito and Nietzsche's attack on Descartes. The negation of the Cartesian dualism is based on Nietzsche's attention to the mediating factor of language in the very enunciation of the 'I am' and 'I think.' Language to Nietzsche is never a neutral code but always a figurative manipulation. Nietzsche's effort to overcome nihilism in a world-view where God was dead made a great leap of the imagination in developing the idea of the eternal return in a cultural process that is continuous as a figuration of existence. Octavio Paz's language is a highly charged figurative language, but it is the language of disclosure. The imaginative construction thus becomes a philosophical probe into the aporia of human existence and a response to nihilism every bit as painful and creative as that of Nietzsche. The overcoming of the dualistic cul de sac has been one of the mainstays in the poetry of Octavio Paz. It is not valid to say with Descartes that there is certainty in the cogito of the doubter, for before the doubter could express his doubt there had to be a language and it is only within this linguistic umbrella that subject and object mean anything at all. In part 5 of a witty, intricate eight-part poem, 'Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas,' Wallace Stevens wrote: Ideas are men. The mass of meaning and the mass of men are one. Chaos is not. The mass of meaning. It is three or four ideas or, say five men or possibly six. In the end, these philosophic assassins pull revolvers and shoot each other. One remains. The mass of meaning becomes composed again. He that remains plays on an instrument.

(255-6)

This poet is also concerned with change in time and the turbulence that attends to change, not because of a resistance to change by static elements, but rather turbulence produced by the very nature of change in human existence. The implied cycle of violence, restoration of authority, and new violence, affects both the historical process and the metaphysical idea that we must have both freedom and order even if they turn out to be incompatible. The rigorous poetic logic of the development of

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 23 imagery is a well-recognized aspect of Wallace Stevens' poetry. Chaos is the apex of turbulence, but it is not the mere opposite of order. Although it does indicate the breakdown of order, chaos itself is structured. It appears to be only disorder or disruption, but this impression is superficial, only taking into consideration the primary scale of the breakdown of order. Chaos is the law of ideas, of improvisations, of singularity, of insight breaking out to challenge the dominant authority. Chaos is the necessary part of the change of the seasons of belief. For one season to wane and another to come into force there must be a breakdown of the accepted sense of order. The second stanza is emphatic - ideas are men, and the mass of meaning and the mass of men are one; this is much more than an analogy or a simile, this is direct identification. Ideas come from men and live and die with their authors and with their recipients. How many men have died in the name of Christ, how many have been persecuted in the name of Christianity, how many people have been enslaved in order to save their souls for God? Or, on the other hand, how many people have been starved or massacred in saving democracy or the rights of the people? The all-powerful focal point is that just as men can be massed together as one, so can ideas be massed together. Chaos stands outside. It is the law of chaos that differences will arise, and differences will lead to the breakup of the mass as it fragments into warring factions. Eventually, one remains and the mass of meaning becomes composed again. This is the process by which men govern other men and through which certain ideas dominate other ideas. This is what Jacques Derrida has called the reign of logocentrism, wherein we have come to believe that a centre is an absolute necessity (cf. Ulmer 5-8). The remaining assassin's song is the music of the singular that aspires to be the universal. Of course, it will fail, but as Akira Kurasawa has reminded us, the tyrant always dreams of immortality, but the vision of the artist prevails and makes both master and slave face the utter mortality of human existence. There will always be another time and another seeker of the pure idea, the centre of creation, who will sing of eternity for a few moments. In classical aesthetics there have been two dominant concepts of the function of art; these are, of course, representation and expression (cf. Sparshott 65-91). Under the concept of representation or mimesis in its multiple guises a work of art presents anew in its own medium some pre-existent entity, event, or ideated configuration. Expressionist theories of art also leave little room for the creative imagination of the spectator or reader. The correct function of the work of art is, according to this

24 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense aesthetic theory, to express an affective state of mind of the artist. We are today witnesses to a major shift in aesthetic theories that can only be equated with the conceptual disjunction of the Renaissance from medieval thought. I am speaking of a possibilizing aesthetics that proposes that the work of art always awaits completion in the imagination of the perceiver or reader. In Europe and America this aesthetics has been introduced under the general rubric of post-structuralist theory and comprises such different approaches as deconstruction, hermeneutics, and psychoanalytic criticism. In Eastern poetics a possibilizing aesthetics has had a major place for centuries. The finest examples of art forms that can only flourish in a possibilizing aesthetic are the Japanese haiku and calligraphy. Basho's liberation of the creative imagination from the stasis of Japan's middle ages has given us in the haiku a striking example of liberation from a normative aesthetics. I do not want to suggest any specialized knowledge of the haiku; what I do know I have been taught by Koji Kawamoto. Earl Miner draws a comparison between classical poetics in Europe and America and Japanese aesthetics: 'the distinction between signifier and signified in western thought is blurred: the two terms merge. And Japanese find that natural' (93). The work of art merges with life because the story imaginatively concretized by the reader continues beyond the writing. Miner continues: 'Sometimes more is implied. There is always more to be told. Continuing causality until long deferred enlightenment is the end, the telos from the beginning' (142). If there remains any doubt on where I stand in this debate on art, science, and the imagination, I want to propose that the inexhaustible richness of art requires a tradition of open commentary in the spirit of Basho. The principal difference between art and criticism is that art is always now whether it was composed in the twelfth century or the twentieth, while criticism is always past. My position is that the highest achievement we can aim at in criticism is to have spoken honestly and openly of our era's sensibilities and to have written with judicious discretion and, above all, clarity. Painting, literature, music, and all other art forms are experienced in the present. In this chapter, I have argued that ontologically the creative imagination demanded of all of us in order to realize art is akin to the creative imagination demanded for scientific enquiry. The understanding the scientist brings to the experimental laboratory is to a large extent an imaginative leap into a hypothetical expansion of reality. The intricate and rigorous process of explanation the scientist must apply to this initial understanding is central to the scien-

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 25 tific tradition. The joy of science is being able to retrace the steps of an experiment halfway around the world from where it was first done, and thereby go from concept to execution, from insight to proof. Whenever literary criticism borrows a page from science and accepts with some modesty that we all write to keep the fire alive and that our own views will be most surely superseded within a single generation, we will begin to approach the same sense of renewal that our colleagues in science so richly enjoy. We are faced with the paradox, the more immortal we attempt to make our work, the more obviously dated will it become, for each generation has a new sense of what the lasting universals of civilization are. I do not want to blur the lines that separate poetics and science. Scientific research constantly progresses making yesterday's laws today's historical reference. The history of science is the story of the roads of enquiry traversed, but the emphasis is unmistakably on pushing the present norms of enquiry to the limit until they break. The writing and the reading of poetry, on the other hand, consist in constantly remaking the world and redescribing a number of essential players in that serious game of world-making. But poetics and the history of poetry are not a story of progress. This is a story of change, but not of progress. Ours is a double history, one of poets and poems and another of commentators. The significance of the past is constantly being remade into present meaning by today's readers, as it must be if the great works of art are to continue to be alive and not merely monuments to the past and past sensibilities. Imagination, like all human faculties, is part of willed action. It can be disciplined by reflection on the world as we know it, but it can also expand beyond all physical limitations into fantasy or it can be spontaneous and ephemeral. In this chapter we have been concerned with the reflective imagination that the poet/scientist engages in attempting to grasp the sense of the insight that has been experienced. Even as we write a single line we transform the manifold of ideas into some semblance of coherence. This process of transformation is the imagination of explanation and representation. It is reductive to characterize the imagination as a synthesis of information, for it is so much more. The imaginative act of writing is breaking down original images and ideas and building new ones that we hope will be meaningful. How distant this notion is from the depiction of the imagination as free-wheeling fancy. The imagination of writing, if it is to meet the dual objectives of transmitting something already known in part by the writer to the reader, who

26 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense does not know any of it at all, must be imaginative configuration that is disciplined in the use of language. The limits of this use of the imagination are all too evident - it is an impossible task, yet it is a necessary one. I have not thus far distinguished between the various modes of the imagination. One such mode that is well known to scientist and poet alike is serendipity and I take this up in the next section. Here, our subject of enquiry has been the most reflective mode of imaginative thinking: the sense of the whole. This is the insight that grasps convictions, links relationships, sees analogies and common aspects that are not obvious. The reflective imagination recognizes similarities in dissimilarities and, in general, makes it possible for us to think in terms of assemblages, categories, or sets of phenomena. In this sense Aristotle and Kant have been masters of reflective imagination just as much as Dante and Cervantes. And Lavoisier, Marie Curie, Feynman, and all the original thinkers among scientists are also poets of the natural world. One final distinction is required and that is to situate fantasy with regard to the reflective imagination. There is one significant way in which it is different. Whereas the reflective imagination seeks to elaborate connections, fantasy constructs not only the world but the sense of order that governs the world. Fantasy also must make sense to both the writer and unknown readers, albeit very different kinds of sense. No utterance ever communicates more than the performative act by itself, and this is so because nothing that we can put into words is nonrelational. Wittgenstein's aphorism, language is use, continues to be the cornerstone of making sense, and especially so when encountering fantasy. Derrida's comparison of writing postcards and writing books to having sex and making babies is appropriate in this context: one is short term if of no physical consequence, the other is long term and with possibly substantial physical consequences. Both the writer and reader of fantasy are making sense in a most unique manner, for they are trying to create themselves, their conscious willed persona, in circumstances that are of their own making. This is the creation of their own language game where the normal rules of discourse are suspended. The writer initiates it but it is the reader who ultimately realizes the new language game. There are a few remarkable texts that exemplify this special avenue of making sense. I consider Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Donoso's Obsceno pdjaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night) as such texts. A short passage from the latter should suffice: The toothless crone who winked at me tries on the raspberry-colored bathing cap and struts to the applause of the others. This package: this one. You're

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 27 becoming tense, impatient, it has to be the package with the key to what Brigida was trying to say. This one. Do you want to open it? All right. Yes, Mudito, open it with respect, because Brigida wrapped it so that I would understand ... No, Mother Benita, no, don't be fooled, Brigida made this package and the others because she was afraid. She was queen, executioner, dictator, judge, but she tied things and saved them the same as the rest of the old women. I know you're praying for this package to have something other than junk in it. You strip off the brown paper and throw it out. There's more paper, finer stuff, all wrinkled up, you tear it and drop it on the floor. Why go on opening and tearing wrappings, this apple-green taffeta one with a piece of newspaper underneath - showing Roosevelt and Fala and Stalin's smile on board a ship - if you surely know you won't find a thing? ... She searches, her anxious fingernails pull the shoulder pad apart and let the padding fall to the floor. (31-2; my translation)8

The rules of the game in writing narrative are fairly stable. The point of view of the addresser is established so that the distance, implicit or explicit, to the addressee can be determined. In this text the point of view of the addresser and the very identity of the addressee keep changing. There are three major shifts and a number of minor ones. The passage begins with what appears to be standard first-person narration in the past; there is a minor change to present tense. A second major shift moves the first person into direct address as the speaker presumably is speaking to another present before him, but then it becomes apparent that the addresser is not the same speaker as the initial one. This utterance is followed by direct address and this time we begin to sense that the speaker now is our initial narrator. We move back and forth in a simulated dialogue without establishing the presence of the other. Finally, near the end of the cited passage, there is a minor shift in perspective followed by the third major shift as the narrative voice becomes a thirdperson narrator, not speaking to another but about her. How is it possible to read, to concretize the narrative situation? The answer is that when the expected rules of the game are not being followed, the reader scrambles to make up new ones to organize the configuration of the narration, as we have just demonstrated. We must, however, also ask what happens to the textual configuration in a text that has these rule changes. Based solely on this passage and not the entire novel with its extraordinary alchemy of myth and history, the reader takes on a new double function, that of player and rule maker. Science fiction, as another kind of creation, makes the point that the political and human agencies described are rather conservative in depiction, while the physical and biological relations of natural phenomena

28 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense have been liberated from the natural constraints of the world as we know it. In a true sense the best of science fiction is dealing in future probabilities of existing enquiry. The relation of literature to science in the human experience of making sense has been the topic of this chapter. We should, however, not lose sight of the fact that science fiction addresses the values and issues of human relations in a world that is strongly controlled by the sciences. LA. Richards put it this way: The experiences which the arts offer are not obtainable or but rarely, elsewhere... Nor is Art, as by way of corollary is sometimes maintained, a thing which had its function in the youth of the world, but with the development of Science becomes obsolete. It may very possibly decline and even disappear, but if it does a biological calamity of the first order will have occurred. Nor again is it something which may be postponed while premillennial man grapples with more immediate problems. The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instrument by which it may be raised or lowered. (233-4)

Richards published these comments in 1925. To conclude this section I want to return to the initial proposition that there is a deep link between the imaginative configuration of phenomena in science and literature and that this link is the educated imagination responding to contingency, chance, and indeterminacy. In the words of biologist Robert May: One thing is certain. Biological systems, from communities and populations to physiological processes, are governed by nonlinear mechanisms. This means that we must expect to see chaos as often as we see cycles or steadiness. The message that I urged more than ten years ago is even more true today: 'not only in [biological] research, but also in the everyday world of politics and economics, we would all be better off if more people realized that simple nonlinear systems do not necessarily possess simple dynamical properties.' (95)

The creative force of the imagination in both art and science, the force of vision, that characterizes the work of both the poet and the scientist, is that they must take from their experience in order to create a 'what if world in the laboratory and an 'as if world in the poem, but they make these worlds to transgress their boundaries, for the ultimate aim is to share in the reality we make in the art of living.

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 29 Serendipity The dictionary definition of serendipity is 'the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident/ This definition assigns four explicit attributes to the term. It deals with a discovery, it is unexpected, happy, and accidental. But there is also a fifth attribute that is implicit, or at least it is so in our usage, and that is that serendipity happens when there is a certain kind of mental activity; this activity may be as varied as human thinking itself, but the common factor is that there is playful looking for understanding or curiosity in new configurations of meaning, a playing a game of 'as if or 'what if with whatever we catch in the net of our imaginative reflection. This commentary is limited to two wellknown and long-established playful activities: doing physics and reading poetry. Creativity in science is a highly nonlinear process; unexpected progress in basic knowledge appears as a result of jumps across conceptual barriers and, consequently, unexpected thresholds of enquiry open. Scientists as well as the readers of a poem often proceed by a series of unpredictable bifurcations in considering the natural or created elements that they use to construct experimental models and metaphorical meaning. Unpredictability has become an important part in the build-up process of new knowledge. This build-up of new knowledge can be seen in the context of the scientific revolutions described by T.S. Kuhn (1970). However, as Kuhn states, the development of new paradigms appears through a consensus of participants in the enquiry and can only be traced in its trajectory through thousands of hardly visible reformulations. We are dealing here with fairly explicit and highly visible steps, which will eventually be included in a new conceptualization. It is essential for both the experimental scientist and the literary critic to have an expanded sensitivity to initial conditions (personal, cultural, scientific enquiry, education, etc.), as well as a heightened awareness of interferences not as obstacles but as phenomena; these include noise or fluctuations in the physical system itself as well as the influence of disparate encounters that cannot be anticipated during the creative reading process. This unpredictability is not easily guessed from reading the published results of scientists or literary critics commenting on poetry. But on close scrutiny the historian of science finds not only the presence of serendipity in science, but indeed a trail of many minor surprises by scientists leading to major paradigm shifts. In criticism, hermeneutics recognizes that the final published interpretation is the result of multiple bifurcations that have been taken and that other equally valid interpreta-

30 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense tions can be seen as potential but unfulfilled readings. The most significant factor uncovered by the disclosure of the serendipity of bifurcations is that randomness can only be used by a trained and skilled observer. We are in effect making a case for the educated imagination of 'as if in poetry and 'what if in physics. As a first example, consider the discovery of natural radioactivity by Henri Becquerel, who received the Nobel prize together with Marie and Pierre Curie for this discovery. He was working on fluorescence induced by the sun's action on natural minerals (which were later known to contain radium). On a cloudy day, inappropriate for his experiments, he stored his rock samples in a drawer next to photographic plates wrapped in black paper. Unexpectedly, he found that the plates stored in this way had been imprinted, and thus he deduced that natural radiation emitted from the mineral had crossed the layers of paper. It was this phenomenon that Pierre Curie proposed to his wife Marie as a field of study for her thesis. Clearly this is a nonlinear interaction induced by the simultaneous presence of the scientist and of the various material elements; but it was not fully unexpected either! The subject of light emission induced by a primary radiation had been somewhat of a 'family affair,' and both the father and grandfather of Henri Becquerel had worked on it in the Musee d'Histoire Naturelle. He was also fully aware of Wilhelm Konrad Rontgen's earlier discovery of X-rays. The discovery can be described in terms of serendipity, but we should also include these contributing factors as well, which made it possible for the scientist to recognize the significance that chance had provided. Is there an analogous form of discovery in reading poetry? I think there is. It is in new meanings, both in the reader's response to the semantic impertinence of metaphor and in the bifurcating elaboration of an 'as if reality. I am not using the term metaphor as a figure of speech or the term 'as if reality as the imitation of a stable material world. Metaphor as a trope suggests a resemblance to something to which it is not literally applicable, as in the example 'a mighty fortress is my God.' In this chapter we are concerned with the imaginative invention elicited in the reader as a response to the semantic impertinence of the creative metaphor, as, for example, in the line 'a tree grew on my head.' The reader cannot assign even a temporary literal sense to the line. The poet's words provoke and release a stream of figurations in random combinations as the reader plays the game of making sense. It is only by playing with the multiple images and ideas of lived experience that the reader creates meaning. The other mode of poetic discovery comes as a pattern of

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 31 response develops from the numerous encounters the reader has with mobile bifurcating agents or truth claims. These are the semantic bifurcations the reader takes in response to the polysemic sign. The pattern that ensues from a series of bifurcations marks a direction of interpretation that is unique to each reading. It is possible to relate this freedom of enquiry to the development of a tradition such as the history of Western philosophy from the presocratics to Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Ricoeur. The philosopher Jean Buridan, rector of the Sorbonne in the fourteenth century, captured the sense of enquiry and choice in the metaphor of a donkey that was equally hungry and thirsty and was placed at equal distance from food and water. The symmetrical arrangement of the two force the donkey to choose if it is to drink or eat; in physical terms, the donkey's choice breaks the symmetry. The resolution of the conflict expresses the donkey's freedom of choice. Bifurcation is a resolution of conflict exercised by the agent because there is a real choice. Creative scientists can identify a small number of unexpected bifurcations in their professional life, such as have been recorded with talent and humour by the chemist Jean Jacques in L'imprevu ou la science des objets trouves.9 But, on a more 'microscopic' scale of personal observation, serendipitous steps are a part of the everyday creative process in science. Similarly major insights in literary criticism are a rare occurrence, but on the level of the reading of poetry each reader makes numerous choices, confronts the semantic impertinence of creative metaphors, and constantly plays out a meaning. But it is only the trained critic who is able to transform the play of randomness into an articulated reading of the poem and, further, it is primarily the hermeneutic critic who is able to reconstruct the path of bifurcations and place the reading in question in the company of the many other readings that might have been. A second related factor of serendipity is its apparently irrational character associated with such qualities as intuition or even with a systematic search for unlikely facts. A recent Nobel prizewinner in physics often punctuates his scientific discussions by betting on what he believes is right before having proved it. Most of the time he is right because, in fact, at a deeper level, he already knows; in this case, as with many leading scientists, we are dealing with directed chance. In literary criticism directed chance arises from the intertext of the critic's repertoire of poetry and the corollary readings the critic makes. The apparently irrational-looking pursuit of the unexpected can in fact be framed as a systematic tool of discovery. A major (and unexpected!)

32 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense breakthrough in physics has been the discovery of the existence of superconductors with a critical temperature Tc as high as that of liquid nitrogen (of the order of 100 absolute degrees). Superconductors are materials that have a strictly zero resistance below Tc and a finite one above it. Just before this finding, the maximum reported value of Tc was only of the order of 20 absolute degrees, despite research efforts carried on for more than half a century. Today we know of a large number of new high-Tc materials whose properties have been studied by thousands of scientists. Clearly there has been a major breakthrough. The revolutionary discovery was made by Dr K. Miiller, a veteran scientist working practically alone in the IBM laboratory in Zurich. Instead of looking for new metallic alloys, which are good electrical conductors in their normal state, he had made the non-obvious systematic choice to study oxides, which are bad conductors and which have fairly ill-defined characteristics. And here was the new generation of superconductors! He conducted a systematic search for the unexpected as well as his permanent fascination with oxides and an only partially veiled fascination with alchemy.10 But this was science: within a few weeks after his initial report of the discovery, the preparation and analysis of the new superconducting materials had been reproduced and confirmed systematically by other laboratories around the world (this was not the case with other unexpected and publicized 'discoveries' such as 'cold fusion/ and 'memory of water'). The process of creation need not be rational, but its confirmation and development must be, and this is so in both science and literary criticism. Indeed the scientific method itself with the typical 'va et vient' of trial and error approach, which can be envisioned as a series of bifurcating explorations, has been part of experimental science from its beginnings. This is clearly a long process. It meant that tons of pitchblende materials were purified by the Curies and many combinations of oxides were tested at low temperatures by Miiller. In this comparative essay into the role of serendipity in reading poetry and in the scientific discovery process, can we go further? Clearly the writing of a physics article and, consequently, its use, does not follow the historical path taken on the discovery. The writing of a physics article favours the presentation of (reproducible) physical facts, their analysis in connection with previously established ones, and their predictive power. The process is optimized to allow for direct check and comparison by other scientists. The deductive presentation used in articles is a reconstruction and, moreover, it is expressed in a coded language only transparent to specialists. Even the use of familiar words such as catastrophe,

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 33 chaos, strange attractors, flavour, and colour is misleading for a broader audience. For all these reasons, general sources of information are, most of the time, of no use in the analysis of the process of scientific discovery nor can they be employed to stimulate creativity and scientific imagination for a broader audience of scholars and scientists. Everyone can read poetry, but not everyone can examine the reading and share it with others. Can we think of the experience of poetic creation and re-creation as a second presentation and not as a substitute for the primary one? Do readers who interact creatively and freely with the poem involve themselves in the discovery of their own world, culture, and judgment? Can this discovery be shared in the same way the scientist shares his or her discoveries? The scientific analogue to poetic reading would be that of a tour across elements of a physical problem presented in such a way that it would make the best use of the personal experience of the scientist. This is what is done when we 'browse' through a scientific journal by stopping at a few titles, figures, notes, that stir up interest in a nondirected way. I see no better place than a science museum exhibit to set up such an optimized program. A number of discrete elements are scattered that are constructed for a well-defined project. But a visit takes place generally as a random walk among the individual exhibits, and the scientific designer must, at the same time, take into account visitors of very different levels of culture and motivation. Thus the exhibit cannot depend solely on a linear demonstration. The planning of a science museum exhibit is one of laying wagers on serendipitous agents that are most likely to provoke a directed and deeper curiosity into the 'what if aspect of natural phenomena. But, as in the case of the reader making poetic sense, a creative exhibit encourages visitors to make scientific sense through a skilful combination of signs and words by emphasizing certain tensions and subsequent choices (bifurcations) in their exploration. We should, however, take a closer look at bifurcations in reading. The inscription of language into diverse systems ranges from relatively simple systems like an Exit sign, which has a minimum of rules and a limited range of meaning, and complex systems that are extensively rule-governed and have an almost limitless range of meaning. Poetry is a complex system. Complex systems are made up of signs, each of which has a fixed origin in the lexicon of a natural language and each of which has the possibility of belonging to multiple poetic systems; some of these signs appear with much greater frequency than others because of specific symbolic properties. Others have been frequent in one

34 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense historical period and not another and still others make but rare appearances in poetical systems. Some of these signs in specific combinations make their way from one poetic system to another and therein form specific and new textual configurations while still retaining the trace of their previous place in the other poetic system. The concretizing agent who will recognize the transference from one poetic system to another is in every case the reader. 'Complex adaptive systems' is the term used in science today to designate the nonlinear dynamics of living systems, whether they are competing trees in a forest, colonies of bacteria, communities of animals, or societies of people. My contention is that natural languages are most certainly complex adaptive systems, and within natural languages the mode of expression we call poetry can serve us as a paradigm for research on how language works. The human need to make sense of what is said puts into play a host of factors, including the paradigmatic relations of the words used, the syntactic order, symbolic connotations elicited from the reader's repertoire, generic and intertextual usages reflected in the configuration, as well as the social connotations of the historical context of both text and reader. These variables not only interact with one another but are constantly changing the configuration of reading in fully unpredictable ways. These shifting relationships present an open-ended range of possibilities of poetic meaning since all the variables also change in time. If we look at a poem as a complex adaptive system, we recognize that the poetic system goes through a phase transition from order to randomness as the interaction between the text and the reader is gradually increased and intensified. A system can develop the most extravagant complexity at the very boundary between order and randomness or sense and non-sense. The poetic text as a complex adaptive system moves toward that boundary through the natural process of readerly expectation. The key to the analysis of these systems is the interaction between text and reader. The more the interaction increases the faster the system moves from sense to non-sense and then to the critical point of either complete breakdown or the emergence of a new metaphorical sense that has literally come out of the ruins of the initial sense. A comparative enquiry into an ecosystem and the reading of a poem may appear to some to be a comparison without basis in pragmatic terms since it matters to scientific enquiry how well we know the workings of the ecosystem, and no one particularly cares whether we understand how one has read sense into a poem. This viewpoint, although unfortu-

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 35 nately widespread in our time, and particularly in English-speaking North America, fails to comprehend that the two are fundamentally interrelated. The point is fundamental - not only is the imagination a part of human enquiry and chance a part of the experience of phenomena, but living dynamic systems are unknowable if we do not take randomness into consideration. For example, consider 'when god decided to invent' by e.e. cummings: When god decided to invent everything he took one bigger breath than a circus tent and everything began when man determined to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because.

If we were to paraphrase the poem, it would take a full essay on the structures of human reasoning and then we would have captured only a splinter of the shifting alignments of meaning, the juxtapositions and combinations of meaningfulness that continue to emerge even as we reflect for but a moment. In contrast to El Obsceno pdjaro de la noche (The Obscene Bird of Night) by Jose Donoso, from which I quoted in the previous section, 'Indeterminacy,' in the cummings poem the attractors are stable, but they are such fundamental terms in the language that they raise the most basic ontological problems of human understanding. The enquiry into human temporality not only raises the sense of the past, but the larger issue of whether or not the past, or the 'was/ is to be understood as one choice among countless of the human possibilities that arise in the contingency of human experience, or the 'shall' from which the 'was' was derived. Finally, there is the reductionism that has been with us from the outset of the adventure; on finding a basically indeterminate universe the human instinct is to reduce it to causality. Thus it is that the 'why' of life becomes the 'because' of partial explanations. To sum up this description of poetry as a complex adaptive system of signs there are four points to make: (1) Poetic systems are composed of discrete units we call signs; (2) These are continuously adapting during a reading; (3) They may adapt in an entirely novel manner in subsequent readings; (4) Although the signs are simple in their lexical rendering, in a

36 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense text they gather information about their new contextual environment by eliciting relevant previous imaginative configurations out of the random play of the reader's making of meaning. Since a poetic system of signs is a rule-governed complex system the various formal properties of a particular formulation can be examined in detail. However, the major distinguishing feature of a poetic system is that unlike simple systems where assigned meaning is obvious and selfevident, in poetic systems meaning cannot be assigned until the inscription becomes a text, that is, when the system is activated through the reader's interaction. When writing becomes a text it is given specific parameters and, most of all, there is a transference from potential semantic possibilities to a specific reader's meanings. The use of this term 'becoming a text' explicitly indicates that writing becomes reading and that meaning is forthcoming as the action of the text-reader relationship unfolds. Poetic meaning is neither the property of the writing nor the creation of the reader, but rather the interaction between writing, now constituted as text, and the reader, whom we shall henceforth refer to as the concretizing agent. This agent does not decode the inscription using the global system of a natural language. Only the novice translator does this. The concretizing agent must effect the transference from virtual meaning to actual meaning and this is done by completing the message, which is necessarily incomplete and will always be incomplete except for those moments when the concretizing agent completes it in ways that are often unexpected. The object of the reader's play with words is to make meanings. In creating meanings out of certain clusters of signs we call images and metaphors, the reader compresses the referential information into models or schemata that are used to anticipate and react to changes in the evolving meaning. Over time the reader modifies those schemata to reflect new information, elicited in the ongoing response to the poetic signs. Of course, not all poetic systems are the same. There are some systems with a lower number of polysemic signs. These systems lack the momentum in the reading experience to develop explosively into new contexts of meaning; highly charged polysemic systems, on the contrary, expand so rapidly that they shoot off into radically divergent contexts. In a word, they bifurcate again and again, creating a nonlinear and unreproducible response between different parts of the same system. We can therefore only generalize in a limited way. When a sign operates as a polysemic sign it takes on the functions of a mobile bifurcating sign.

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 37 The inscribed system is, therefore, a fixed rule-governed system with specific formal characteristics, but on reading, it becomes a nonlinear process as the signs become a text through interaction with the reader's epistemological systems. We have thereby moved from the consideration of the semiotics of the written sign system to the semantics of the nonlinear process that is reading. The reading of the poetic text can be described as a complex adaptive system with a limitless (not infinite) number of mobile agents as each sign can become a catalytic agent of bifurcation in a response system. The latent polysemia comes to the fore as the sign is catalysed into meaning; these are meanings that could not have been anticipated. A number of these polysemic signs are operative in the reading of a highly charged poetic system. Diverse systems of meaning are composed of signs that are continuously adapting to the reader's response systems. The interface between text and reader brings together a determinate arrangement of signs that are made effective; that is, they are concretized by the reader's response. The response depends on a number of random variables. The operative signs vary from one reading to another; they attract information sequences that are unpredictable on the basis of the textual system itself. But how do adaptive signs evolve in the reading process? Meanings build up in models of convolution like the convex folds of the surface of the brain as the reader plays with past schemata in working out the present configuration. For example, images with a low diversity of independent signs lack momentum and remain inactive until they are drawn into the schemata growing out of highly charged images or canonical stable attractors that expand so rapidly that they consume all other signs and even threaten to engulf the whole of the text. The text can be reopened through the opposition of powerful unstable strange attractors. We saw just such a class in Paz's poem 'Apremio' (Compulsion) in the previous section. If each sign that has been turned into a catalytic agent of bifurcation through reading has potentially more than one meaning and there are only limited means of channelling these meanings into a unified text by each reader, the critic must recognize that the particular configuration of the text always derives from the reader's interaction with the text and cannot be assigned in any permanent way to the system itself. The study of poetry hence must recognize that the configuration given to a poetic text is always serendipitous because poetry is a complex adaptive system and not a linear one.

38 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense Let us take a quick look at a very short poem by Emily Dickinson, written in 1864. It reads as follows: An Hour is a Sea Between a few, and me With them would Harbour be -

The verses are simple metred lines with full rhyme. The first distinctive feature encountered is that in the punctuation of the second line the comma can serve as a caesura enabling us to read the line in two very different ways, either as a full line, 'Between a few, and me/ or as two halves where each half depends on the preceding or succeeding line to form its semantic unit, as in 'an hour is a sea between a few' followed by 'and me with them would harbour be.' The second major feature is to recognize the two main attractors in the base metaphor 'an hour is a sea' as attractors that contain oxymoronic sets, the first being a measurement of time with sixty minutes, 3600 seconds, etc., and the second to be a designation of physical space, a major body of water. Each attractor draws to it a full repertoire of temporality in the sign 'hour' and in the case of 'sea/ a vast open space, beyond the individual horizon of perception. The third feature is the metaphorical attribute of 'harbour' as a third attractor that brings forth semantic sets of haven from the open sea, and safety in the unity of us; that is, 'they' and T can become the resting place. Not only do each of these signs - hour, sea, and harbour - function as attractors pulling from the reader entire paradigms of relations on temporality, open space, and haven, but in the poem, in relation to one another, they take on still more complex operations. Thus it is that 'hour' in conjunction with the immensity of the sea takes on the additional idea of brevity, and 'sea/ because of the temporal limitations of an hour, acquires a menacing sense. And in conjunction with the other two signs, harbour becomes a place of safety and of overcoming distances both spatial and spiritual. The reader plays with these and many more possibilities as the poem unfolds. It may be on a second or third reading when the game will suddenly give out a sense of proper fit; a metaphorical meaning has arisen out of the multiple possibilities that kept going and coming. At least two readings of this short poem can be offered: (1) an hour is a vast separation beyond our horizon that separates a few others from me. But I and my others can become the place of common rest. We can travel

Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 39 from unknown to known in sixty minutes; (2) an hour can be a vast separation between persons; that is, the beginning and the end of the hour mark the polarity of the few from each other. Each is a stranger to the other. But when these few become them and me, we move from a generic abstraction to the pronouns of person and, therefore, in the course of an hour can go from polar unknowing abstractions separated from each other in silence to the coming together in the harbour of knowing each other. In both readings there is a moment of creative understanding. In the first reading it is a moment of overcoming alienation of the self by joining with my others in making a harbour. There is an implicit imperative to act because the self is situated in a polarity of isolation. In the second reading where the self is not polarized, it is the few who are at sea and who in an hour can arrive at the haven of the harbour by personalizing the abstract into the personal and these few become them and me now joining together to make the harbour. In both readings the conclusion is overcoming separation in the space of an hour by joining together.When these serendipitous moments occur depends on each reader's reading. Meanings come together and no one, least of all the poet, could have anticipated the sense that emerges. This experience of serendipity brings us back to the language of science and criticism and, at a deeper level, to creativity with its combination of rational and irrational steps where serendipity is a materialization of deeper mind and brain processes. Both the scientist and the critic work in their writing to find the best means of explanation of the phenomena they have observed. The more the descriptive and explanatory process unfolds, the more will the writer be able to understand what has been found. The scientist differs from the critic in one highly significant aspect, and that is that in science the process of discovery must be so clearly stated that it can be reproduced around the world, while the critic's process of explaining a poem does not usually carry the same burden of proof. It is only in hermeneutics that the critic sets out to explain the path of discovery as fully as possible, not for confirmation, however, but for debate in the conflict of interpretations that is the ongoing sharing of creative experience. I am, therefore, speaking of creativity in the play of the enquiring mind. Here I am going far beyond the celebration of creativity; I am making a claim that there are nonlinear approaches to knowledge. The attainment of this form of knowledge depends to a large extent on an educated imagination being able to make the initial configuration and, subse-

40 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense quently, develop the rational articulation of refiguration that can explain the net gain in meaning. The gain in meaning is the result of the reader's response to the semantic impertinence of metaphor. This tensional process obliges the reader to make sense of the patterns of bifurcations that are the making of an 'as if world as well as to develop an acceptable explanation for phenomena that do not respond to the established rules. We should not, however, confuse the notion of unpredictability and that of disorder proper, as in a throw of dice. As in physics the theoretical description of strange attractors is drawing, in an abstract phase space, the possible state of the system; this is a possible state resulting from the interaction between the poem and the reader and as such it is inscribed into a pre-existing set of possible states wherein their local evaluation in a sense can be predicted. I have never considered a situation where 'anything goes/ wherein, presumably, the reader could find whatever came to mind, whether related or unrelated to the poem. My task has consistently been to seek an explanation for nonlinear thinking in which the imagination is the catalytic agent of discovery. Let us remember these lines from Saint-John Perse's Nobel lecture: 'Au vrai toute creation de 1'esprit est d'abord "poetique" au sens propre du mot; et dans 1'equivalence des formes sensibles et spirituelles une meme fonction s'exerce, initialement, pour 1'entreprise du savant et pour celle du poete.'11

2

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community

Memory Parody is a limit case for hermeneutic enquiry because the play of model and text creates distorted truth-claims and indeterminate poetry develops an unstable response range, but literature of appropriation and identification, both personal and collective, is much more problematic, for the limits between reader and text tend to dissolve. The hermeneutic approach to texts of appropriation and identification is to probe directly into the relation these texts have with personal identity. This is the overriding direction this chapter and the two that follow take. The probe into identity through the hermeneutics of making sense asks three questions: (1) What is the place of memory and of literary remembering in the elaboration of personal identity? (2) What is the sense of others that defines the self and how are fictional subjects a part of this sense of others? (3) How necessary is the sense of belonging to a community in the making of identity? In this section the first of the three queries is taken up: the hermeneutics of memory and remembering. Wittgenstein considers memory to be the filling in of absences in consciousness, and that the words of the remembrance stand on the same ontological level as that which has been remembered (1953). We can describe that which has been remembered, but is it possible to describe what is memory-like about the remembrance? For example, as soon as I put the glass to my lips I recognize the taste of tequila even after many years of not having tasted it; there is certainly an experience of taste and of remembrance. But can I be sure that this is the same taste I had before? There is no third party who could intervene and reassure me that the

42 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense taste is the same as the one I had some twenty years before. What is meant when I say that a remembrance of the past came into my mind? Wittgenstein asks, have I not merely transcribed into a word, tequila, what was a sense impression with a resonance in memory? By saying that I recognized the taste, I have certainly not described the process of remembrance. Subsequent to tasting, I recognize the taste as one I already knew, but what tells me that this remembered taste is from the past? The answer is so clear that I could have overlooked it, and it is that smell and taste sensations are almost immediately transcribed into words and with words comes the narrativity of the past. I remember especially that time when... But let us say I cannot remember the name of the place where I tasted the tequila I am now recalling. I try to remember the name of the place by recalling other factors related to the incident; what I am doing is attempting to narrativize the transcribed words of the remembered taste. Finally it comes to me: such and such is the name of the place that now fits into a narrative account. I have filled the absence. When I try to remember what happened to me on such and such a date, there is of course the presumption of my continuity and my life as a quasinarrative account, but what is memory itself? Wittgenstein considers it sui generis and a transcription of incidents into a narrative remembrance. There are therefore no inner pictures, no flashbacks as we have in cinema, but rather a mental catalyst that becomes present when I transcribe the remembered into a living narrative. I will argue that literary remembering is one of the most complex manifestations of memory because it inverts human experience into a reverse direction of some consequence. Instead of starting with the recollection and then transcribing into a quasi-narrative, in literature we begin with the narrative that becomes the reader's vicarious experience of remembering and this pseudo-remembering, or 'as if remembrance, always contains the possibility of setting off and provoking a chain reaction of associations in readers by drawing extensively from previous narratives from past readings or from the narrative of living. Significantly, Paul Ricoeur finds that primary remembrance is a positive modification of the original impression, and he insists remembrance is not something different but rather a continually weakening modification of the incident remembered (1984-8). In this very important way remembering is essentially different from the representation of the past by images, because remembrance shares the original remembered account with the living present one; it is in the present that the remember-

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 43 ing is going on while documents, signs, and pictures are in the past until they are interpreted as part of the interpreter's present meaning. Ricoeur establishes a useful distinction between primary remembrance and retentional intentionality. Primary remembrance can be characterized by a moment of recollection, whether voluntary or involuntary, which becomes actual and clarifies itself as it is fitted into the individual's narrativized intentionality. On the other hand, retentional intentionality is already a narrative with absences that are the object of mental scrutiny. Thus in its form of a flow of lived experience, primary remembrance presents the same characteristics as retentional intentionality because as recollection, the remembered has been narrativized. This is a conscious process of a fusion of islands of memories that are more or less well coordinated. We can only come to the conclusion that memory, whether individual or collective, is formed through narrativity. In this respect the writing of diaries is a curious practice; for the most part they are private and personal accounts of the writer's intimate feelings on the circumstances of the day. The question as to why the writer puts his or her thoughts into writing is not usually asked, although it might well be answered that it is a personal means of remembering. What concerns me here is the function that the diary takes on when it becomes a means of collective remembering, that is, when an authentic personal diary is published. For example, Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl transforms the inscription of experience into the remembrance of events that are already remote for two generations of readers. This document from the past is inserted into the present of its readers as actuality of experience and never as the writer's remembrance. It has thus become a remembrance only for its readers. And what about those readers who did not live through those years, and the readers of the future? Will the Diary lose its other function of bearing witness and become one more story among others? How can we compare this historical diary with numerous fictional diaries? The fact that the diary bears witness to wanton brutality of the German state will never be lost because the historical context is in place. The second question is just as significant for it asks about a fictional testimonial without a narrative context, say of a young native woman in Guatemala as, for example, Rigoberta Menchu. Can it become a part of remembering the past? The answer lies entirely with the possibility of reading within a context. If there is no historical context, the story will be one more story of living. The diary by its very format does not establish a context, it accounts for experience and depends on the

44 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense pre-existence of a historical context in order to perform its function of bearing witness. Since there are today hundreds of previously unknown personal testimonies emerging among women writers, it must be clear that the narratives in the form of testimonial writing must be contextualized if they are to be part of the narrativization of the past. I shall return to Ricoeur's account of the problem of a collective memory in the conclusion to this section, but first we should consider Proust's form of remembering: And almost immediately I recognized it; it was Venice, about which my efforts at description and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never yielded me anything, but which was brought back to me by the sensation I had once felt as I stood on two uneven flagstones in the baptistry of Saint Mark's, and with that sensation came all the others connected to it that day, which had been waiting in their proper place in the series of forgotten days, until a sudden happening had imperiously commanded them to come forth. It was in the same way that the taste of the little Madeleine had recalled Combray to my mind. (192)

A quick analysis of this key passage from The Past Recaptured gives us the following items: (1) there has been a sensation of well-being in the present that has been 'almost immediately recognized' as the same feeling the narrator has experienced in Venice; (2) the feeling of well-being has been unexpectedly brought forth because of sheer contingency of a similar physical sensation in the present with one in the past - in this case, stepping on two uneven flagstones; (3) primary remembrance brought on by chance has succeeded where retentional intentionality has failed; (4) remembrances are stored and locked up in memory but once released flood into consciousness; (5) there is now a search for the key that will unlock remembrances. Proust's contribution is of some significance not only because we have moved into written remembrance, but because as a narrator he is prepared to reflect on what he has experienced and is about to write. The meditation extends in my edition from page 191 to page 250, when a butler comes into the library to tell Marcel that the first musical selection had ended and that he is now free to go into the drawing-room. In these sixty pages of inspired writing, Marcel is reinserting narrative from the past into the present and linking up the two in his internal time consciousness. But Marcel's reader throughout the long trajectory that began volumes before in Swann's Way is doing exactly the same thing; he or she is reinserting past narrative into present narrative and thus it is that the

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 45 reader can share Marcel's exuberance in his newfound power over time. Marcel concludes his meditation with a heightened sense of an intellectual breakthrough: 'I would therein describe men... as occupying in Time a place far more considerable than the so restricted one allotted them in space, a place, on the contrary, extending boundlessly since, giant-like reaching far back into years, they touch simultaneously epochs of their lives - with countless intervening days between - so widely separated from one another in Time' (402). This victory over the constraints of time when linked with grace can of course be won through the writing he will now undertake and that we have already read. Thus it is that the reader reaches a more powerful position of superiority over time than even Marcel himself, for the reader's remembrance of things past is both Proust's and his or her own. The fiction of this overwhelming narrative should not be taken here as an illustration of a pre-existing phenomenological agenda that I am following; quite to the contrary, the narrative actualizes meanings of time and memory that philosophy can only grasp at indirectly; it is through the singular figure of Marcel, our guide and narrator, that we liberate our own remembering. The world in this respect is the realization of remembrance that becomes remembrance in the living present of its readers. The interplay between Marcel, who advances toward a future unknown to him, and Marcel the narrator, who has already been there and forgets nothing and who slowly, sometimes painfully so, unfolds the apprenticeship of himself as hero, is one of the most subtle accomplishments of twentieth-century literature. The narrator, as the narrating source presenting the past of his own lived experience, is caught up in an overlapping of temporalities. Marcel the character is constantly reminiscing about his past while the narrator is moving the narration forward; we are thus engaged by a character who is in the past but is also inexorably moving forward in the narrator's presentation while he himself is constantly looking back with melancholy at all that he is leaving behind. These two currents coincide when a present physical sensation fortuitously provokes a recollection of a similar physical experience, itself of no consequence, except that it inserts the verbal transcription of primary memory into the present narrative. Thus it is that an approximate repetition takes on an unexpected and unprecedented signification in which distance becomes a bridge instead of a barrier. The remembering act and the remembered are with the reader and, what is most important, so is the medium, the narrative itself. It remains for us to consider the link between a narrative such as Remembrance of Things Past and the narrativity

46 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense of collective memory. Consider these passages from Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude:1 Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (11) Aureliano, on the other hand, took a step forward and put his hand on the ice, withdrawing it immediately. 'It's boiling,' he exclaimed, startled. (26) When the squad took aim, the rage had materialized into a viscous and bitter substance that put his tongue to sleep and made him close his eyes. Then the aluminum glow of dawn disappeared and he saw himself again in short pants, wearing a tie around his neck, and he saw his father leading him into the tent on a splendid afternoon, and he saw the ice. (126)

A few preliminary observations on these passages are in order: (1) The narrator is not remembering an incident, he is stating that a character at a much later time than the narrative present would remember an incident that has not yet taken place. The narrator himself is that person within, who knows all of the story; every word, every pause is inscribed in memory and must be told in its appointed order as is the time-honoured tradition of the storyteller, but this narrator does allow us to catch a glimpse of his status as a timeless person as Proust so aptly put it. (2) The remembering takes place on page 126 and, there, the narration simply makes the statement that the character remembered. How he remembered and exactly what he remembered we are not told. Therefore we do not have an example of remembrance, but only the indication of what the remembrance was about. (3) The reader, however, who has been prepared for this incident of remembrance from the first line of the text and who has read the account of the childhood incident, does indeed remember what happened and what Aureliano said when his father took him to discover ice. In the absence of a description of Aureliano's remembrance, the reader's remembrance comes in to take its place. It is the reader who recalls the father's words, his brother's refusal to touch the ice, and Aureliano's words as he touched it. Garcia Marquez's novel, like Proust's, is built on the aporias of human temporality and memory. The narrator as storyteller depends on memory but his memory is unitary and not a string of islands linked by the thread of plot. His is the memory that unfolds; it is the telling of a story every time he faces his audience, but for each member of that audience and for

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 47 each performance, the storytelling as an act is unique and not repeatable. The characters in the story remember and they also forget, in fact they are plagued with a loss of memory in the early chapters, and utterly lose their cultural memory in the later chapters, and this is so because they are in someone else's story and no longer in their own. They are all bit players in a saga they cannot grasp, their time is the ephemeral present of their action. Because they have no concept of the story neither do they have any idea of beginnings and endings. There are only two exceptions: the enigmatic Melquiades, who emerges as the narrator, and Aureliano Babilonia, who becomes the textual reader of Melquiades' story. Aureliano Babilonia gains access to memory when he is able to make Melquiades' story his own. The breaking of the code in the last chapter is similar in magnitude and purport to Marcel's understanding that memory is gained through narrativity. When Aureliano Babilonia becomes a reader of his own story he is able to transcend the present and recapture the memory of Macondo that had been lost to all of the other characters. The reader of this novel begins reading someone else's story. It is the story of a fictional village lost beyond the swamps of the Guajira peninsula of Colombia, written by Garcia Marquez, and narrated by a crazy old gypsy who appears to be ageless. But from the first line of the text something unexpected is happening to the readers; they are slowly getting involved in an exceptional time spectrum. In incident after incident, the reader is simultaneously in two or three textual places in the story; as these temporal cross-indexes begin to proliferate and as the reader reaches the place where such and such was to take place, as a reader she or he has traversed distances of years in an instant and linked them together. The end result of this constant repetition of the phrase 'many years later X was to remember' is that the reader is joining the narrator in his exalted place of unitary time. When we reach the last of the unnumbered twenty chapters and we encounter a textual reader, we know that he is now reading our story and that we can read and reread it many times over, but it will always be a new reading, because the reader has become an active agent in the telling of the story. Human agency inside fiction and history has been examined by a number of critics including myself in chapter 4 of this book. However, what we are dealing with here is human agency in the making of fiction and history. Both are direct applications of reflective imagination, both are rule-governed activities, and both are essentially collaborative efforts. But there is a further common element and that is that in both the reading of fiction and history, the reader draws upon the vast prefigura-

48 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense tive storehouse of narrativity. The emplotment of both narratives is possible because both history and novel are telling stories about human agency. To be sure, the uses and limitations of documentation are quite different in the two narrations and the modes of characterization also differ in that the historian is much more circumspect in delineating the personalities of the multiple agents that are described. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein explains the term languagegame, which I shall have occasion to use here. He writes: The word language-game is here meant to emphasize that the speaking of language is part of a form of life' (1953, no. 23). I take this to mean rulegoverned human activity that links reality and language. One such rule-governed activity is reading a novel. The constructing of our 'as if world based on the interaction between the text and the reader is a fluid nonlinear sort of game, but nevertheless it is a rule-governed activity. Therefore, when we read about remembering in a novel, we are doing more than just enacting a role for a character within a plot. We are, above all, engaging the textual temporal indicators in a process of worldmaking that is only at first confined to the particular situation of the text, for it rapidly begins to involve our sense of world through our reading repertoire of consistency building and our paradigms for responding to textual absences. The second point to be made here is to assess the significance of collective memory of narrativity I alluded to in the opening pages of this chapter. I am fully aware that the notion of collective memory is strongly challenged by contemporary historiography. Ricoeur puts it this way: The scientific use of data stored in and manipulated by a computer certainly gives birth to a new kind of scholarly activity. But this activity constitutes only a long methodological detour destined to lead to an enlargement of our collective memory in its encounter with the monopoly exercised over speech by the powerful and the clerisy' (1984-8, III, 118-19). One Hundred Years of Solitude is a protohistory of most of Latin America, in so far as there are communities that have lost their identity through self-destructive civil wars and the intervention of United States hegemony. The loss of collective memory is the human tragedy that befalls oral cultures that are transformed into written cultures by violence rather than by education. Only the very few and privileged members of these communities have access to writing. Once a people of an oral culture have been deprived of the means of collective memory, which is storytelling, the lives of these persons gravitate to personal views of the past

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 49 or, in the case of Latin America, to foreign ready-made stories transmitted via television, and only an ever-shrinking part of the community is able to hold on to the collective past. The only way to save a people from the extremity of self-destruction of their identity as a people is for the writer to recover the art of storytelling and pass it on to possible future generations who might be able to recover their lost collective identity. The fusion of islands of memory into a narrative of identity is the basis for the unity of human consciousness. Contingency and coincidence in the activity of living give us the incidents out of which we must, more or less, coordinate our narrative. The most important observation to be made here is that this is a coordination that we must have, and is drawn from the narrativity that has made up our lives. This common storehouse of stories, tales, gossip, great literary works of art, history both official and unofficial, scientific explanations, and the numerous stories of the lives of others we ponder upon, is what we have called the collective memory. The interweaving of these multiple layers of narratives has established cultural patterns of recognition and paradigms of order that are our collective coordinates in establishing our individual identities. The movement from primary memory to remembrance, I have said, is effected through the narrativization of incidents. The profound significance of reading texts like those of Proust and Garcia Marque/ is that they bring into conflict the reader's established paradigms of order with the textual ones and it is from this encounter that we generate what Ricoeur has called the refiguration of the lived world. Just as we have considered individual memory and collective memory, so too can we examine the concept of narrative identity as applicable to a community as well as an individual. A national history and an autobiography are only the monuments that stand on the basis of the narrativity that makes up a collective identity. The absence of a collective remembered past is an absence that must be filled. The question is how will the past be reconstituted in the remembrance. Tyranny has always felt the urgency to rewrite the past, whether it is an individual identity or a community's past. The work of correction and rectification is neverending because subjects recognize themselves in the stories they tell about themselves. In this respect, the work of literature and history, as reflective imagination of the past, is strictly complementary, for one gives a community a sense of the particular while the other deals with the general. It is very significant that the great French social historian, Fernand Braudel, in his last work, The Identity of France, has converted this nation

50 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense into a protagonist of history within a plot enriched by a lifetime of research and a style of narration in the best French tradition of Flaubert. If the remembrance of childhood brings joy to Marcel, it is the realization that sudden and unexpected remembrances of a few isolated incidents can be the key to recapturing the past that finally produces profound happiness and dissipates the anguish of a sense of failure and the fear of death. The newfound resolve of Marcel, the character, is secured in his unification with Marcel the narrator of the story. This is a complex unity for the individual has now taken control of his story, and what were merely isolated fragments of remembered past have become the past inscribed as part of the narrative present. The reader who has been with the two Marcels is now swept away in the character-narrator's identity as the world-maker. Identity and control have been attained through the power of the configuration of the narrative present in which the reader is involved. Macondo's history or collective identity as the common memory of the community has been lost by the townspeople. It is no longer a lived experience, and will henceforth stand outside the lived experience of these fictional citizens of Macondo. The loss of collective memory cannot be recovered. Yet the readers and the readings of this story are legion. Macondo has passed into the collective memory of countless communities of Latin America and the world. In its trajectory from genesis to apocalypse, this story has become a part of Latin America's collective memory. This fictional history has become cultural history. Because fiction is not constrained with the requirements of documentary evidence, neo-positivist historians can be tempted to set it aside when considering the sense of the past a people take as their identity. But we ought to be reminded that the collective memory of people is a vast tapestry with many elements of fact woven together with other memories of imagination or belief. The reality of our sense of the past is dependent on our narrativization of memory, as Wittgenstein has shown us; or, as Ricoeur has said, there is a constant interweaving of history and fiction in our refiguration of the lived world on which our consciousness of human time rests. It is of some importance to recognize how it is that Ricoeur and Wittgenstein have contributed to the phenomenological hermeneutics I have used in my discussion of literary remembering. Ricoeur's semantics of discourse is central to phenomenological hermeneutics because it provides the foundation for a theory of interpretation that is centred on the concept of the text and that integrates a philosophy of experience and

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 51 a hermeneutics of textual exegesis into an active idea of reflective thinking that Ricoeur calls refiguration. We start from a prefiguration of narrativity essential to all world-making and move into the activity of the configuration of the text - that is, the making of the text by the reader - and our encounter with the textual other culminates in the philosophical reflection of the reader's redescriptive response to the textual injunctions; in other words, our ground is narrativity that is our necessary pre-text, our active rendering is the making of the text, and our reflective post-text is a gain in our narrativity for the next reading. Wittgenstein's striking analogy of aesthetic appreciation and one's judgment of having understood something also offers a powerful instrument for phenomenological hermeneutics. Both aesthetic appreciation and the purported understanding of something involve figuration or the seeing of aspects of the thing appreciated or understood. To see an aspect is to be aware of relations that reach out from the particular case in innumerable directions and thus give it its unique character. This is the domain of the reflective imagination I have discussed in chapter 1, which will be central to my concern with making sense throughout this book. Our reading of a text is an exemplary case of 'seeing aspects' in Wittgenstein's terms. The logical space of the rendering of the text, or in Ricoeur's terms, the configuration of the text, is never a fixed space that slowly fills up. The space of rendering a text is the same kind of space as that of the aesthetic appreciation of a painting or the grasping of a solution to a problem; it is what physicists call phase space and is constituted through the oscillation of the multiple relations that converge, cross over, diverge from the movable focal point of the enunciating voice. The textual rendering of remembrance constitutes a specific focal point that serves to attract the reader's figurational capacities. It is from this focal point that the stream of textual and lived relations will reach out. The outcome of reading certain texts we designate as literature will be to have brought about an extraordinary number of relationships. Whatever the canon may declare or the literary histories propound, the literary text will be the power source that provokes some form of redescription in the relationships that emanate from the encounter. The dialectic between self and other is the most fundamental relationship in the unfolding of the reflective imagination, and memory plays a central part in this dialectic. The other is not an external add-on to self. My argument, taken from Ricoeur, is that the other is the internal basis of self and that this dialectic structure is established in the singular and collective memory that constitutes personal and collective identity. Just

52 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense as memory of self and memory of others are indistinguishable from each other, so too is personal memory entwined with the collective memory that is history. Therefore, the narrative of memory and of remembering is the ground for the narrative of identity that we interpret in the hermeneutics of life. Ricoeur sums it up aptly: 'When Dilthey formed the concept of Zusammenhang des Lebens (the connectedness of life), he spontaneously held it to be equivalent to the concept of life history. It is this pre-understanding of the historical significance of connectedness that the narrative theory of personal identity attempts to articulate, at a higher level of conceptuality. Understood in narrative terms, identity can be called, by linguistic convention, the identity of the character' (1992,141). This identity of the human agent can only be read within the plot of the life history of that person. The further and subsequent derivation of one identity in conjunction with the identity of others is the collective memory of a community as remembered from the remembrance of countless others who have lived and relived their lives. The Cinematic Subject as Other This section considers the elaboration and reception of the cinematographic subject from a hermeneutic perspective and in this way responds to the query of what is the sense of others that defines the self. From two films, I have chosen two very different characters and modes of characterization, which I plan to use dialectically to demonstrate fundamental changes in concepts of representation of the subject. Casablanca, the classic romance of the American hero in spite of himself, was released in 1942. It was directed by Michael Curtiz, and starred Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Frida, the filmic biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, starring Ofelia Medina, was produced in 1984, directed by Paul Leduc. My aim is to comment on two modes of representation of the filmic subject; I describe these two modes as linear and nonlinear characterization. In 1979 Stanley Cavell gave the following 'provisional summary' (his words) of what he called the material basis of the medium of cinema: This basis is a succession of automatic world projections' (79). He clarifies the meaning of each of the terms in his statement. The obvious fact is that the film is made up of successive frames that sometimes are continuous, but may be discontinuous with the fine art of cutting brought to bear in the making of the film. With the word 'automatic,' Cavell adds the fact that film is photography and once complete is fixed and can be replayed

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 53 innumerable times by purely mechanical means; there is no need for staging, actors, rehearsals, etc. 'World' covers the ontological facts of photography and its subjects. Finally, with the word 'projection,' he points to the phenomenological facts of viewing, and to the continuity of the camera's motion as it ingests the world. It is this last aspect of Cavell's premise that I take as my starting-point. I want to discuss the phenomenological facts of viewing, and specifically a three-and-a-halfminute clip from each film, in a hermeneutic exploration of two filmic characters. Six minutes into Casablanca, a single-engine Fokker flies over a crowd and over the sign of Rick's Cafe Americain and lands at the airport. A delegation of German officers greets Major Stroesser of the Gestapo, who has come to Casablanca to personally supervise the capture and perhaps execution of the Czech nationalist leader Victor Laszlo. Major Stroesser is greeted not only by his officers but by Captain Renard, the prefect of police in this North African outpost of unoccupied France. As they walk from the plane to the waiting automobiles, Major Stroesser enquires into the fate of the person who killed two German couriers and took the letters of transit signed by General de Gaulle that ensure the bearer unquestioned right to leave French territory. Captain Renard, smiling, informs Major Stroesser that the killer is known and on that very evening will be arrested at 'Rick's.' He adds: 'Everyone goes to Rick's,' to which Stroesser responds: 'I have heard of this cafe and about Mr Rick himself.' In ten seconds the significance of the character has been introduced. In the next scene we see a full shot of Rick's Cafe, followed by a close shot of the neon sign. The camera enters the cafe on the heels of a couple that has just been greeted. The camera concentrates first on Sam, who is singing at the piano, then flits from table to table picking up fragments of conversation from the customers. There is a virtual cross-section of politically displaced persons and the usual collection of thieves, prostitutes, and smugglers that they attract. The camera leaves the main saloon and follows the waiter known as the professor as he enters a private area where the gambling casino is situated. As he serves a large group in the casino playing cards, a woman asks him if he will please ask Rick to join them for a drink. The waiter replies that Mr Rick never drinks with the customers. A man at the table tells the waiter to mention that he ran the second-largest bank in Amsterdam. The waiter replies that would not impress Rick, and that the former director of the largest bank in Amsterdam is now the cafe's chef. Rick's character has been built up through multiple references but has yet to be seen or heard.

54 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense The camera now approaches a table in a close cut so that we can see only a man's hands and mid torso; a waiter hands a voucher book to the unseen man who takes it and signs 'O.K. Rick/ For a couple of seconds the camera lingers on his hands, the cigarette in the ashtray, the chessboard and the game he is playing solo; he has just taken a white bishop. Only then does the camera slowly move up to his face. The build-up has been continuous from the moment Captain Renard mentioned Rick's cafe to Major Stroesser. The character exudes strength, self-confidence, intellectual power, and most of all, control of his domain. The next scene in this short segment demonstrates the extent of the character's control. The doorman looks to his table for a visual sign of approval or rejection of each person who asks to enter the casino part of the cafe. A couple enters, followed by a well-dressed middle-aged man. When Rick gives the sign of refusal the doorman closes the door. The man protests angrily and takes out his business card. Rick has come over from his table and confronts the man. The would-be customer demands admittance. Rick tears the business card, hands it back to the man and tells him his cash is good at the bar. When he asks if Rick knows who he is, Rick answers that he does and that he is lucky to have access to the bar. The diminutive Ugarte, played by Peter Lorre, who came in while Rick was confronting the angry customer, remarks with admiration that Rick dismissed the Deutsche Bank as if he had been doing it all his life. A tight-lipped Rick questions what makes him think he hasn't. Ugarte visibly shrinks. This filmic event is the introduction of the protagonist. There will be many more additions to the basic characterization of Rick, but the tensional contradiction in this dominant figure has been established. The linear mode of characterization is noteworthy and can be seen as a rapid build-up with a direct course of development of strength and contradiction. First, Rick is a key figure in the expatriate life of Casablanca. Second, his cafe is the privileged centre of activity. Third, he controls his space and therefore is central to the political activity in Casablanca. Fourth, he appears to be politically nonaligned and prospering from this status, providing services to both Free France and the German Third Reich. Fifth, this purportedly independent person demonstrates nevertheless marked anti-German political views. This is the tensional kernel that will expand into the existential metaphor of freedom. But before I enlarge on the linear mode of characterization in the creation of the filmic metaphor, let us look at the other film segment. Frida is a biographical film, which probes into the extraordinary life of

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 55 the Mexican painter and political activist Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon de Rivera, better known as Frida Kahlo. She was born in 1907 and died just after her forty-seventh birthday in 1954. The film is disconcerting because of the absence of dialogue and the extreme fragmentation and apparent random succession of the scenes. There are more than one hundred separate scenes grouped into ten segments, each segment framed by the same scene, taken from a variety of camera angles, of the dying Frida. I have chosen for commentary a three-and-a-half-minute segment starting at the ninth minute of the film. There are five scenes in this segment. First, the camera moves slowly over a group of peasants holding the Day of the Dead ceremony and, especially, remembering the recently assassinated Emiliano Zapata. The year is 1917, Frida is ten years old, and she is seen as a keen-eyed observer. The camera zooms in on the photographs of Zapata and the votive candles in his honour as the group sings the lament and the invocation that Zapata lives on. Forty seconds after Frida appears as observer the scene ends abruptly and we witness the aftermath of an accident. The eighteen-year-old Frida is carried into a house with a piece of steel protruding from her hip. A hefty man pulls, turns, and twists the shaft until he manages to remove it amid her cries of pain. The film editing is again sharp. The next second we approach the dying fortyseven-year-old Frida in her bed, with her face reflected in a bedside mirror. The scene lasts one minute and twenty-two seconds. The next scene is in a carpenter's shop. The camera pans slowly through the shop from a fixed position, encountering obstacles until it comes to a painting that the seated Frida is observing. The year is 1939; she is thirty-two years old. She is examining her painting entitled The Two Fridas'; two seated representations of Frida, mirror images of each other, are holding hands. One is dressed in the nineteenth-century European manner, the other in the Mexican Tehuana costume. The European Frida has a surgical instrument in her hand; she is cutting the artery from her exposed heart and is bleeding on her white dress. The Mexican Frida has an amulet in her hand with a portrait of Diego Rivera as a boy. Although her heart is also exposed there is no cross-section representation as is the case with the European Frida. The camera approaches the painting from an oblique angle, then moves up close to only the European half of it, then turns to focus on the observing Frida and concentrates on her face. One can see the painting reflected in her eyes. The camera moves back and captures the full painting. There is another look at Frida observing the painting, followed

56 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense by a return to the painting, now concentrating on the Mexican Frida. Finally, the camera returns to Frida, still intently examining the painting. She breaks the brush that she has been holding in both hands. Not a word has been spoken; the scene has lasted one minute and a half. The last scene in this clip follows instantly. The camera moves in slowly from a distance on Frida, her father, and her sister; the year is 1916, and Frida is nine years old. She is having her photograph taken by her photographer father. She is seated in a formal pose, wearing an elegant white dress. Her sister is seated off to the side and is observing. The scene ends as the camera moves in closely and concentrates on Frida's face as the photograph is taken. The discontinuity is mitigated only because all the scenes concentrate on Frida. The dating of the fragments is possible because all the scenes are so clearly identifiable as incidents in the life of Frida. In three and a half minutes we move from a ten-year-old in 1917, to a young woman of eighteen in 1925, to a dying woman of forty-seven in 1954, to the thirtytwo-year-old Frida in 1939, and finally, to the nine-year-old youngster in 1916. Can any of these fragments be expanded to the sense of a narrative event in the film? The nonlinear mode of characterization creates a constant incompatibility of one image with its successor; the brevity of each image is also a disruptive factor, and because there are no verbal images the viewer is forced into the configuration of visual metaphors. There are two constants in this characterization: first, physical pain, and second, representation, be it through memory, mirror reflections, photography, or painting - and, of course, the film itself as photography. Let us compare the two modes of characterization, not as a simple accumulation of information but rather as what they are in the experience of the viewer: processes of redescription in a semantic field of meaning construction. In ordinary terms, the two segments give us a limited human experience with a fictional other. In both cases the six information bits that confront the viewer operate within a specific historicity. In the case of Casablanca the year is 1939, France has fallen to Nazi Germany, and unoccupied France is still an indeterminate zone not quite as open as Switzerland, Sweden, and Portugal, but not as restricted as occupied France. In Frida the period is postrevolutionary Mexico from 1917 to 1954. It is marked by events in Mexico; in Europe, especially the Russian revolution, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War; and in

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 57 the Americas, by the United States' intervention in Nicaragua and Guatemala (not in 1980, but in the earlier 1920 and 1950 episodes). The six markers or truth-claims in the Casablanca segment are: (1) the name 'Rick's' is seen as the plane flies overhead, is mentioned by the prefect of police, and is repeated by the Gestapo major, giving Mr. Rick an anticipated significance; (2) the name is repeated and is then a subject of conversation between the waiter and the customers; (3) the signature is seen before the person; (4) the hands and activity of chess-playing and smoking are seen; (5) the face and the upper body are finally seen in a position of authority and control; and (6) the person exercises power by refusing access to the German banker. The truth-claims are entirely sequential, linear, and fully coordinated in the characterization of Rick, American hero in spite of himself. In its semantic field the authority of the character in Casablanca depends almost entirely on maintaining a neutral indifference to the ideological enemies of Germany and Vichy France. The truth-claims in Frida appear to be a random succession of images: (1) the face of the ten-year-old, observing the Day of the Dead ceremony; (2) the body of the young woman in extreme pain; (3) the body of the mature woman in pain, and her mirrored reflection; (4) the artist, her work, and the camera; (5) the painting itself and its images of duality and pain; (6) the girl as the subject of a photograph - that is, the filmic photograph of the taking of a photograph. The succession is completely nonlinear. The configuration is one of multiple images that make up personal identity, that of the artist and her artistic persona; if Casablanca gave us a linear build-up of the hero, Frida gives us the play of images in the indeterminacy of the subject as other. And because there is no preestablished paradigm of hero in the case of Frida, the viewer must attempt to fit each new bit into some overall schema of the biographical person that was, not the fictional persona that is. The linear characterization of Rick as hero is an established narrative process for the viewer; the nonlinear characterization of Frida is a creative metaphorical process that keeps changing and rearranging the fragments even after the film has ended. The former is a powerful closed text, the latter is an unstable and threatening open text. Rick is a composite character created to serve the role of modern hero. Frida is a biography and a swarm of visual images that are not yet narrativized. Although subjects are the creations of cinematographic art there is no doubt that part of the redescriptive process is that we are dealing with two different

58 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense things - a literary narrative and a life story - and therefore the subjects of the two films operate by means of different truth-claims of identity. These two films have given us the basic data for the discussion of the relationship between personal identity and literary identity. When we speak of a fictional character, what is it that this term implies and presupposes? In a basic first approach we can say that the fictional character refers to a set of distinctive markers, physical or behavioural, which permit the reidentification of the individual as the same one encountered before. The sameness of the person has such established external markers as physical features and, most of all, a name. The behavioural traits can be ascertained only by some form of interrelated action. Both Rick and Frida have the external markers that are emblematic of sameness. However, Rick has a much more developed presentation of behavioural traits than Frida. At least in preliminary terms, Rick is more knowable as a character than Frida. But we must now move to a secondary level in this hermeneutic probe of subject. This second level is the finite perspective of world-making. Here character appears as a way of living, of existing in terms that are related to my own process of existing in the world I remake each day in accordance to my perspectives of order. This is the world not only of things, time, and space but, primarily, a world of ideas, values, and others. Thus, on this level character designates those lasting dispositions toward value-judgments and toward others as subjects by which a person is recognized. On this level Rick has a few ideas we will continuously associate with him. Besides loving freedom and Elsa and despising bullies and Nazis, what he demonstrates in this segment is courage, toughness, authority, mental agility, and self-control. These character traits set Rick on the path to the narrativization of personal identity as Woody Allen demonstrated in the 1972 film Play It Again, Sam. Woody Allen's character's identification with the heroic Rick displays the otherness of the characterization assumed as his own, but this form of identification is already latent in the identification with the values the hero personifies. We must go further if we wish to explore the subject in Frida. Every narrative, be it novel or film, unfolds a textual world of its own. The more unique the world constructed the more will it prevent us from entering except as curious voyeurs of the exotica of the other, who is never our other, but only the object of our fantasies. The subject in the narrative becomes a subject as our other to the degree that we can accept the character's fate as a human fate, but this is not a simple matter of eliciting empathy.

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 59 In our own experience the life story of each of us is caught up in the life stories of others. Whole sections of my life are part of the life story of others - of my family, my friends, my companions in work and in leisure. However, this personal entanglement in life stories differs markedly from literary ones in that the former are open-ended and in process while the latter have been worked out in the narrative plot - or so it has been in the accepted wisdom of how we read a novel or view a film. A breakthrough on this matter has been phenomenological hermeneutics, which has helped us to interpret postmodern narratives and to go beyond our contemporary dialectic of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation, but I would also claim that it has given us a new reflective approach to art of other times. The subject in Frida becomes an 'as if human subject for the viewer, and this can be explained if we examine the process of figurative appropriation as the complex experience that it is, rather than some naive notion of model substitution. The filmic text/viewer relationship in the reception of Frida is one that can only be characterized as struggle. There is a struggle at every level of reception from the most basic level of knowing what is going on in the film, to the more complex ideological issues of the Marxist concept of history and the most problematic of trying to respond to someone else's acute physical pain. Of course, the film is a retrospective review of a life story, but because this is a life story that does not flow temporally, the viewer is involved from the outset in trying to make sense of the fragmented remembrances of a dying woman's life. Therefore, the first point to make is that although the filmic text is a retrospective series of remembrances, the viewing of it or, in Ricoeur 's terms, the viewer's configuration of it, is a present of actualization. This hermeneutic examination of Frida demonstrates that because the filmic narrative is one that we have had to construct ourselves through our response to a series of almost one hundred visual images, it is our configuration that we measure against that of the life story. Our narrative and Frida's biography, far from being mutually exclusive, are in fact complementary. Stories of another's life are objectified through writing and narration, but in this film the life story returns to life through the path of our figurative appropriation. The last question I want to consider is the nature of the filmic subject in the reflective make-up of the viewer. I must enquire as to the intimate relationship between the figure of the subject and the imagining subject who is the viewer, and I plan to do so within the limitations of the two

60 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense films discussed and, specifically, the two sequences I have described. For decades now, we have all heard protests against violence, pornography, racial and other forms of social discrimination in film. These representations are rejected for two reasons: they are said to be offensive to some and are purportedly inducements or legitimizations of antisocial behaviour for others to emulate. The claim that there is an aesthetic intent that overrides these protests becomes questionable if one accepts a deep linkage between art and life, as I have in this chapter. My response to this debate is in three parts, which are the representation of the human body, otherness, and the repertoire of world-making. The constancy of a self's identity is anchored in the body. Rick and Frida will, once again, serve as my examples. In both segments the two characters are fully clothed. It is only in Frida's painting that her upper body is partially uncovered. Yet the body language of both characters is a formidable part of the visual imagery. In Rick's case, he exudes strength and control without having to demonstrate it. With Frida we respond to the face of physical pain without the lacerated body appearing. The closest we come to it is when the steel shaft is removed from Frida's hip. The strength of the visual images of the body lies not in depiction but in the motion or lack of it. Rick's potential as a hero is demonstrated by his movement and body language as he walks over to personally throw out the Nazi and make the fluttering Peter Lorre shrink even more. On the other side, the only movement Frida makes in the segment's fragments is to break the brush she has been holding in her hands without our seeing it. The relative lack of movement in Frida is the determinate visual aspect that entangles us in imagining the pain and fury behind the indeterminate non-verbalized look of the woman. The constriction of movement is more powerful than movement. The second aspect of subject that we are considering can be stated directly as the dialectic of self and other as the very dialectic of identity. I know who I am, above all and in all cases, because I know I am not other. The identity of being the same is bound up with an ontology of totality. The self is not constituted by mere self-designation as a subject of discourse, action, or narrative. There is a more radical self-grounding, which is the will to be separate that must have otherness as the radical guarantee of sameness for the subject. Rick's others are all around him and they are all subordinate. His subject is defined in contrast to his many others. The dialectic of self/ other in Casablanca is completely concentric in that the others are all others to Rick and there is no other subject who has the capacity to define himself or herself with Rick as other. There is but one exception, and this

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 61 is the other that Rick was in happier days in the flashback scene to Paris and Elsa. It is only this Rick who has the capacity to make the Rick of Casablanca other. The characters in the film, including Elsa and the hero of Prague, Laszlo, serve only to define the attributes of Rick's character as his others, specifically the woman he loves and the man he admires, two highly positive if somewhat obscured traits in the Rick of Casablanca. Frida has no other than the other created by her through memory or through her painting. These other Fridas make the dialectic of identity one of profound introspection and indeterminacy. The principal visual image of the film sequence has the seated Frida looking with overwhelming intensity at her painting of the duality of herself. Frida the painter observes with a look of extreme concentration the painting of a European and a Mexican representation of herself, linked through a single artery. The Mexican mirror image has the photograph of her husband, Diego Rivera, as a child; the other image has severed the artery so that both images are bleeding to death. And we are observing them both as the seated Frida observes and the painted Fridas observe each other. Where is the subject in this scene? The identity of the woman is the indeterminate core of the film. She looks and possibly thinks as Virginia Woolf once wrote: 'It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done' (29). The creative genius of Virginia Woolf plunged into the dialectic of self and other. If the other is unknown except through the manner of our seeing him or her as our necessary complement, what can we do with the painted alter images of the subject as the self's others? Do they serve to give her her identity? Or is her identity still dependent on others whose separateness is overt? Frida's others are numerous: her husband, Diego; her father; her sister; Trotsky; Zapata; and numerous friends and lovers, both men and women. Frida's subject is unknown, because her others do not define her with their separateness, but set her off in her constant search for her inner other. We must look for her as subject and, in our manner of seeing, see our own reflection as we redescribe our world through her powerful indeterminate challenge of love, betrayal, pain, joy, suffering, and sensuality. The last part of this enquiry has to do with the viewers' involvement with the filmic subject - Rick, the hero in spite of himself, and Frida, the silent, motionless restrained woman with expressive power and a passion for life. Viewers' self-projections toward the filmic subject are an essential part of their dialectic presence in the film-viewer relationship. What does the otherness of these subjects amount to when they become

62 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense our others? Human reflection is primarily the voice of the other in us. In film, speech is comparable to gesture because what speech is charged with expressing is in the same relation as intention is to gesture. My remarks about the way the signifying apparatus works already involve a theory of significations. My corporeal awareness of the objects of my surroundings is already implicit in my body and presupposes no thematization or representation of my body. Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body - by a mute presence that awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them. In me as well as in the listener who finds it in hearing me, the significative intention is at the moment no more than a determinate gap to be filled with words - the excess of what I intend to say, over what is being said or has already been said. Therefore Rick, as our other, speaks to action and our often muted or deferred desire for action. There is a need to act and to act in support of people, ideas, beliefs, etc., but there is also a form of paralysis of the self who finds himself incapable of initiating action as a meaningful response to life. Because Rick's subject embodies action we need only to know if we will let him act on our behalf as well as his own. The aptitude for being affected through the injunction of principle constitutes a condition of our own identity. In the case of Frida it is her suffering that as subject she offers us. It is by means of her other's suffering that we find our own capacity to know ourselves as our other's other. In the final analysis the more we work at the configuration of the filmic subject of Frida Kahlo, the more will we be drawn into her world of passion and pain, and this entanglement, which will never be explicitly narrativized, must ultimately be our own configuration of this life story. The pieces of the puzzle are given, the segments are all punctuated with pain and remembrance, but the narrative itself is the one we give the filmic text. Since all cinematic subjects are incomplete and require the viewer's participation to complete them, I conclude with some general observations on the nature of the cinematic subject in the process of imaginative world-making by the viewer. First, the cinematic character as a special kind of narrative identity performs a mediating function for the viewer. This is a mediation between similarities and differences in the other I construct within me. The cinematic subjects are powerful imaginative variations on identity. In this section I have taken two opposite poles in the modalities of filmic characterization. At one end we find the linear mode in a story of love in the midst of the beginning of the Second World War. The story has definite characters: Elsa, loyal and passionate, a

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 63 contradiction resolved by her surrender to Rick, who must 'do the thinking for all'; Laszlo, a man with a cause, who will not only give his life for his political beliefs, but is also prepared to risk almost certain capture and death to save Elsa. Finally, there is the protagonist, with his strong code of personal ethics, his apparent pragmatic stand, his unquestioned qualities of leadership, and his love for Elsa. The linear development of the personal and collective conflicts works to test the resolve and lasting disposition of the filmic character as hero in spite of himself. At the other end of the scale stands the undeveloped plot of Frida; the biographical context serves for the examination of the identity of the character. Frida does not have a definite character, although she certainly has political beliefs as strong as and perhaps stronger than Rick's. She also expresses love of Diego and a much more complex sexuality, which is but a mode of being-in-the-world. She desires a sexual relationship with Leon Trotsky yet rebukes Diego for his many infidelities, especially with her own sister. She enjoys both heterosexual and homosexual relations in a sense of heightened sensuality. She knows physical and psychological pain and she is able to express the pain of living through her art. Frida does not have a definite character although she has a most powerful and almost overwhelming presence in the film. The contrast between the narrativist and the non-narrativist delineation of the subject in these two films is the spectrum of the imaginative construction of the other as known and as unknowable but present. Identity and the Community I am here concerned with the interpretation of literature as an expression of cultural identity, irrespective of the political power structures that arbitrarily separate and join peoples. If we redraw the lines and say that in reading literature we are dealing with a group identity that not only expresses the community's configuration of the world but, most important, is shaped by what it takes in from other language groups, we have an entirely new alignment of authors, works, and relationships than that which we now consider as national literature. I preface the discussion with the recognition that translation has attained such a high level of exchange that there is no literate social group in the world today that is not thoroughly involved with the writing of other language communities. The central question I wish to discuss here is the making of cultural identity. My argument draws upon a particularly rich philosophic tradi-

64 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense tion that examines cultural identity in terms of language. My line of thought follows from the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jiirgen Habermas, and particularly, Paul Ricoeur. I argue that literature attains meaningfulness through referentiality. But I also argue that historicist theories that would circumscribe referentiality to the author's circumstances are reductive, and further, that subjectivist approaches that ignore textual historicity are impressionistic appreciations. The referentiality that is central to my thesis is multiple and tensional. It is because the literature of a people is part of the social context of the reading and writing of the community rather than a separate fixed body of prescribed texts, that it becomes social reality. My theory of referentiality is a hermeneutics of fictional reference in which terms gain meaning through four simultaneous operations: (1) ostensive reference to the semiotic system; (2) sociocultural reference through language; (3) textual auto-reference; and (4) experiential reference to the reader's world-view. Because the referential operations are simultaneous, interpretation of the reading experience that strives to become significant commentary must approach the reading dialectically as an open-ended source. The extent of our understanding of a text can be measured by the fullness of our appreciation of the context in which the statement was made and its relative accessibility to us. The context, as I have indicated, can be characterized as a complex dialectic of expressive systems. It is neither fixed nor complete; it is a dynamic event, a temporally marked intersection of referential systems, and, as such, cannot be reduced to a determinate configuration. Thus it is that we can say that the reading and writing of literature is a normatively regulated, communicative action with an argumentative handling of truth-claims. It is precisely the argumentative handling of truth-claims that serves the community in the ongoing process of cultural identity. This communicative action takes place in the community and in a specific sociolinguistic context, but is always bringing into the community as many truth-claims from other communities as it is redescribing its own. So it is that the cultural intertex must become an essential part of the interpretation of the literary aspect of cultural identity. The interpreter always begins with confidence and the self-assurance that the interpretive commentary will approximate the insight of the understanding already achieved. But the more the interpreter works at the explanation of his or her previous understanding, the more will the text reveal previously unsuspected aspects, so that, in time, what had been the initial understanding will have changed through the search for

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 65 satisfactory and effective explanation. The interpreter comes to new understanding when the explanatory process has ended; however, this new understanding is just as vulnerable as the initial understanding, and the interpreter can propose it as valid only because, like Don Quixote, he dare not test the home-made helmet once again. If the interpreter were to reopen the explanatory process, the seemingly stable understanding so carefully constructed would begin once again to unravel. Meaning is a dynamic encounter, a crossing and crisscrossing of referential operations. An interpretation that pulls out of the dynamic event is nothing less than an arbitrary reduction of meaning to the position of understanding where the interpreter happened to be when he or she broke off. The question, therefore, is how can we discuss a dynamic and unpredictable event without imposing closure. My preliminary response is that the interpretation I propose is a hermeneutic examination of the reading experience, rather than a historicist promotion of an abstract construct arbitrarily designated as an accurate determination of the work itself. Such reductionist interpretations are the result of one or two referential operations taken out of the reading experience and put forth as fixed and definitively accurate expositions of the work's meaning. The commentary that follows consists of a heuristic plan that presents the conceptual framework through an explanation of the four referential operations, which, in practice, are simultaneous. The concluding interpretation brings together the referential systems in a dialectic process of questioning and being questioned that is the text-reader relationship. 1. Ostensive reference to the semiotic system. The sign system of a natural language is made manifest through the effective production of a communicative pattern. This is true even when there is the semantic impertinence of metaphor in the utterance that pragmatically disrupts the production of sense. In the latter case, it is the remaining pattern that keeps open the possibility of a new sense raised out of the ruins of the pragmatic or literal sense. For example, let us consider the following lines from 'Sun Stone/ by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz:2 Green domain without end. Like a blinding flash of wings when they open in the middle of the sky.

The key signs are the functional words like and when. Beyond the

66 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense obvious grammatical usage, we must recognize the functional role the signs perform in setting up the pattern of relationships. The adjective like performs the sense-making function of resemblance and transfer. Thus, the pattern is one of A resembles B, and, by calling attention to this resemblance, there is a shift in focus whereby B gains in sense by the transfer of characteristics of A. In our present example, there is a double indeterminate aspect because we cannot immediately recognize how 'green domain' can be said to resemble a 'blinding flash/ and further, we cannot recognize how it is that wings that unfold in the sky can produce a blinding flash. When is a conjunction that serves to produce temporal specification in the subordinate clause. The semantic problem is that it is not clear how the temporal specification of opening wings in the middle of the sky can produce a blinding flash. The point of our discussion under the heading of ostensive reference to the semiotic system is that there is a functional pattern that controls our response by channelling us into a process of thinking A is like B when the temporal specification X is operative; therefore, green domain is like a blinding flash, but this is a blinding flash of wings when they open, unfold in the middle of the sky. The suddenness of opening up in the middle is the essential control sign for the passage. 2. Sociocultural reference through the ideological models of the specific language. The sociocultural inference here is to power, dominance, and sudden disruption of this hitherto unchallenged domain. The referentiality is not the direct ostensive reference but rather an indirect inference through the semantic indicators and their paradigmatic relationships; domain without end sets in motion clear patterns of power and domination. Equally strong is the referential power of 'blinding flash' in the middle of the sky as a disruption of the unbroken dominance, while the reference to the bird that suddenly opens its wings has inferences of singularity amid uniformity. The most significant factor is that in terms of the sociocultural inference, the 'green domain' without end is oppositionally situated to its comparative counterpart 'blinding flash of wings.' 3. Textual auto-reference. The textual references are both intratextual and intertextual, and they are explicit. The intratextual references

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 67 build on the cited lines. A few lines later, Paz's text reads: 'Like a bird turning the forest / to stone with its song/ and a few lines later: 'A sudden presence like a burst of song / like the wind singing in the fire.'3 The sudden appearance of the bird takes on power that could not be anticipated in the earlier verses. It is the bird song that can petrify the entire forest. In the third segment, the reference is once again to the sudden eruption of song, now compared to the wind singing in the forest fire. The intratextual significance of this system is that it opens with the whole and juxtaposes it to the singular only to reverse it, and have the singular spread and overwhelm the whole. Some ten lines later, the lyric voice enters the poem through the singular presence of point of view: I move across transparencies as though I were blind. A reflection erases me, I'm born in another, Oh forest of enchanted pillars, I move through the arches of light into the corridors of a diaphanous fall.4

Intertextuality abounds throughout this long poem and, in the particular case of the bird imagery of the first part, there is a masterful appropriation of the first stanza of 'Retorno' by the Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez: The world's thousand towers against a golden sunset raise their beauty before my thoughts an ecstasy of stone of one thousand structures in a blinding flash transports me silent and blind.5

In Juan Ramon Jimenez's poem the 'blinding flash' comes as a result of thought, of meditation on man's work, and it transports the lyric voice blind and mute to genesis. In contrast, in Octavio Paz's poem, the blinding flash is genesis; it is the beginning that plunges man into a green, unending domain, like wings suddenly unfolding in the middle of the sky. The point of view of presence in the hitherto uninhabited world turns the forest to stone. The lyric voice enters shortly after and attempts to return (retorno as in Jimenez's poem) to genesis and, thus, regain his identity as man. The intertextual utiliza-

68 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense tion of the image of bird's wings opening in the sky goes back further, for Jimenez published the poem for the first time in the first Spanish translation of Rabindranath Tagore's The Gardener, translated by the author himself and published in English in 1913. (The subsequent Spanish translation was done by Jimenez's wife, Zenobia Camprubi de Jimenez in 1916, soon after their marriage, and was published in 1917. The translation was from Tagore's English translation, since she did not know Bengali.) The Gardener contains the following poem, simply listed as number 32: My heart, the bird of the wilderness, has found its sky in your eyes. They are the cradle of the morning, they are the kingdom of the stars. My songs are lost in their depths. Let me but soar in that sky, in its lonely immensity. Let me but cleave its clouds and spread wings in the sunshine.

Tagore's bird image has not only found a resonance in Juan Ramon Jimenez's image of the blinding flash of wings, but it has also maintained the meditative attitude of the lyric voice. When we turn to Octavio Paz's poem, we recognize that Jimenez's blinding flash has been assimilated to the Bengali poet's eyes of the beloved wherein identity is possible as suddenly as a flash of wings opening in an empty sky. The point need not be overstressed, but who has the exclusive proprietary claim of such images? The Bengali poet? Yet Tagore himself translated his poetry to English and thus made it a part of English-language poetry. Does it belong to the Spanish poet and his wife who translated the translation and responded to it through poetry? Or is the image of the Mexican poet who took in both and made their images over into his own poetry? 4. Experiential referentiality. The basic principle of indeterminate reference in interpretation is that the reader must strive to ground the openness of the text into some form of personal consistency that makes sense. It would appear, therefore, that closure and ethnocentricity on the part of the reader are not only unavoidable, they are a

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 69 necessary part of reading. This is the position taken by deconstruction theory and, on the whole, it is true. There is, however, another alternative and that is phenomenological hermeneutics. The reader can construct the necessary presence of consistency and not impose closure on the text by giving emphasis to the fact that this textual meaning is a construct, one of a number of possible constructs. This can be achieved by exposing the logocentric understanding of the text to the dialectic force of explanation. Let us review what I have presented thus far: There are at least four operations of referentiality in making sense of the text, and they are, as I have stressed, simultaneous. Some are instinctive, grounded in the training we have received, others require explicit choices. The semiotic mode of reference only makes possible a meaningful reading; it limits the number of possibilities on formal grounds but leaves all determination open. The sociocultural mode of reference both privileges certain possibilities of meaning and, at the same time, greatly enriches the text by linking its features to the cultural matrix of the language. Textual referentiality also privileges and enhances the text, but instead of linking it to the social ground, it ties it into the conventions and history of other texts and their genres. The fourth mode of reference, experiential referentiality that concretizes the text is, of course, the most restrictive, since the reader must make a number of choices in the configuration of meaning that, in part, limits the text. This referential operation would, indeed, be a logocentric reduction of the text and would cut off its creative power by fixing meaning. But this is the case only when the interpretation is isolated from other interpretations. What I propose is a dialogic interpretation that is in process, that is open-ended, that proposes meaning and meaningfulness, not to close the text, but to be contested by other readers. This is the cultural intertext. Thus it is that the very distance between the text and the reader becomes a bridge rather than a gulf of separation, for distance that is grounded into two historicities is distance as a relationship. The interpretation that follows is limited not only because I consider only a fragment of a very long poem, but also because I have privileged only one set of images. The poem 'Sun Stone' by Octavio Paz has 584 lines; it opens and closes with a coda I do not treat here. My commentary is on lines 10-44 and on the imagery of genesis and presence. The thirtyfour lines under discussion follow the coda and, in four stanzas, progressively move from reality without individual presence until, in a blinding

70 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense flash, wings unfold in the middle of the sky and there is singularity. The second stanza introduces temporality that prophesies joy and suffering of consciousness. The third stanza introduces the human glance, the viewpoint that makes the world and can also petrify it in memory. The body of the other is present in the gaze. The fourth stanza finally adds the first person of the lyric voice, who can know himself only through the female other. The lyric voice possesses the world through the body of the female other. His reflection is ephemeral. He has not yet discovered the meaning of reality, which is neither I nor you, but we. I have selected a poem that is not explicitly concerned with social issues in order to demonstrate the assertion I have made that all literary texts as experiential reality are part of the social and moral refiguration of the world by the reader. Contrary to historicist criticism, there is no topical, allegorical, hermetic, or ideological search for hidden messages. The social dimensions of literature I discuss are at the very core of reflection on the reading experience. If in reading a text we participate in making it, what is it that remains of that experience? What remains is primarily a reflective process of redescription of those aspects of our own reality that have been implicated in the making of the text. In the fragment of the poem I discuss here, there emerges a lyrical configuration of beginnings, beginnings of world, of consciousness, of self, and of identity. These beginnings have emerged in our experience through a creative process that knows no national boundaries. Among the varied interpretations that have been offered for these lines, the basic idea that this is a genesis paradigm is well accepted. But I must insist that this is a unique genesis where there is no God and no Satan to tempt mortals into transgression. Nor is there a pantheon of gods plotting and scheming to outdo one another using mortals as their pawns. In this genesis there is the world, inhabited by man and woman, and transformed by them into their habitat. A genesis paradigm that does not place the human being in a permanently subservient role, and does not recognize transgression of the divine will, has profound social implications. Recorded history would have been vastly different if such a beginning had formed part of the Western cultures as it did of India's. If there is no paradise lost, there is no damnation and, as Rabindranath Tagore's father, the great Hindu philosopher Debendranath Tagore, taught, in human affairs a person's brain and heart alone must rule. I began this section with the proposition that the argumentative handling of truth-claims serves the community in the ongoing process of cultural identity. My concept of cultural identity is that of a dynamic

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 71 identity, an identity that has a centre, but a moving centre. Dynamic cultural identity is a changing horizon because it is, above all, a living set of ideas about the self, and the self's community. Without a doubt, the dynamic cultural identity of the United States, for example, draws from both logical identity and platonic identity, but its parameters are constantly changing, as a detached observer can readily recognize. It follows that the very life-force in a dynamic concept of cultural identity comes from ideas that are proposed, contested, accepted, or negated about the self's relation to the community. The conflict of literary interpretations takes on particular issues, significant to the specific community, but because the fundamental stakes are common to all communities, cultural intertextuality traverses the world with such ease that McLuhan's global village becomes an appropriate historical indicator of our times. Phenomenological hermeneutics examines the literary text in the context of the linguistic community where it has originated, but this examination is one of continuous cultural interchange. The movement of texts and ideas between linguistic communities is so vast and so complex that the very idea of linguistic isolation today, even for the tribes of the deep Amazon basin, is patently absurd. The extent of our refigurative understanding of a text can be measured by the fullness of our appreciation of the context in which the text was made and the community in which it has been received. Meaningful human action takes place within a linguistic community that shares the same spectrum of values and prejudices and interpretations of common events. It is only within this aggregation of collective memory that cultural identities emerge, identities that can be in conflict with others that occupy the same space, as we know well from the occupied territories in Palestine and the war in the former Yugoslavia. There are also radical bifurcations in cultural identity that lead to tragic consequences, for example, the Spanish Civil War (1936-9). The distinctions and breaks within the dynamic process of a cultural identity gravitate to political parties that give support to the differences. But even in the case of the violent self-destruction of a cultural community we must recognize that the polarities and conflicts are part of the same identity. In the case of Spain one has to return to the war of independence from France, the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the Carlist conflicts that punctuated that century, to understand how a people could, under specific circumstances, be capable of tearing itself apart. The cultural intertext I have used here offers us a means of moving in and out of the dynamic centre of gravity that a cultural identity constitutes.

72 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense The significance of the cultural intertext would be marginalized if we did not recognize the potent role it plays in the development of popular culture, primarily in the making of images of hierarchy and images of governance. These images, whether they be national symbols or social stereotypes, always have a great potential for the displacement of truth, of social equity and justice. Homi Bhabha addresses the issues directly: Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the 'middle passage' of slavery and indenture, the 'voyage out' of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial histories of displacement - now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of 'global' media technologies - make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture a rather complex issue. (172)

What these remarks bring to my argument is the problematic of social reality. The same culture has two faces within its own domain as well as a dual export version. Within, it is at once a drive for survival and continuation, an insatiable need to continually supplement its own expression, but it is also in Bhabha's words 'a resplendent being/ 'a moment of pleasure, enlightenment or liberation.' That culture can be both monster and beauty is all too well-known by historians, but what interests me here is the way this duality is exported. My proposal is that the cultural intertext necessarily changes when it is exported because it moves into different discursive communities. As Linda Hutcheon puts it: 'Members of a discursive community share not only these presuppositions about how communication works in general terms, but also how it comes into being in terms of the identity, position and relative social status of the participants' (1994: 99). The profound differences that separate India, Spain, and Mexico must be pondered if we are serious in our attempt to understand the transmission and power of the cultural intertext. One of the ways in which we can cope with the multiple and unanticipated contexts into which the cultural intertext moves is to question not the intended target of the author but rather the reader's possibilities of making sense of the intrusion from another culture. In other words, even the simplest configuration of the social dimensions for the cultural intertext involves an affective component. The fact

Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 73 that cultural contexts other than that of the author's can neither be predicted nor controlled leads us directly into a chaotic situation of unknown variables that create a completely unpredictable situation. What is largely predictable, however, are the culturally derived targets in the originating point of the intertext sequence. For example, it may be deduced that a specific text was devised with an ironic purport or may have had a basic ludic orientation, but the culturally intended reading of the text depends overwhelmingly on the sharing of cultural indicators between the author and the reader. When these are no longer operative, as is the case in the majority of ironic texts that have been exported into a culture that does not possess the necessary cultural indicators for the ironic reversal, the cultural intertext has gone through mutation. Our challenge is that we can risk ignoring neither the targeted cultural imperative nor the unpredictable affective response in other cultures. The hermeneutics of cultural intertext involves dealing with the complexity of critical behaviour. There are always random contributing fac tors to the critical response, but if we understand cultural differences then we can propose principles of interpreting indeterminacy that do not eliminate it; this is a hermeneutics of engagement with cultural dynamics. The hermeneutic principles of cultural interpretation are akin to the principles of self-organized criticality in physics. This idea propounds that complicated interactive systems can evolve toward an unstable condition in which minor changes can provoke a major change. The typical example used to demonstrate this idea is the building of a sand pile grain by grain. Once the pile rises to a certain height - a critical state - it avalanches. Similarly, when a literary text or cultural feature is transposed from one culture to another there is a gradual build-up of meaning as one truth-claim after another is undertaken by the reader, but there is a critical point when the accumulation of truth-claims that have been accepted within the new context no longer holds to the model of coherence and, like the sand pile, it just breaks down. Cultural intertextuality as an integral part of the making of the world we live in covers the entire range of discursive practices and cannot be approached as simple usage of loan words or images. The model we propose is a nonlinear approach to cultural reality, one that recognizes the full extent of the present crises in theories of representation (cf. Valdes and Hutcheon). This model is a comparative enquiry that uses an empirical frame, specific schemes of cultural production, and finally, narratives of various distances ranging from the contemporary to the long view. Culture is

74 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense thus seen as a construct of identity and value exchange. The fundamental failure of past models was the movement toward some universal subjectivity. Our model situates the community in specific material reality, has a commitment to the historically specific, and consequently, narrates the history of the cultural intertextuality.

.3

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction

The Parodic Co-Text Hermeneutics from its inception in the eighteenth century has been concerned with the meaning we ascribe to texts. My task here is to examine what it is that we mean when we say that a poetic text means this or really means something else, etc. In this book, I take up neither the history of the meaning of meaning in hermeneutics nor the status of meaning in the approaches of the two other major contemporary theories, semiotics and deconstruction. My point is that the meaning of poetic meaning in hermeneutics today is a nonlinear equation; it is a description of a dynamic system, it is interpretation that does not aim at closure of a text's meaning but rather seeks openness, growth, and change in the perception of the aesthetic object. In the second part of this chapter I apply the ideas on textual sense to parodic texts. Both semiotics and deconstruction dismiss the subjective response to the poetic text, but for opposite reasons. Semiotics turns away from subjectivity in its search for a verifiable description of the communication process that is not limited to the idiosyncratic dimension of the individual. Deconstruction, on the other hand, considers the subjective response to the text when it is raised to the level of interpretive meaning as imposition of a particular meaning onto the virtual text and thus the logocentric falsification of the text. I agree with the position of both semiotic and deconstruction theory; my challenge of their position is one based entirely on experience and the practices we follow when we read poetry. Our basic starting point in hermeneutics today is the experience of reading and making sense while we read. This is a dynamic system that is impossible to predict or curtail. It is, however, fully accessible to

76 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense study if we consider it as a nonlinear equation, that is, as the dynamic system that it most certainly is. If the meaning we derive from a poetic text changes as we read, and certainly changes when we reread, how can we make any reference to it? The answer is that we do it in a similar way to what the physicist does in describing a chaotic turbulent fluid movement. We make a map of the moving points that act as determinant attractors for the multiple indeterminant features. The map will not give us a hyper-meaning of poetic texts, for its basic function is to facilitate a dialogue about differences. Let me proceed with an example. In the lines 'A thousand crystal tambourines / wounded the dawn' (Garcia Lorca 358) there are three determinate features: the word 'tambourine,' which is the name of a folkloric musical instrument; the verb 'to wound/ which is part of a lexical set of verbs of bodily harm; and 'dawn,' which is basically a time of day, but a time of transition, the opposite of sunset. Each of these three attractors carries a plethora of attendant associations from previous usage by us, by others, and by countless unknown authors. Clustered around tambourine is dance, gaiety, celebration, fair, and carnival. Just as clearly, wound is related to violence, war, crime, killing, etc. Finally, dawn, as a time of transition, is associated with the coming of daylight, the designation of shadows, a new day, etc. But these terms do not stand alone in the line. They have qualifiers and are tied together in a grammatical statement. Tambourines are qualified by the numerical term 'thousand' and by the oxymoronic 'crystal.' A crystal tambourine would be a mere decorative imitation of the musical instrument, for its basic drumlike function would be lost. The major indeterminate feature of the line arises with the semantic impertinence of our pseudo-musical instruments causing bodily harm to the coming of daylight. It does not make sense. But does it make sense metaphorically? If we activate the three determinant features and unleash the dynamic process of latent meanings, the three are much more than lexical units; they become strange attractors of clusters of meanings. The attractors are called strange because they are not stable, they are caught up in a process of poetic meaning, and as they shift and change in relation to their grammatical links, their attendant clusters of cultural and idiosyncratic implications whirl in a turbulence of metaphor. A turbulent flow of transformations is generated. The smooth roundness of the crystal tambourine carries within the angular refraction of light and the exclusion of the festive for the jingle of glass. The violence of the angular refraction and the sound of glass breaking overpowers us with

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 77 the jagged harshness of pain, but is the dawn of a new day the victim? Or is it the possibility of renewal that has been wounded? The freshness of a new day, the coming of the light of day, the attendant sensibility of youth and hope are not killed, but they are wounded perhaps to die under the full force of the sun. What is the meaning of this meaning of these reflections? My reading of these words does not affect the virtual text, which is always available for a new reading as another response to be enacted through the conjunction of the personal and the cultural of language usage. The virtual text is a semiotic code with specific characteristics of polysemy and grammatical impertinence. At this level of the virtual text we cannot speak of meaning at all. My commentary on the line is, of course, a limited response to just a few of the multiple possibilities the text offers. It is limited, as limited as any subjective response of any reader must be. It is not only limited by the person, the time, the language, and the culture, it is also limited by the circumstances of the reading. This subjective reading experience is its own reward, it is the pleasure of the text, it is sensuous and gratifying, but it is also ephemeral. It begins to disappear almost as it is realized. The only solace is that we can do it again and again. Therefore, the meaning of the poetic sense in this case is subjective and severely limited. But there is a third dimension to the meaning of poetic sense and it is to explain the subjective in intersubjective terms. The more I try to reach others through various modes of explanation, the more I move into an intersubjective mode of communication and the further behind I leave the original personal response. The intersubjective realm of poetic meaning is dialogue. The more we talk one to another about poetic sense, the more will that poetic meaning become a shared concern of ours. The question, therefore, is how hermeneutics transforms a subjective response into intersubjective shared meaning that is dynamic and not fixed. Instead of seeking to find the correct meaning of a poetic text, hermeneutic criticism aims at making the discussion of the aesthetic characteristics of the text more effective. This means that critics have the responsibility of informing their readers on how their interpretation was arrived at and, most important, must never claim that the sense that has been given is more than the best explanation the critic can provide of his or her reading experience. The process of hermeneutic commentary is, above all, a dialectic between the two conceptual poles of explanation and understanding. Explanation begins with an established paradigm of analytical means to be

78 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense used in the presentation of the conclusions the critic has arrived at in the course of reading, research, and reflection. The aim is to communicate a specific understanding to the reader. Thus, the critic is moving the readers from an explanatory paradigm to a specific understanding. On the other hand, understanding is a purported grasp of the issues and a satisfactory explanation of the various problem areas. It functions as a stable conclusion of the interpretive process. The stability, however, is only apparent, for in the dynamic process of the hermeneutic dialectic the pre-explanatory understanding changes as the process of explanation ensues. The understanding that is finally attained has substantial differences from the starting point. Therefore, the fixed nature of the conclusion is temporary, for as soon as the explanatory process begins, the purported fixed interpretation also begins to shift once again. The hermeneutic dialectic reflects the movement from subjective to intersubjective meaning, which is never complete. It begins anew with every new enquiry into the poetic text, even the poetic text that has been examined on numerous occasions, for it is because of the polysemic nature of poetic language that the textual construct is inexhaustible. Consequently, the meaning of a shared poetic meaning is not reductive of the virtual text but, on the contrary, is an ever-expanding reflection about the experience of the text. The closer we move to the centre in a group of textual commentators, the closer we come to those who are commenting directly on their experience of transferring the virtual text into a reading experience. On the periphery of the group we have those who are commenting on the commentary and not on the experience of the text. The hermeneutic meaning of poetic sense has three levels: (1) of potentiality, which is virtual and cannot be circumscribed in any way; (2) the subjective meaning of the reading experience, which is the basic incentive to read but is, of course, limited and ephemeral; (3) the intersubjective meaning of sense, which began as subjective response but has been tempered by the need to communicate with others and thus has undergone a profound recasting as the process of explanation has taken the initial understanding and made it into a shared meaning. The virtual text remains the source, the inexhaustible basis for the reader's participation and the response to the demands it makes. When a reader retreats from a text because it does not make sense, the retreat is but the recognition that the text is other and that facile appropriation is not possible. The dialectic of discordant concordance belonging to the reading experience is but a part of a far-reaching dialectic of two world-views. The confrontation runs deep in a struggle that is un-

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 79 predictable; the mediating function is that of literature, and narrativity in particular. The stories told are thus taken as imaginative variations on basic ideas of living and suffering. The narrative is consequently the primary sense-making instrument we have and use as we read. Narratives do not merely enhance imaginative variations. We can go further and state that narrative produces these narrations since the narrative pattern set into motion in reading continually adds variations in emplotment. Zola was not far off the mark when he thought of his novels as a vast laboratory for experiments in which modes of living are put to the test. Where Zola was clearly wrong was in thinking that he could anticipate the reader's response. In the everyday experience of making sense of what we say and do, we do not have simple linear plots but multiple plots running at the same time, overlapping at times and well beyond our control, except for the very small part we have been given to play. Literary texts also must never be taken as singular emplotments. All texts are made of multiple other texts through the play of intertextuality by which the reader's reading experience of texts is opened even more, for the reader will read through the cultural intertexts that are his or her mode of concretization. Making sense of texts is a complex operation that is unpredictable, but this does not mean and never has meant that we cannot communicate our sense of the text to other readers of the same text. My thesis is that any reduction of the complexity of making sense is just that, that is, a reduction of very little value to anyone; within the changing directions of making sense of the text there lies the dialectic of appropriation and alienation. The reading experience is the pleasure of the text; it is the personal subjective joy of aesthetic concretization. No one can teach us how to enjoy a text. The enjoyment of art is largely a matter of a developed imagination gaining in experience and depth through continued exposure to the diversity and richness of human creativity. The more we read, the more we give of ourselves, the more effort we make in response to the injunctions of the text, the greater reward at this primary and essential level of experience. But we do not remain at this level of the pleasure of the text. Not for long. Most readers of the literary work of art want to speak about their experience to someone else and herein lies the dilemma that gave birth to hermeneutics. How can we make a deeply personal experience knowable to another? The answer is that if we do not get beyond the subjective language of response, we cannot. In order to communicate to another

80 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense about the aesthetic experience one has had, a different kind of language is needed. To transform subjective feeling into another's meaning, the speaker must search for and effectively use a common language. The search for this bridge is the process of explanation I have described above; it is the search for effective transference from a private domain to a shared context of understanding. There is, however, another very important consideration that must be added to the making of poetic sense and that is the unexpected and profound linkages the imagination thrusts together as texts buried in memory suddenly come to the surface not because they are necessary for making sense of the text that confronts the reader, but because the educated imagination has used it. This is what I have called the cultural intertext rather than explicit intertextuality. Cultural intertextuality is an essential part of making sense and is primarily a part of the reader's world-view that has been called into action as a mediator with the text's world-view. For example, when we read the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos' poem 'Presence' (88), a number of images of self-depreciation and humility surround the anticipation of death before there is a concluding stanza of affirmation. The poem is disturbing because the diminishment of personal identity is so strong, and the redemption as cohabitation in the world is so lacking in passion and so understated in promise. There is no defiance of death, no anguish of existential loss as we know from Unamuno's tragic sense of life. Nor is there a quiet acquiesence of death as a passage to a better life as we have learned from Santa Teresa. Rosario Castellanos's simple and singular affirmation of life is in the human community. Here are some lines from the twenty-four-line poem: Some day I'll know. This body that has been my hostel, my prison, my hospital, is my grave.

(1-2)

No one will see the ruin. Nobody will pick up the unfinished page. Among this handful of disperse acts, flung to chance, not one stands out as a precious pearl.

(14-18)

Although I forget and though I end Mankind where you are, where you live we all abide

(22-4)2

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 81 This stoic response to death with its gentle acceptance of human limits and mortality has its only mitigating touch in the sense of community that humanity stands for as the place of abode. My intertext cannot be a religious faith in the resurrection or the union with God because the poem excludes all religious referents. We have to move in the direction of the Roman stoics to find strong poetic kinship. Yet the sense of rage against death because it is so contrary to this poem serves as a contrastive intertext. Unamuno's essays, poems, and drama would give us substantial contrastive materials, but there is a poet from another culture and another literature who comes forth as a precise contrastive counterpoint. Dylan Thomas's 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' will serve us well: And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion.

(50)

The striking contrast is even more stark when we recognize that Thomas's lyric voice refers to the death of his others while Castellanos's lyric voice is projecting her own death. In Castellanos's poem there is the end of the lyric voice and oblivion and the solace of the abode of humanity, but in Thomas's poem the rejection of death's claim is emphatic: 'Break in the sun till the sun breaks down / And death shall have no dominion.' These are not only two different ways of responding to death, but I would say they are exemplary opposites: the stoic acceptance of death without religious symbols to mitigate the denial, contrasted with the highly charged rejection of the dominion of death; both poems turn to a sense of humanity or mankind as proof of continuation. Self-constancy is for everyone the summation of living so that one's others can recognize and acknowledge the person as an individual. It is this peculiarity of living that death threatens in Rosario Castellanos's poem; there is no question that the individual is what will be lost with death. There is no evasion of this central aspect of selfhood as the sameness that is threatened. In Dylan Thomas the polar opposition between

82 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense self-constancy, which will end, and the perpetuation of character is underscored. Lyrical identity is in both poems, and the reader's sense of the poems is one of finding the source of this identity. In narrativizing character Rosario Castellanos tilts the scale of identity in a manner that Dylan Thomas's fury, once abated, can never match: The knot that I was (bound up in rage, betrayal, hope sudden insight, surrender, hunger, cries of fear and helplessness, joy flashing in the shadows and words, and love and love and loves) the years will cut through.

(7-13)3

The narrative sense of a first-person confession turns the focus of the action to others. The narrativization rapidly builds up recognizable features of an identity. Therefore, death now threatens a person and the person so denied survives through the poem as Thomas's poem recognized but did not develop. The sense we make of the text is a dialectic of making the poetic text my text and giving the text's other the singularity that must correspond to the demands of another world-view. The text demands the reader's response, but cannot control it. The cultural intertext is particular to each reader, but it cannot change the exigencies of the text, it can only help to shape the response. The meaning of the hermeneutic sense is a temporary position of reflection that will be taken up in the ongoing dialogue around the literary work of art. If it is a good hermeneutic commentary, it will be readily understood and responded to by others and, therefore, grow beside the work of art. This tradition of commentary of the literary work of art is, in fact, a history of the culture of the specific centres of research and teaching. It has been asked whether hermeneutics is a contribution to knowledge. But the knowledge of which I speak is a knowledge of ourselves and our predecessors as commentators. Our criticism does not eliminate the creative openness of art, it enhances and supports our capabilities of expanding the dialogue about the work of art into an international discussion for readers of the diverse cultures of the world. If the sense of the text is so unpredictable, how can we have any hope of sharing the same meaning among a number of readers? The difficulty therefore is not within the configuration of the variables of a new imagi-

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 83 nary montage, but between separate and distinct readers, each with their own meaning. This is what Ricoeur would call a second-order difficulty and not a primary one. But for hermeneutics this is the main objective. A true philosophy of interpretation thus must come to grips with the necessary conflict of interpretations. The unity of the hermeneutic probe is the overarching concern that takes us from the prefiguration of cultural practices within a linguistic community, moving into an explanation of the process of configuration, and concluding in the refiguration of sharing the configurations. This last part is the process of communication within the community and this is achieved through the dialectic of explanation and understanding. It is the search for an effective language of explanation that will move the configuration of the text out of the subjective response and into the intersubjective language of communication. The terms of explanation are not the linear description of what happened, nor the repetition of what the reading disclosed but rather the richer unfolding of coordination between the historical, the systemic, and the reader's repertoire. If the reader's meaning of the text is to have any bearing on the community, it must be understood by others so that it can be addressed as other. I want therefore to stress the interactive character of meaning within refiguration. At this point we must recall that a non-shared meaning such as 'what the author really had in mind' or a sense of personal relation are irrelevant. The only meaning that counts is the meaning that has reentered the community as communication. This point has been made masterfully by Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, where he calls it the power of bringing something about. He writes: 'Just when the work is separated off from its author, its entire being is gathered up in the signification that the other grants it. For the author, the work as an index of individuality and not of universal vocation, is quite simply relegated to the ephemeral' (156). Ricoeur reminds us (ibid.) of the key passage in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, chapter 5, where he anticipates the full weight of the discussion: 'The work z's, that is, it exists for other individualities, and is for them an alien reality, which they must replace by their own in order to obtain through their action the consciousness of their unity with reality; in other words, their interest in the work which stems from their original nature, is something different from this work's own peculiar interest, which is thereby converted into something different' (Hegel, 243-4). The hermeneutic encounter with the work starts with it as a cultural artifact, grasps sense, which is configured into meaning, which is finally explained as an intersubjective interpretation of the other.

84 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense If we accept the basic idea that parody is a conscious evocation of another text or work, then we must also accept that all imitation is parody. But we also note that there are at least two different types of parody: ironic parody and parody as homage; there is also the use of a parodic mode in satire.4 In this chapter on hermeneutic sense I treat a special kind of ironic parody: novels in which previous texts, usually philosophical or religious tracts, are construed as strict guides for living. I also examine the parodic mode in satire. Of course, most fundamentalist religious sects attempt to function in this manner. The use of ironic parody, however, highlights the incompatibility between the human spirit and the constraints of living according to the written word. Unamuno's Amor y pedagogia (1902) was one of the earliest novels of this century to feature a satire using a parodic mode. This is a satire of life according to a text. In this case it is a notion of science transformed into a positivist religion of August Comte. At the other end of the century, John Updike's novel S. (1988) focuses on the Indian cult of tantra transposed from groups of Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains in India to used-car salesmen, college drop-outs, rock-and-roll groupies, and even housewives in an Arizona commune. The link between the use of a parodic mode and an ironic parody is not to be found in period, language, or country but in the self's relation to the community.5 Unamuno examines the social concept of the great text that explains all. Updike posits the abiding need for the great text and how this absence is used to exploit others. In ironic parody and in satire there is no debt to the parodied text; there is no sense of doing justice to the subject matter. It has been clearly exploited for the purpose of creating an ironic context on the basic issue enunciated. In Amor y pedagogia the issue is selective breeding and the creation of a super-race. This was certainly a major intellectual topic at the end of the nineteenth century, as a result of social Darwinism and positivism.6 Near the end of the twentieth century, in S., the topic is sex as a means of gaining self-knowledge. The sexual revolution of the 1960s has transferred sexual relations and, especially, sexual intercourse from the private to the public arena. The idea of transforming sensual pleasure and sexual gratification into a means of enlightenment is perhaps the greatest fantasy of this narcissistic age. Updike's novel has taken the ancient Indian tantric cult of ecstasy and made it into the great promise of self-knowledge through sex in the Arizona desert.7 It is the 'American way' of fulfilling the promise of the Declaration of Independence: the pursuit of happiness.

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 85 The open and declared appropriation of other texts in parody not only overtly subordinates the other text but, of even more consequence, calls attention to the very nature of the parodic writing. It would be simplistic to think that the parodic textual relation is one of closed appropriation that is simple direct citation. The explicit strength of ironic parody is that both texts are in a larger context that I call the shared world of narrativity. In Amor y pedagogia Unamuno cites his parodic sources: the scientific sociology of Comte and the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer.8 With equal candour, John Updike acknowledges his use of The Dhammapada and Ajit Mookerjee's Kundalini in his novel. He further recognizes his more subtle employment of secondary sources like Mircea Eliade's Yoga and his erudite A History of Religious Ideas, as well as Joseph Campbell's The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology.9 In both novels that concern us, there is open mockery of serious ideas that have been given an important place in the history of civilization. The basic difference between Unamuno's novel and Updike's is that Unamuno uses a traditional omniscient narrative voice, aided by the protagonist's inner voice of conscience, while Updike depends entirely on letters and tape recordings. In other words, the discourse is very different. Unamuno's mockery is overt, Updike's covert, subtle, and indirect; S. is a very postmodern parodic reduction of the religious cult phenomena in the United States. In this sense we can say that Unamuno's novel offers us a prime example of modernist parodic irony and Updike of a postmodern version. In Unamuno's novel the parodic targets are specifically intellectual charlatans and their victims. Not only is barbed satire heaped on scientific sociology and positivism, with Herbert Spencer and Isaac Newton as saints in this cult to reason, as is Auguste Comte himself. But there is also a burlesque of the professional poet with his cult to Our Lady of Beauty, and in the work of Don Fulgencio, mentor to the protagonist and tutor to the future genius, there is a ridiculing attack on Hegel's logic, a philosophy that purported to explain the world based not on a cause but on reason as its first principle.10 From this first principle of reason it follows that the world can be known by deduction, that is, not as a series of effects by known causes but as logical consequences. The point of Hegel's philosophy is not merely to see things as they are, but to understand why they are as they are. Unamuno's parody of deductive logic exploits the occasions this offered the so-called scientist to make political generalizations under the guise of objective knowledge. In the first chapter Unamuno has thrown a not too subtle barb at the

86 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense ridiculous speculations on the reproductive system that passed for science. Avito Carrascal begins to court the seductive Marina and the narrator reports:11 They arranged a meeting in which Avito plans to be very masculine, dominating, in keeping with science and thereby impose himself on the primary matter [the young woman, Marina]/ ... Primary Matter is so serious that upon opening her eyes she makes Genetic Form [Avito] vacillate... Upon hearing him talk about the relations of the husband with his woman, Marina blushes and an inflamed Avito gets even closer and he puts his hand on her hip so that Matter burns and Form is aflame ... Poor Marina's lips graze Form's nose and now genetic Form eagerly seeks Primary Matter's mouth with his formal mouth and both mouths are united in a kiss. And at this point Science and Consciousness rise up, strict and severe, and the future parents of the genius separate from their embrace. All the while sociological Pedagogy smiles down from the region of pure ideas. (323-5; my translation) The British scientist William Harvey (1578-1657), known as the discoverer of the blood's circulatory system, was, however, just as given to the folk-tales of a sexist Europe's ignorance of the reproductive system. Carolyn Merchant cites and comments on Harvey's views as indicative of male form imposed on female matter: The semen carried within it the virtue of divine agency affecting the female like lightning from above, a spark from a flintstone, or the magnetic power of the lodestone ... The male's semen was so powerful that it even affected the woman's mind: The virtue which proceeds from the male in coitu has such prodigious power of fecundation, that the whole woman both in mind and body undergoes a change'... The male sperm endowed the female uterus with the 'plastic power' to create an offspring. (160-1) But the primary female matter was not free to develop. It produced only what was impressed on it by the more perfect and superior male: "Through the imposition of the form or plan of the father on the uterus during coitus, "it results that the female produces an offspring like the father." The "form of the father existing in the uterus generates an offspring like himself with the help of the formative faculty'" (161).

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 87 By the late nineteenth century some progress had been made in description of the reproductive system, but the concept of male form imposed on female matter persisted into the twentieth century. Unamuno's parody of scientism is aimed at the general public's facile acceptance of pseudo-scientific notions as the dogma of the modern era. Amor y pedagogia begins with the protagonist, Avito Carrascal, a scientific sociologist and true believer in the religion of reason, who decides to look for a wife. He will pursue matrimony for love of pedagogy in order to create the perfect man, the genius of the new order, thus he will seek out his future wife deductively from general principles to particular phenomena. He surveys the characteristics of eligible candidates much as a breeder of pure-bred horses would examine the lineage of the mare, but in contrast to the breeder who places as much emphasis on the stallion, Avito never examines his own characteristics.12 By deduction he concludes that the perfect wife must be solid in frame and body, blond, of healthy complexion, with broad hips, large and solid breasts, tranquil temperament, good appetite, good digestive processes, possess appropriate primary school instruction, be clear thinking, practical in habit, with contralto voice and a regular dowry. Avito writes a declaration of marriage, but this is a marriage contract drawn up according to the sacred principles of scientific sociology. He finds a blue-eyed, blond woman, Leoncia, with broad hips, and so on, among the women he knows, and proceeds to woo her scientifically. But when he pays her a visit, he meets Leoncia's adopted sister, Marina, who is just the opposite: black-haired, with dark brown eyes, slim of figure with a provocative mysterious air about her, a dream made flesh, sexuality waiting to explode like a volcano. This is an inductive turn of events, for he must now go from his attraction to the specific woman and try to find the general principles. He gives the declaration of marriage to Marina and begins to rationalize his actions. He has betrayed Hegel's rational first principle and deductive logic, so he rationalizes that after all, genius is not the result of nature but of artifice.13 Avito will be the Pygmalion-like artist, the maker of the future genius; environment is as powerful as hereditary traits, etc. etc. Avito will be the form and Marina the material that will conceive and give birth to the future genius; the meticulous record he is keeping of this project, beginning with his letter proposing marriage to Marina, will one day be used by research students in sociology. If Comte is the target of Unamuno's satirical rendition of sociological pedagogy and the person of August Comte was a remote model for Fulgencio Entreambosmares, it is Hegel's logic that time and time again gives Unamuno the substance for an ironic reduction to absurdity.

88 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense Don Fulgencio's masterpiece of rational thinking is Ars Magna combinatoria, which is to be written in Latin or Volapuk (an international artificial language invented in 1879, eight years before the better-known Esperanto). Philosophy is, according to Don Fulgencio, a systematic process of combinations taken to its logical conclusions. He has attained a clear idea of the four universal categories of reality, which he calls mothers of ideas: two are of ideal order and two of material order. Material order is governed by beginning and end or birth and death; ideal order is governed by ideas of rights and obligations. Don Fulgencio believes that these categories are a vast improvement on the Kantian categories because Kant never went beyond abstraction, but he in turn has immersed himself in the very stuff of life. This great work develops all the possible combinations of the four mother ideas. He begins with binary combinations, then tertiary and then quaternary. So, for example, he studies the right to life, the right to death, the right to rights themselves and rights to incur obligations and so on. A tertiary combination, for example, would be the right to end rights for others and a quaternary combination the right to deny the right to die to another. Thus, the system moves progressively from 16 (4 x 4) combinations to 64 (4 x 4 x 4) to a magnificent 256 combinations and on and on to infinity. The combinatory enterprise in Don Fulgencio's philosophy is a first principle of the many in one. To paraphrase Hegel, as a self-contained, self-determined totality the rational schema is one. As a multiplicity of ideas, it is many. Fulgencio's mothers of ideas are deduced categories derived from each other in a dialectic of temporality and legitimation. Everything that is must have a beginning, when it first appeared, and everything that has a presence must end at some point in time. Similarly, everything that is has a claim to continue being and everything that claims a right must have a justification for continuing to be. These four mothers of ideas are arrived at entirely by deductive reasoning, and by a further deducing of all possible combinations, the whole of reality will be eventually explained. Although Kant had named twelve categories of universals, and Hegel believed that there were many more concrete universals, which can be established by logical deduction, Don Fulgencio has given the world exactly 256 categories to begin with, and if the quaternary exponent is used twelve times there will be 16,777,216 categories. The tragic result in this parodic satire is that the future genius is such a social misfit that he sees suicide as his only solution. In Amor y pedagogia the satire of Comte, Spencer, and Hegel is a

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 89 caricature of the originals, which are all philosophical abstractions purporting to explain the universe. To cite Ziva Ben-Porat's seminal study of satire: 'The satirized original "reality" may include mores, attitudes, types, social structure, prejudices and the like' (247-8). Thus, the satire of nineteenth-century philosophy uses the parodic code of imitation and enactment of the abstract into the concrete. In this case the reader reconstructs the referents of the message, which is that theory has validity as a response to the problematic and, if inverted into a universal system that purports to explain everything, it fails to recognize the very contingency of human existence. Let us now take up Updike's 1988 novel with the simple title S. The novel begins with a long quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. This full-page extract is not the usual epigraph, but a fully drawn implicit characterization of Updike's protagonist, Sarah Worth, in the likeness of Hawthorne's protagonist, Hester Prynne. This is the only characterization she receives, since the entire novel consists of letters she writes and tape recordings she secretly makes of others and those she makes of herself in conversation. We can therefore recognize that this postmodern fictional character is Hawthorne's configuration, which Updike will update to the nineteen-eighties. The novel is written and told by Sarah Worth, a New England woman much like Hester Prynne. In fact, we are induced to picture her as beautiful, with abundant, luxurious dark hair, 'regularity of feature and richness of complexion,' ample bosom, graceful figure, and mesmerizing deep black eyes. Her beauty shines out as she goes about her life, but without any hint of the arrogance that beauty so often brings. The first letter is dated 21 April 1986. She writes to Charles, the husband she has just left without warning, as she flies to Los Angeles from Boston. She writes with common sense, which indicates that she is a pragmatic woman with a clear idea of the detail of running a household. Ironically she is still giving instructions on gardening, and cleaning the house she has just left permanently. In this long letter she reviews her life with Charles. Sarah has fled her gilded cage, with petty cash from the sale of forty thousand dollars' worth of stocks held by her and Charles. She has gone to Arizona to join a religious commune led by a Hindu holy man called Arhat. She joins the other pilgrims in searching for release from the illusions of this world through love. Arhat has established a tantra cult of Kundalini yoga14 in a commune in the Arizona desert from which he sells self-enlightenment by mail order.

90 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense The novel, therefore, offers a parody of a parody. Sarah, for her own reasons, which the reader will have to determine, knowingly or unknowingly parodies what she learns about tantric religious practices. And her sources - the holy man and his writings, lectures, and followers - are themselves a parody of the Hindu religious practices. The entire Arizona commune becomes a living dramatization of parody, a parody of The Dhammapada, the Buddhist text attributed to Buddha himself and also of the Kundalini yoga's beliefs and rituals. The six tape recordings that are the other narrative sources are not all the same kind of narration. The first is a gossip-filled recording of 5 May 1986 for her friend Midge. This is one of the longest in the text. It is not quite dialogue, since the interlocutor is not present, but it does dispense with the formal aspects of the written letter. On 2 June 1986 Sarah writes her former yoga instructor, Irving, and includes a commercial tape made by the Arhat when he was still in India, which now sells for $14.90. The tape is about Kundalini, the tantric energy of bliss. This is the name the guru has now given to Sarah. Arhat himself gives the lecture, which consists of a popularization of the tantric concept of the female energy in all things, but at the end he suddenly turns the tables and calls the story of Kundalini's journey through the body a detailed lie; the whole thing is a lie but a useful lie because it has burned away all the garbage in the heads of his listeners: 'That is why I have told you the fairy story of Kundalini, the little snake that lives at the bottom of our spine. While you were hearing it, no other garbage was in your heart or heads or stomachs; little Kundalini burned it all away' (83). The commune has combined methods of group therapy and tantric yoga. The third tape is one of the Arhat's best-sellers; he lectures: 'Of all forms of illusion, woman is the most important. For Buddha and his followers, woman is the portal of release. She is that within the world which takes us out of the world... She is the living wonder of the world... Buddhahood is in the female organ. The yoni... She is mother... He turns to her. He makes love to her. He inhales her aroma. He looks into her black eyes and sees the redness of her mouth when she laughs ... om, omm, omm' (106-10). The idea is not limited to Hindu tantra religious sects; liberation through sexual intercourse was a central part of the medieval fraticelli cults.15 In this tape the parody is explicit. The guru is engaged in explicating tantric Buddhism to his public and in doing so is altering the original texts, which explicitly set aside pleasure in the pursuit of cosmic unity. But the complication here is that there is a long line of parodies of Buddhist thought and of the Vedic rites.

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 91 The fourth tape is again recorded for Sarah's friend Midge to give her an idea of what goes on at one of the meetings. The reader thus becomes an eavesdropper without the assistance or hindrance of a narrative voice to explain, qualify, or identify the speakers. The fifth tape is unplanned. Sarah is making a tape for Midge when the guru unexpectedly comes into her room. She puts the recorder in an open drawer but leaves it recording. The tape records the lovemaking of Sarah and the Arhat. The guru is seducing Sarah; he is following the tantric ritual of Kundalini step by step, but Sarah is impatient to get to the sexual penetration without all the spiritual warm-up. The parody is multiple. The guru is imitating the tantric masters, the ritual is imitated, and the ritual itself is a parody of the Vedic texts of Buddhism. But what about Sarah? She is a pragmatic New England woman trying hard to imitate the nayika (female subject) of the tantric cult; the imitation is superficial. In plain and simple terms, she is having some powerful orgasms; her lack of sexual satisfaction was one of the reasons why she left Charles and joined the commune. The sixth and last tape is a deliberate bugging by Sarah. Here she tapes a confession from the Arhat that he is Art Steinmetz, a pseudo-Hindu guru from Watertown, Massachusetts. The tape is to be kept by her old college boyfriend as protection. In the meantime Sarah has been posting letters to ex-husband Charles, ex-dentist, ex-psychoanalyst, ex-yoga instructor, her daughter, and her mother. Throughout she has been posting cheques to her bank in Boston, a bank in Switzerland, and to the Cayman Islands. In total, from 24 April 1986 when she began to handle the finances of the commune to 19 December when she quietly leaves, she has transferred $300,000 to a Swiss bank account, $257,634 to the Cayman Islands, and has left $59,366 in her checking account in Boston. More than half a million dollars for eight months' work. In her last letter to guru Arhat she writes: To quote the blessed Dhammapada: "I have conquered all; I know all, and my life is pure; I have left all, and I am free from craving. I myself found the way. Whom shall I call Teacher? Whom shall I teach?"' (249). She makes clear that although she took some funds, she left Arhat $300,000 in his discretionary account and then informed him of the tape of their last conversation. Updike's Sarah Worth is not only drawn in the image of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, but his text revisits the same moral issues of living according to a religious text. The difference between Updike and Hawthorne is not merely historical. Updike is the inversion of the high morality of Hawthorne, as Sarah Worth is a parody of Hester Prynne. If Amor y pedagogia is parodic satire, S. is self-conscious parody of

92 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense parody, a knowing invitation that falsifies what is already known to have been falsified. Or, in other words, essentially a postmodern turning of parody on itself so that it deconstructs itself. Although Unamuno's satire through parody deals in caricature and reduces the parodical texts to absurdity, the main thrust of the attack is to discredit all texts that are institutionalized as guides for living. Updike, eighty-six years later, takes up the parody of the great text where Unamuno left off, but he adds a postmodern twist that Unamuno would have agreed with. Updike's text deals with the question of why people, all different kinds of people across history, are so willing and eager to follow the dictums of a great text. The answer is that it is because human beings cannot cope with absence of order and rules. If they cannot believe in the text they were given at birth, they will seek out another, and there is always someone waiting to offer a new text if the price is right. Any postulate that attempts to predict or stabilize meaning in a poetic text is merely closing off the poetic tensional power to create metaphorical meaning. But the concept of poetic indeterminacy does not lead to an unbounded expansion of meanings. Readings of poetic texts do not expand meaning to infinity for they are powerfully held within the paradigmatic sets of the referential attractors. These are the elements of configuration that will give us the possibility of mapping out the ranges of meaning of the poetic text. In the case of parody we are reminded that we begin with two variables, the parodic model and the parody itself; each has its own series of attractors with their own paradigmatic families of meanings. The polarity between the series of attractors is the basis for the creative configuration of the text. At times the tension is that of an inversion, at other times that of a reduction into caricature, and at still other times that of expansion or contraction of the implicit limitations of the other series, sometimes moving us into satire, sometimes into farce. The Game of Fiction The basis of inductive reasoning lies in our use of ordinary language. When a prediction is taken as valid it is because it is in agreement with the facts of what has been observed. What is prediction but an elaborate fiction? It ceases to be fiction when it is no longer a prediction, but rather constitutes, by general agreement, an event. The problem has always been in devising a prediction, that is, a fiction, that accounts for all the facts. This movement from facts to fiction to event is, of course, a descrip-

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 93 tion of historiography, and the obverse movement begins with fictional ideas, plots, and moves deliberately to fill in these fictional events with as many facts as can be economically used to move the reader into a mimetic concretization. This obverse process is, of course, the historical novel. In this section I argue that the movements from fact into fiction and fiction into fact are not isolated processes but rather are fundamentally interrelated. The common name I give to these processes is world-making. The development of this line of thought takes us through the work of a number of philosophers. I briefly examine the contributions of Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Martin Heidegger, and augment this line of reasoning from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Nelson Goodman. The conclusion is based on the work of Paul Ricoeur, who has presented the most complete theory of fact, fiction, and event or, in other words, the ontology of historicity in history and literature. The phenomenologists converged on a common enquiry into the structure of human experience as it is lived. The analytical philosophers were concerned with how ordinary language is used to construct meaning. It is through the genius of Ricoeur that we have been able to recognize the common ground of human language and the structure of human experience as the same phenomena viewed from different perspectives. Husserl's investigation of human consciousness (Bewusstsein) inevitably led him away from a descriptive psychology to a fundamental enquiry into the human capacity to know and learn. In the opening of The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness he asks how we are conscious of the passing of time, such as in hearing a song sung or a story told. His observation is that in order to understand the song or the story, at any given moment, we must remember what has come before. We no longer hear those parts of the composition but we remember them and this remembrance is important to our understanding of what is being enunciated in the present. The interesting feature for Husserl is the epistemological relationship between what we have heard and our making sense of what we are hearing. Husserl insists that this form of retention must be considered separately from general memory of the past, because in this case our understanding of what we are experiencing in the present is dependent on our retention of what has just passed. He expands on this observation to conclude that there is no consciousness of the present as present without a consciousness of the immediate past. Thus, consciousness of time is a steady stream of awareness predicated on what came immediately previous to the present and so on.

94 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense With Dilthey the arena of enquiry is not the individual consciousness but rather the individual sense of living one's life. Thus his focus is much larger than Husserl's, but he deals with life in terms similar to Husserl's consciousness. In Dilthey's philosophy, to live is always to be located in the present, with the past as the context that gives meaning and the future as the necessary projection that also gives the present the meaning of purpose. The full stream of life cannot be apprehended as a whole, but only in a fragmentary series of lived experiences (Erlebnisse). Although each lived experience is only meaningful in the context of life the individual must strive to achieve a sense of the whole, which Dilthey calls the coherence of life (Zusammenhang des Lebens). Particular examples of this search for the coherence of life is to be found in autobiography, where the writer reflects on the lived experiences as parts of a whole. This search for coherence is a highly significant addition to our enquiry, for the concept of narrativity is thus introduced. With Heidegger and his concept of Dasein we come to the full significance of narrativity. Dasein is the temporal structure of being always ahead of itself. Living is living in a projection toward the future, yet Dasein is also already in the world, for the human has been born into a world that was in process long before the individual arrived on the scene. Meaningfulness through language comes from the past and we through meaningfulness encounter things and others in the present. All three philosophers have sought to depict the structure of individual human experience as it is lived. In summary, we have found that we always make sense of the present by holding on to the past and projecting before us the future, which together with the past makes sense of the present. This awareness of the structure of human experience is not a mere fleeting insight. It is what Dilthey called the search for coherence. It is the continuous reconstruction of a temporally extended story, our autobiography, which in the present of action gives us a part to play, a part that must join the past to the future. Our ordinary daily life is full of such stories, which are constantly merging into one another. As David Carr states: 'We are always living our life, no matter what we do, but we are not always trying to make sense of it as a whole' (10). We are now ready to move from the quasi-autobiography to history and literature. If we conceive of written history as the distillation of countless stories of the life of a social group, we have moved up a level in the search for coherence to a major enquiry, which is linked to group identity in a constant remaking of the past as new issues arise that must be accounted

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 95 for by the writer. The life of a social group involves the identification of the members of that group with events, programs of action, and beliefs that belong to the group itself, but for this identification to be effective it must have had a coherent articulation in narrative terms that accounts for the past, present, and future. Narratives that interpret the significant events of the life of a social group are, therefore, the principal coherencybuilding forces of any community, whether they are novels or historical accounts. I began with the observation that our use of ordinary language contains the seeds of inductive reasoning since we normally go about our business observing factual information and acting upon it. Our plans of action are calculated fictions that we hope take all the facts into consideration. Now, I have subsequently argued that this search for coherence is also part of our process of self-awareness as we engage in quasiautobiography as a matter of course. But I have also pointed out that there is a larger arena of the search for coherence, which is that of the sense of the community in which the individual lives. At that point we reach the largest coherence builders, which are the multiple narratives of history and novel that give an articulation of the sense of community. But it is precisely at this juncture in our enquiry into facts and fiction that we must ask if we can merely assume ordinary language usage as a given or if we must probe deeper into this phenomenon we usually take for granted. Here I would like to return to the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced in chapter 2. Early in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein defines two key terms: Tanguage-game' and 'form of life/ A language-game is all willed activity, for the purposefulness of human activity is a language activity. Activities by human subjects are differentiated not only by the singularity of the person but by the context in which he or she finds himself or herself. The term 'form of life' designates the common areas of social context in which persons operate. At a central part in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes: Thought, language, now appear to us as a unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each. (But what are these words to be used for now? The language-game in which they are to be applied is missing.)' (1953, no. 96). The use of language in context is the basis of meaning and the context goes by the name world-view. We could not entertain meanings, much less communicate them, if we were not players in the language-games of life. The basis of playing the language-game is to infer from the facts that

96 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense such and such a proposition or state of affairs accurately describes the situation at hand. This inference is a fiction, a product of the imagination until we ceremoniously call it history. On the contrary, if we begin with forms of life, such as the relationship of two lovers, we have a fiction in search of facts to validate it in the reader's mind. In the 1979 (third) edition of Fact, Fiction and Forecast, Nelson Goodman makes the following observations: If I am correct, then, the roots of inductive validity are to be found in our use of language. A valid prediction is, admittedly, one that is in agreement with past regularities in what has been observed; but the difficulty has always been to say what constitutes such agreement. The suggestion I have been developing here is that such agreement with regularities in what has been observed is a function of our linguistic practices. Thus the line between valid and invalid predictions (or inductions or projections) is drawn upon the basis of how the world is and has been described and anticipated in words. (120-1)

There are, of course, countless descriptions of the world, most of which are short-lived, yet there is a discernible body of such descriptions that persist and are accepted by linguistic communities. History and literature are two principal ways of world-making, both directly and indirectly, as they become the narrativity of a community and as such the basis of social identity. Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative stands as the most complete and thorough examination of narrativity in history and literature. In volume 3 he draws together the key features of what we know as phenomenological hermeneutics. I shall draw upon this work to propose modes of operation for the flow of facts and fiction in a linguistic community's narrativity. The first point has to do with the ways in which stories become part of the narrativity of linguistic communities. There is an illusion that texts constitute a structure unto themselves and for themselves and therefore are mere reflections on the genius of the language group from which they originate. Yet careful analysis of the reading of texts, be they history or literature, points in a very different direction. The text makes demands and proposes, but there must be a reader to respond, to characterize, and finally, to appropriate the world that results from the interaction of text and reader, that is, from the active collaboration of the two. Once the text has been appropriated by readers certain possible worlds become part of the narrativity of these readers and, therefore, part of the way they explain the world to themselves and others.

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 97 The second point is that this activity not only is constant in the linguistic community but also has a history that is deeply entwined with the concept of identity of such communities. Ricoeur identifies this fundamental feature as collective narrativity: 'The act of reading thus becomes one link in the chain of the history of the reception of a work by the public. Literary history, renovated by the aesthetic of reception, may thus claim to include the phenomenology of the act of reading' (III, 167). The third point is to establish the dialectic nature of the text-reader relationship in both the reading of history and the reading of literature. Ricoeur describes this dialectic as a three-dimensional encounter. First, he writes: 'Reading then becomes a picnic where the author brings the words and the readers the meaning.' But there is a second dimension to the dialectic: 'What the work of reading reveals is not only a lack of determinacy but also an excess of meaning. Every text, even a systematically fragmentary one, is revealed to be inexhaustible in terms of reading, as though, through its unavoidable selective character, reading revealed an unwritten aspect in the text. It is the prerogative of reading to strive to provide a figure for this unwritten side of the text' (169). The reader therefore is the active agent who must provide coherence and seek consistency. The third dimension of the reader-text dialectic follows from the search for coherence, for if it is too successful the unfamiliar becomes familiar and the reader's concretization becomes a mere extension of his or her reality, thereby losing the creative tension of encountering the other. But, if the search for coherence fails, the reader remains shut out. The reader does not achieve a balance even in the best of cases. What happens in a critical reading is an oscillation between the irresistible and the untenable. Ricoeur concludes: 'Taken together, these three dialectics make reading a truly vital experience [experience vive]' (169). The final point Ricoeur makes that enables us to take up the related issues of the passage from fact to fiction and from fiction to fact is the place of reading in the making of the world we live in. He writes: [the two functions of reading] are confrontation and connection between the imaginary world of the text and the actual world of readers to the extent that readers subordinate their expectations to those developed by the text; they themselves become unreal to a degree comparable to the unreality of the fictive world toward which they emigrate. Reading then becomes a place, itself unreal, where reflection takes a pause. On the other hand, inasmuch as readers incorporate - little matter whether consciously or unconsciously - into their vision of the

98 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense world the lessons of their readings, in order to increase the prior readability of this vision, then reading is for them something other than a place where they come to rest; it is a medium they cross through. (179)

This philosophical commentary on reading places the individual reader at the centre, as the primary agent involved in collective making of the narrativity of the linguistic community. Further, it develops a hermeneutics of culture on the widest scale. It remains for me to take up my opening observation of the process that unites and separates readings of literature and readings of history. I argue that the same process prevails in both, but in different directions because the truth-claims of history and literature are different. The historian assembles all the facts that are relevant to a particular event such as the signing of a peace treaty or the beginning of hostilities between nations. The information about what happened is well known. What the historian is seeking is to explain why it happened and how it happened. Thus the research begins with gathering facts and projecting them into a general pattern of what happened. This schema of what happened is an imaginative construct that serves as a guide until such time as the historian judges that the research has been completed and the interpretation of why and how the event happened can be put forward as a reasonable account, at least until someone else does it again. The pattern, therefore, is clear in the historical search, for coherence of life begins with the gathering of facts that are brought together in a construct, a projection of what happened, and when the historian is satisfied that this account explains why things happened and how they happened, the fiction becomes history. But it is undeniable that as a construct it was and remains an imaginative account, since it strives for not only comprehensiveness but also causality. It does, however, present the historical truth-claim that this account is as close as the historian can get to what actually happened in the light of the known facts. My point is a central one: deep within the historical truth-claim there is a fiction that this account explains the patterns of causality that prevailed in the past. Although there are as many ways of writing fiction as there are writers, we can make some generalizations about the specific genre we call the historical novel. The historical record serves as the background against which the narrative will develop. The genesis of this genre, however, is the process we know as emplotment, which means working out a situation or situations demanded by a plot. The working out means assem-

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 99 bling the necessary facts to construct the situations and eventually the plot. Thus, in converse order to history, the writer begins with a plot and works it out in emplotment by filling in as many facts as are necessary. The facts, that is, the singular incidents of human interaction within a historical context, are usually indeed historically factual. The fictional part in this case is the dramatization of the plot: the enactment of human interaction and the language of this interaction. Contrary to history, there is no historical truth-claim, because there is a far greater truth-claim. This is the truth-claim of plausibility of an 'as if world. The novelist is not saying this is the way it happened and these are the reasons for these actions to have taken place. The novelist is saying, this is a way in which it could have happened if this and this were the case and these were the circumstances that prevailed. The fiction is therefore far more general in application than history, for although they both use facts, they use them very differently. The historian tries to narrow the explanation to one. The novelist opens explanation to the multiple variables that make up the complexity of human interaction. Fictional characters exist within a self-contained narrative world that the reader has helped to unfold. Characters and incidents from one novel may remind us of traits of other characters and their situation in other novels, but as a rule characters are not transferrable from one novel to the other except as names or types. In marked contrast, our own life story and the stories of others are completely intertwined with other life stories. This difference is usually explained by the fact that whereas fictional life stories are closed, actual life stories, even those from the past, are 'open and fundamentally incomplete. There is always the possibility of another version of the incidents that have been narrated as important or unimportant in a life story. The novel does not permit the addition of new or different points of view than those that have been part of the composition. There is, however, another way of approaching these marked differences. Life stories, it is true, are usually open and fictional lives are closed, but we must remember that life stories are only open if they are in the historical arena, that is, if they are subject to a constant search for new configurations of the same facts. Life stories are as closed as fictional stories if they are our own narrations of identity. And fictional stories are not all the same; the degree of indeterminate presentation makes a character in a mimetic novel essentially different from a character in a postmodern novel. These observations force us to consider what open and closed features life stories have in common. In other words, what do

100 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense Emma Bovary and Napoleon share as narrative constructs? There are many interpretations of Emma as a woman and as a woman who lived in the particular circumstance Flaubert has given her. But Napoleon Bonaparte is a generic name for numerous historical and fictional characterizations. Therefore, from the side of the composition there is scant common ground for the two. But from the side of the reader, it is quite different. Both Emma and Napoleon have had to be envisaged as human persons acting and going through all the ordinary functions of living. Both are the product of the reader's configuration, grasping together incidents and description assisted by interpretive comments and the reports of what they said and what was said about them. The reader may have heard previous reports about them that have influenced the attitudes of reading, but the reader's configuration is an experience of direct encounter between the two world-views. The historical character may have, and usually does have, more than one version in competition with each other, while the fictional character has less conflictive versions, but the two have an ontological complementarity, for they are both life stories, which can only be reconstituted by a reader as a life story, but both are equally abstracted from life through writing. It is this extraction from life that makes it possible for the reader to reinsert the life stories into life itself as personal experiences of alterity. Facts are determinant features that are used both by the historian and the novelist. The imaginative projection of what happened in the past is part of both the historian's research and the novelist's emplotment. There is as much fiction in history as there are facts in fiction. The one clear separation that remains is the difference in truth-claims and, consequently, how the reader responds to the different truth-claims. The historical truth-claim that attempts to reduce the event from the past to a specific historical argument asks that the reader weigh the present explanation against rival explanations in terms of cohesion, consistency, and exhaustive research of the facts. The truth-claim of fiction is radically different. Fictional texts do not insist that this explanation is better or more complete than others. But fiction does make a truth-claim of simulation by purporting that under certain conditions and specific participants under particular circumstances it could happen in this way or, in some cases, it can never be, except as a hypothetical paradigm. Hypothetical paradigms of psychological relations have been used to simulate human development from the time of the medieval exempla, but in our time the facticity of the model has been highlighted first in the most innovative modernist writers and today as a mainstay of postmodernism.

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 101 Indeed most commentators of postmodernism observe that the seeds of the revolution of indeterminacy were sown in high modernism. The transgression of limits between a verifiable empirical, historically identified world and the fables of fiction is just such a postmodern plant. The remarkable novel Niebla (Mist, 1914) by Unamuno has been placed in the context of Pirandello, and Andre Gide's works, and so it should be. But there is a much deeper sense of disruption and transgression in Unamuno than in either Pirandello or Gide. The novel has a prologue written by a fictional character, an epilogue narrated by a dog, and a story that tells the activities of a rather troubled young man for a few months before his death. What manner of narrator tells the tale of Augusto Perez's rather futile life? He tells us that this is a young man of about thirty years of age who lives in his family home with two older servants, a couple who have been in the employ of the family for some time. Augusto lost his father when he was born and was raised by a protective and overbearing mother. He has inherited a fortune and has never worked at anything. He studied university under the watchful eye of his mother; she has now been dead some two years. Augusto has only one friend, Victor Goti, and he has never been alone with a young woman, much less had occasion to establish any kind of relationship. When the novel begins, he is a psychological introvert, neither charming nor of brilliant mind. On the contrary, he appears to be empty of all personality. This thumbnail sketch of Augusto Perez is, of course, based on what the narrative voice tells us about him and the limited moments he is able to speak. Let us consider the first paragraph of the novel: Augusto appeared at the door of his house and held out his right hand, palm downward; gazing up at the sky, he momentarily struck the posture of a statue. He was not taking possession of the external world, but merely observing whether or not it was raining. As he felt the fresh intermittent wet on the back of his hand, he frowned, not because the drizzle bothered him, but because he would have to open up his umbrella. It made such a fine line folded in its case! A folded umbrella is as elegant as an opened one is awkward. (23)16

Three aspects of this passage are indicative of the dramatized omniscient narrator in his negative characterization of Augusto. The discursive pattern of punning in the Spanish text is still present in the translation and that is that Augusto's name is that of the Roman emperor whose statue with an outstretched hand claims the Mediterranean for Rome, a com-

102 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense parison that is fraught with sarcasm. There is also the syntactic pattern of contrastive extremes that ridicules the character's actions: 'not to take possession of the world but merely observing if it was raining/ and 'not because the drizzle bothered him but because he would have to open up his umbrella/ The last two lines are free indirect style that purports to be the character's thoughts but are the narrator's viewpoint. The closed umbrella as a phallic symbol is elegant, the open umbrella as a female symbol is ugly. Yet before we can quite get over the phrases we are unexpectedly given the direct words of Augusto Perez, and his views are in fact at odds with the characterization we have been given. At this point let me merely summarize that the narrator has displayed an openly biased distortion of the character. Thus it is that although the narrator is omniscient, he has proven to be unreliable. There is more than a change in tone when we read Augusto's interior monologue: 'It is unfortunate the way we must make use of things, thought Augusto. Usage breaks down all beauty, destroys. The noblest role of any object is that of being contemplated. How beautiful an orange still uneaten!' (23).17 Augusto's views on objects such as umbrellas and oranges is, as we now recognize, little more than a variation of the art for art's sake concept of aesthetics, which he has appropriated to his own peculiar situation of introverted alienation. We must be reminded that one of the competing schools of art at the turn of the century was this mystic line on art.18 Art for art's sake expressed a devotion to the creation of objects that cannot be mistaken for anything other than objects for contemplation because they are conspicuously divorced from the service of any other possible interest. Therefore a closed umbrella made of marble and a painting of oranges are objects of beauty, while the functional umbrella or the eatable orange are ugly. Augusto moves on: He stands at the doorway, not having anything to do or anywhere to go, and he decides to follow the first dog that will pass. Instead he follows a beautiful young woman. Now what can that boy there be doing stretched flat on the ground? Watching ants, of course! An ant, now, is one of your worst hypocrites! It runs about pretending to be working. Just like this loafer coming along now, charging ahead as if he were going some place, elbowing everybody else out of the way, and I'll bet he hasn't got a thing to do. What could he possibly have to do? Nothing at all! He's just a loafer. An idler like ... No, I'm not an idler! My imagination never rests. The people who pretend to work are the idlers, the ones who do nothing but get all wound up and lose their minds, stifle all thought... As for real work,

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 103 what about this cripple dragging himself along ...? And yet how do I know anything about that...? 'Forgive me, brother!...' Brother? Brother in what way? A brother in paralysis? (28)19

This interior monologue, which is developed as a sort of monodialogue, offers us the first extensive look at the character and his psychological state. The stream of consciousness with its free association is circular and, ultimately, returns to Augusto himself. We now have two emerging images of Augusto - the negative heavily biased view of the unreliable narrator and the confused muttering of a rather problematic character. Chapter 3 offers the first evidence that Augusto has some semblance of personal relationships with others. The other in this case is Victor Goti, whom we shall consider later as the prologuist of the novel. Augusto and Victor have for years played a chess game every week.20 The dialogue is elementary and never progresses to a level of full exchange, but there is the first indication that Augusto can operate on a minimum level of social intercourse. Chapter 5 gives us some idea of the extremely repressed life Augusto has lived with his widowed mother. He studied law, not to practice but to have an education becoming to his social status. From adolescence he has been given to extensive mental introversion in a cacophony of images. Even after his graduation from law school, it was his mother who would tuck him in and kiss him good-night and then wake him in the morning. When she died, Augusto, much like Jerzy Kosinski's character Chauncy Gardiner (played by Peter Sellers in the film version of Being There) began to spend his entire days in a continuous daydream. If there had been television at the beginning of the century, he would have been a TV freak like the Kosinski character. The fifth chapter ends with his finding an abandoned puppy, which he names Orpheus; the narrator claims that Augusto himself did not know why, but we may speculate, when we consider the dog's epilogue, why Unamuno chose the name of the mythical poet who was able to descend to the world of the dead. In the text proper Orpheus is the silent listener to most of Augusto's monodialogues. By chapter 10 a sense of alterity begins to manifest itself within Augusto as his introversion diminishes: 'Now I have an objective, a purpose to this life of mine. I will conquer this girl or be conquered by her: it's all the same ... I may not exist at all, as one. In which case there is no "other" about it. I am a suitor, but he may not be one at all, because he has already won the suit. The suit for the love of sweet Eugenia'... A woman passed close to him. Her body radiated freshness, health, joy. His solilo-

104 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense quy was broken off. He was carried along by her moving presence. Without thinking he followed her, and resumed his soliloquy: What a beauty! This one and the other, one and another of them. Perhaps the other man is not a suitor but one sought... But this girl now, she really is a beauty. What a lovely way to wave to someone as she just did! And the eyes! They're much like those others, Eugenia's! What a pleasure it must be to forget about life and death in those arms! To be rocked as on a sea of flesh!... As for the other man, the other ...! But the "other" man is not Eugenia's friend, he's not the one she loves. The other one is me. Yes I'm the "other" one, I'm another!' (77-8)21

In this, one of Augusto's longest monodialogues in the early chapters, we have not only an explicitly expressed sexuality but also through it a new coherence of reflection and the breakthrough from the introversion into a sense of alterity and sexual attraction. Augusto's mother dominated him by becoming his essential other. Part of the process was the ritualizing of trivial acts and thus, by force of repetition, the endowment to them of symbolic power. One of the most telling is the practice of sitting the young Augusto on her lap while she contemplated the ashes of the consumed phallus, the cigars smoked by the husband before his death.22 On the other hand, when Augusto attempts a simulacrum of this ritual by making Rosario sit on his lap while he kisses and caresses her, he fails; his erection subsides as he looks into her eyes and sees himself reflected in perfect repetition. Augusto is thereby losing his personal identity and experiencing the psychological dissolution of the self. He pulls away on the brink of destruction, still sexually impotent, castrated by the continuing presence of his Oedipal mother, but with still another opportunity to find himself in his others. He goes out determined to succeed; he proposes to marry Eugenia, but she leaves on the eve of the wedding and the final dissolution begins. His friend Victor advises him to 'devour himself/ which is what he has been doing in the mirror-imaging of himself. Deleuze asks: 'What happens when Others are missing from the structure of the world?... 'A harsh and black world, without potentialities or virtualities: the category of the possible has collapsed. Instead of relatively harmonious forms surging forth from, and going back to a background in accordance with an order of space and time, only abstract lines now exist, luminous and harmful only a groundless abyss, rebellious and devouring' (306). The non-self, which is consciousness without the other, has no recourse but to devour itself. In chapter 23 Augusto seeks out the advice of Antolin S. Paparrigopulos,

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 105 a scholar who specializes in the study of women. This chapter is the most parodic of the novel and is only matched in Unamuno's work by Amor y pedagogia (1902). After a long discussion of his research on women the scholar dares to reveal to Augusto his great discovery, which he has obtained through arduous research on a Dutch scholar of the seventeenth century. The parody that follows has a powerful critical sense in that it takes up the topic of woman as other: This writer says - in Latin - that even though all men have souls, the same does not hold for women, that women have one and the same soul, in other words, a collective soul, something like Averroes' activating agent of understanding, which is spread among all women. And he goes on to say that the differences observable in an individual woman's way of feeling, thinking, and desiring results from bodily distinctions, which can be ascribed to race, climate, diet and for that reason are insignificant distinctions. Women, according to this author, are similar one to the other, far more than men are, and that is because all women together are one and the same creature ... (177)23

It is nothing short of remarkable to read Luce Irigaray (1985) on this unitary concept of women published sixty-three years after Unamuno's novel: 'Woman in this sexual imaginary, is only a more or less obliging prop for the enactment of man's fantasies' (25). Unamuno's Paparrigopulos is thus repeating the traditional objectification of women as the collective other. The devastating irony of this advice to the sexually aroused Augusto is that he may see all women as women-objects because of his sexual repression, but Eugenia for one will not have any of it. She will take his money, thank you, live her own life, take Mauricio as her live-in lover, and live life according to her needs and desires. The counterpoint between the Paparrigopulos chapter, 23, and chapter 29, when Eugenia indeed takes his money the day before they are to get married, and leaves with her lover, is a comical play of master/slave inversion. The problem with Augusto is that although he has glimpsed the other as woman, he has not been able to cope with his contradictory sexual needs and his dependence on mothering. Paparrigopulos advises him to seek a relationship with three women in order to break out of the dual conflict. In all of this, the women involved are never considered but as aspects of his needs. Unamuno is also pointing to Eugenia as a liberated woman, who will now be able to afford her lover thanks to the generosity of Augusto. Beyond the satire and irony there is the proposition that love, respect, and esteem can be granted by lovers who do not seek pre-

106 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense eminence in each other's eyes according to social norms of success, but rather seek mutually discovered qualities in the other, of preferment, affection, and growth of personality. The story of Avito Carrascal, protagonist of Amor y pedagogia (1902), which is briefly reviewed in this novel, points in this direction.24 The culmination of Mist comes in chapter 31, when Augusto, after deciding to commit suicide, first goes to consult with the well-known philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. The third-person narrator who has been telling the main story and who has so abused Augusto now switches to first-person narration and alters his tone to one of condescension rather than ridicule. The persona of the implied author Miguel de Unamuno has had an active counterpart in the story itself in the person of Victor Goti, who is writing the novel that Unamuno's persona is narrating. This fateful encounter between Augusto and Unamuno operates simultaneously at three different levels: in the narration itself the ensuing dialogue is the culmination of a series of interviews in the character's quest for his identity, which he had begun to intuit was linked to his others; it also functions at the textual level of the longdeferred meeting of the abusive narrator and his hapless victim who is finally able to reverse the master/slave relationship; finally, it operates at a metafictional level as the creation overwhelms the creator because the creation was never the author's writing alone, but rather the writing as reading whereby it has been realized and completed. Augusto begins the interview speaking of Unamuno's writings, in particular those that are more or less philosophical, showing that he knew them very well, which, of course, pleases the arrogant Unamuno. Then he begins to tell Unamuno about his life. Unamuno's persona interrupts, telling him that he is as familiar with the vicissitudes of Augusto's life as Augusto himself; he then speaks of some of the most intimate details of Augusto's life. Augusto looks at the Unamuno persona with genuine terror in his eyes and is about to run away when Unamuno orders him to sit down. This narrative passage, which is the introduction to the Unamuno/ Augusto dialogue, has all of the levels of textual development. First and foremost Unamuno has endowed Augusto with the status of a person by having him on the same level of reality as his own persona, by allowing him previous knowledge of Unamuno's own work and implying knowledge of the present text, since in 1914 this was the first philosophical novel Unamuno had written. Second, by shocking Augusto with his display of the omniscient narrator's intimate knowledge of the character,

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 107 he not only brings to culmination the long-awaited confrontation but he also recognizes that his superior knowledge is limited to what has been written and not to what Augusto is thinking now as they speak; Unamuno's narrator can only report what he sees. Unamuno presses his advantage and delivers what he thinks will be the final blow: 'No, you don't exist any more than any other creature of fiction exists. You are not, my poor Augusto, anything more than a figment of my imagination and of my readers' imagination, when they eventually read this story of your fictitious adventures and mishaps that I have invented for you. You are a mere protagonist in a novel, or nivola, whatever you'd like to call it' (219).25 Unamuno's narrator makes two errors in revealing Augusto's secret to him. He acknowledges that Augusto's reality depends not only on the writer but also and in equal measure on the readers, thereby unwittingly recognizing that control over Augusto is not within his power. Second, by using the past tense with regard to the writing of Augusto's story he excludes the present moment of speaking, of dialogical exchange. The turnaround that follows is extraordinary in its overt philosophical implications: Then, he glanced again at my portrait over the books, and his color returned and his breathing became more regular. He gradually pulled himself together, mastered himself... he suddenly looked at me with a smile in his eyes and said to me slowly: 'Look here, Don Miguel ... are you sure you're not mistaken and everything that's happening to me is the exact reverse of what you think and have told me?' 'What do you mean by the exact reverse?' I asked him, alarmed at seeing him taking control of his own life. 'Could it not possibly be, my dear Don Miguel,' he added, 'that it is you and not I who are a creature out of fiction, the person who actually does not exist, who is neither living nor dead? Could it not possibly be that you are a mere pretext for bringing my story to the world?' (219)26

Augusto, now a liberated autonomous character because he can speak for himself to his readers and not only to himself or to another character, recognizes that the basis of all representation, whether it be in painting as in Unamuno's portrait or through writing, must have the receiving others who can view the painting, read the novel and respond to it. By turning on Unamuno's narrator, he is merely inverting the attack into a counter-attack. As a persona and as a narrator, Unamuno is in truth

108 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense merely a pretext for presenting Augusto, but as a writer Unamuno is the necessary basis for the reader's reenactment of the story and as an author Unamuno will live on only to the extent that his characters, like Augusto, are read.27 The prologue to Niebla (Mist) is written by Augusto Perez's close friend and confidant, Victor Goti, thus initiating the text on a metafictional level and anticipating the existential conflict of chapter 31. Don Miguel de Unamuno insists on my contributing a prologue to this book of his, in which he recounts the lamentable life and mysterious death of my good friend Augusto Perez. Since the wishes of Senor Unamuno are for me commands, in the full sense of the word, I can do no less than write it. For, though I have not succumbed to the Hamlet-like scepticism reached by my poor friend Perez, who went so far as to doubt of his own existence, I am firmly persuaded that I lack what psychologists call free will. I am somewhat consoled by the thought that Don Miguel possesses no more free will than I do. (3)28

Victor Goti as an equal, that is, as one coexisting on the same ontological level as Augusto Perez, quite remarkably also claims to coexist with Unamuno. This common level of existence for all three lies only in the domain of the reading experience of the varied and sundry readers of the novel. Beyond the ludic punning there is no declaration by Goti that should strike a more responsive chord in Unamuno's readers than the claim that Unamuno has as little free will as he, Goti. Keeping in mind that Unamuno was the aggressive advocate of the will to be oneself for one and one's others, this statement begs for a response, which indeed Unamuno provides in the post-prologue, but at least on one level Victor is correct. Neither he nor Unamuno's narrator is the master of his existence; they are at the mercy of the whim and fancy of their readers, whom they can only hope to marginally influence. Further on in the prologue, Goti takes up the issue of the novel's eroticism: For my part I am not at all surprised at the evident relationship between the erotic and the metaphysical. I remember rightly enough that our European peoples began by being, as their literatures show, warriors and saints, developing later into eroticists and metaphysicians. The cult of the woman coincided with the cult of conceptual subtleties ... Eroticism and metaphysics developed together. Religion is martial, warlike. Metaphysics is erotic and voluptuous ... the metaphysical instinct, curiosity to know what is none of our business -

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 109 original sin, in short - is what makes man sensual; or perhaps sensuality is what arouses, as it did in Eve, the metaphysical instinct, a longing to apprehend the knowledge of good and evil (10-11).29

Victor Goti's comic reductions of Unamuno's ideas on sexuality and alterity point the way to Augusto's therapy; if he is to come out of his extreme incestuous introversion, he must awaken to his sexuality. The next step would have been to move beyond the woman object to the true other, who was Eugenia, but he did not get that far. The epilogue, in the style of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares, has been given to Orpheus, Augusto's dog. This is no ordinary dog, for it knows the work of Plato in addition to understanding the dog's life his master lived: 'Yes, I understood him all right. He went on talking in any case. He was really talking to himself. He also talked to the dog in himself. I kept alive his so-called cynicism' (245).30 Orpheus has facilitated Augusto's progress from incoherent interior monologue, to monodialogue, and finally to dialogue; he has been part of Augusto's partial return from the mental prison of the opening pages. The entire trajectory of the novel has been one of established order challenged by disruption, creating chaos instead the orderly progression of unfolding narrative. In 1932, in one of his numerous short and highly provocative essays, Unamuno wrote about order and chaos: 'Chaos in Greek means the same as the Latin hiatus, that is, a gap. And in order to come out of chaos, of the gap, one has to find a purpose, a human purpose, not an animal purpose' ('A.M.D.G.,' 1188, my translation).31 Augusto's accidental or instinctive following of Eugenia gave him a purpose and this courtship led to his discovery of his sexuality and his sexual appetite for women became evident, but the overcoming of the hiatus did not lead to the realization of himself until he was able to engage the other fully and openly. The sense of alterity in the dialogue of chapter 31 is the culmination of his blind search for self. One's self is in being one's other, whether this is expressive in action or words. Order is broken up by contingencies of life and these gaps are overcome by imposing the order of the will, that is, purpose. But the sense of purpose must be the willed expression of any individual, not the automatic response of accepting the purposes one has been given. The status and role of women in Spanish culture in Unamuno's time was one of a number of issues that he explored in his fiction. The most cited and celebrated of these novels is La tia Tula (1921), but to gain access to that fictional story of excess the scholar must also examine Nada menos que

110 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense todo un hombre (1916), and both of these texts in the light of Mist. The major break with representational narration in 1914 comes in the portrayal of alienation and alterity. Unamuno recognized that the generic idea of women as woman was not only, but primarily, the result of the male-dominated language through which men and women know or think they know each other. When Biblioteca Nueva of Madrid published a Spanish translation of Sigmund Freud's works in 1922, Unamuno was an immediate and avid reader of volume I, Psychopathology of Even/day Life, which was originally published in German in 1904. Although Unamuno recognized the social importance of Freud's theories of the subconscious, he wrote that the fundamental flaw in the theory was that Freud had not considered the latent elements of alienation in language itself. This was a view that did not surface again in any major way until Jacques Lacan's research more than fifty years later. Unamuno's development of Augusto Perez's emergence from severe introversion is through a series of interviews that intensify in the probe into his hidden incestuous thoughts. Augusto's real is not synonymous with external reality, but rather what is real for him within the discursive patterns of his world that have become familiar. The symbolic is the primary order of discourse, since it represents and structures both the imaginary expansion of the world and the material content of the world. It is, therefore, only in language that ambiguities and interpretations of the real can operate. The problem for Augusto is to transcend his isolation in a private language and to move back through discourse into the origin of language, which is dialogue. Unamuno has consistently held out that the primary function of language is not to inform but to evoke. What Augusto must attain in his use of language is the response of the other. It is only in dialogue that the speaker can know his reality. Within the text this is made manifest in chapter 31, but in the metanarrative there is another level of exchange, which is the text-reader relationship, and this also is a dialogical form; this is where Augusto's ultimate reality lies, as he plainly understands. Augusto would have been pleased to read that his readers had indeed given him a kind of textual reality in which he not only rivaled his narrator, but surpassed him in scope, depth, and complexity. I have made some reference to the 'facts' of Augusto's troubled life - his childhood, his relation with his mother, etc. Now, by way of conclusion, let us ask what we mean by referring to these aspects of the novel as 'facts/ With some help from Wittgenstein we can make some progress on this issue.

Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 111 Facts do not exist in the same sense as objects. A fact is not a kind of object. A fact is a postulation that is accepted, until proven otherwise, as valid at the time of utterance. Wittgenstein writes: 'It often happens that we only become aware of the important facts, if we suppress the question "why" and then in the course of our investigations these facts lead us to the answer' (1953, no. 471). The main insight we have to support calling the incidents of Augusto's life facts is the role of language-games as the basic semantic link between language and reality. Mist is an 'as if reality that is not based on descriptive pages or intricate characterization, but it is a language-game about life and introversion. The following comments from Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1932-1935 are to the point: The rules of grammar are arbitrary in the sense that the rules of a game are arbitrary. We can make them differently. But then it is a different game' (57). Niebla (Mist) is Augusto's language-game.

4

Period and Process:

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process

Postmodernity in Spain and Latin America In historical terms postmodernism begins in the second half of the twentieth century in Western Europe and the Americas, and somewhat later in Africa and Asia. The term encompasses aesthetic, cultural, and political considerations of some magnitude. This has been a period of reflection on the established paradigms in all realms of human endeavour, which by the end of the century will have effected an irreversible rupture with modernism.1 Postmodernism is a fundamental cultural rejection of a master narrative, a denial of validity to a centred world-view. Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of postmodernism is to be found in the way in which philosophers, historians, and literary authors in the 1990s consider the past. The past, whose presence these writers must claim, is not a golden age to be recuperated. In this sense they are conceptually the opposite of Renaissance writers, who depended on an idealization of antiquity. The postmodern approach to the cultural past is to problematize even its most basic assumptions of structures and values through a relentless, unlimited, critical reflection. The postmodern paradigm of thinking is a critical remaking, and never an unquestioned conservation of past cultural traditions. The alternative to a logocentric narrative is the singular non-centred expression of self. This paradigm of critical thinking is the basic definition of postmodernism I use.2 It is critical reflection that will not be coerced into any one direction or ideology. In art and literature irony, parody, and interior duplication, all features of art from the past, are now used to bring about a subversion of authority and have prompted an intensification of the interpreter's interaction with the work of art. In a number of postmodern literary theories

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process

113

this emphasis on critical reflection was begun by Derrida's deconstruction. In hermeneutics it has emerged as an open-ended dialectic in the community of commentators, and in criticism the principal thrust of the postmodernist critical questioning has been expressed first through the feminist reconsideration of the canon, the neo-historicist challenge to historical truth as a stabilizing ground, and most recently, the postcolonial revision of the valuative character of language itself.3 Where did it all begin, who played Pandora to Western concepts of order by opening the box of critical reflection: a plague of questions and more questions? My answer is itself postmodern; it is that the origins can be found in the revolt of the marginalized against the dominant cultural centres. In 1950 the cultural centres were in New York, Paris, and to a lesser extent, London, but not yet Berlin or Rome. The margins were to be measured by the distance from these cultural capitals. Africa, Asia, and Latin America were remote and the cultural leaders of these continents all eagerly sought to be in touch with the centre.4 In 1950 Madrid was as culturally distant from the centre as Cochabamba, and both Buenos Aires and Mexico City were much closer. But if Spanish art and literature were in exile, Latin American literature was markedly derivative and colonialist, notwithstanding the creative genius of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz; in fact, these powerful figures in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico were the vanguard of the rupture that would soon sweep Latin America. Because postmodernist art is an overtly conceptual aesthetic it made its earliest and still most powerful presence in the novel and poetry; theatre, cinema, architecture, and painting followed. In this section I concentrate on selected works illustrating the Hispanic rejection of modernity as early as the beginning of the century and, subsequently, on the critique of the mimetic master narrative in order to assess the cultural transmission of concepts. The Hispanic world offers us an exceptional array of creativity, which transformed this vast part of the world from a derivative culture to an innovative one in only one generation. Alongside the subversion of self-legitimizing narratives, Latin American testimonial literature has given us the first truly decentred narratives, constituting a postmodern realization of a singular yet symbiotic voice of bearing witness to life. As I have suggested, the metafictional text inherited from modernism, in its postmodernist manifestation, moves beyond the mise en abime of interior duplication so highly favoured by modernism and envelops the reader in a tensional contradiction.5 There are only transitory answers in

114 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense the dichotomous contradiction of continuous opposition, but like the negative and positive poles in an electric current the questions themselves create a process of figuration, a force field that is powerful, but unpredictable in its direction and, perhaps of more importance, makes the reader a collaborator in the creative art of world-making with an unprecedented stake in the work of art as aesthetic experience.6 Comparative literary history confirms that aesthetic changes have multiple anticipations and precursors. Postmodernist prose fiction is not an exception. If some of its earliest manifestations are in the creative boom of the Latin American novel of the nineteen sixties, its anticipation was in the novels of Miguel de Unamuno, especially Amor y pedagogia (1902) and Niebla (Mist, 1914), which have been examined in chapter 3. If we examine the first edition of Amor y pedagogia we discover an extraordinary iconoclastic text that subsequent editions failed to maintain and mitigated to a large extent. In that first edition the unwary reader is confronted by an unsigned prologue that is a devastating attack on the author and the novel that follows. The author is accused of having lost his senses, of having written a vulgar, cheap farce that offends all readers with any aesthetic sensibility. The novel is denounced as an absurd mixture of slapstick, burlesque and of being little more than a display of a stream of conceits. How could an educated man, a professor of classics at the university, sink so low as to engage in this vulgar display of selfindulgence, we are told. The Spanish-reading public, and indeed readers more than ninety years later, are not prepared for such an onslaught published as the prologue to the novel. The prologue is, therefore, a denial of validity to the text that it is introducing. If the prologue is disconcerting, the text itself is even more enigmatic. The novel is written entirely in the present tense. The traditional narrative past is never used. The reader is in the dramatized present of action, even where there is description. Yet the story is in the past; thus there is a discursive contra diction in the enunciation itself. In chapter 3 I have compared this novel to Updike's S., both examples of the making of parodic meaning. In this chapter I want to call attention to its historical significance in the development of postmodernism. The use of parody, caricature, ironic burlesque, and the metafictional structure of a novel that displays its fictionality as an 'as if signified will not remain fixed in a purported world-view; the writing is provocative, contradictory, and open-ended. From the violent attack against the text in the prologue to the self-reflection in the epilogue and throughout the almost surrealistic depiction of the tragic victim of scientific sociology,

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 115 Avito's hapless son Apolodoro, Unamuno plunges the reader into a Zoroastrian struggle, not of good and evil, but of reason and emotion. Unamuno wrote two more forerunners of the postmodern novel, Mist in 1914 and How to Make a Novel (Como se hace una novela) in 1927. Mist has long been considered one of the high points of Spanish modernity because of its use of interior duplication in the famous dialogue between the fictional character and the author-figure. What has been overlooked, however, is that the parody in this case is aimed at the genre itself. The playful nivola in place of novela undermines much more than the purported reality of the text; it makes the reader aware of the fundamental truth that the human imagination is unlimited in its inventiveness and that this inventiveness is not merely an ancillary part of life but, on the contrary, the very stuff of which we make our lives. The prologuist Victor Goti, in denouncing Miguel de Unamuno for his arrogance in thinking that the characters that he has written into his work belong to him, points to the idea that Unamuno is but the necessary efficient cause for the creative process to take place. Augusto puts it most directly: the only reality that matters is that which the readers have received. The interaction between text and reader as the conflict between two worlds gives rise to the original world of the reading experience. There were no takers to Unamuno's outrageous challenge. This novel was soon overshadowed by his subsequent writing, including Abel Sanchez (1917), La tia Tula (1921), and San Manuel Bueno, mdrtir (1933). The iconoclastic, fundamentally postmodern How to Make a Novel (1927) went completely unnoticed. How to Make a Novel was begun in Paris in 1924 and was completed in Hendaya in 1927, while Unamuno was in exile from Spain. It is part autobiography, part narrative, and all literature. In the last entry of the journal, Unamuno writes: How to make a novel, well and good! But why, wherefore is it made? And the wherefore is the why. Why or wherefore is a novel made? So that the novelist may make himself. And wherefore is the novelist made? In order to make the reader, in order to make himself one with the reader. And only by the novelist and the reader of the novel making themselves one do they save themselves from their radical solitude. In the degree that they make themselves one they become actual and present and thereby eternal. (479)7

The power of the creative contradiction as metaphor was not taken up again until sixty years later, on the other side of the world: in Mexico,

116 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense Argentina, and Colombia. Unamuno, the master of paradox, one of the principal authors of European modernism, had also laid the groundwork for the subversion of the modernist paradigm by making the text selfdestruct its purported reality. The Death ofArtemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes was written between May 1960 and December 1961 and was published a few months later in 1962 (see Valdes 1982, 55-64). Without question, it is steeped in Mexican preHispanic culture, especially in the ancient Toltec belief in the flowering war, which holds that the human being is a living contradiction, part matter and part spirit, and growth can be achieved if neither one or the other win out; life is assured only if the contradiction continues, for from it springs the flower of his creation. The novel is structured in a sequence of thirteen spirals, each alternating between the first-, second-, and thirdperson narrative voices. Not only are the first and third person opposed to each other in so far as the first person is locked into the empirical response of the body and the brain to the gradual approach of death, but the third person narrates with historical distance that puts it at odds with the other two voices. What is most extraordinary is that the secondperson has its own internal battle. It presents the paradox of the experience of human time. Even as the mind recalls the past it does so as a projection of what is to come. Thus we encounter a past time narrated in the future tense. The Mexican novelist has responded to the French masterpiece of second-person narration by opening up the paradoxical domain of internal consciousness of time; I refer specifically to Michel Butor's greatest novel, A Change of Heart (La modification), of 1957. Butor's novel explores the subtle descent from an internal narrative voice responding to a mimetic world driven by human intentionality into the labyrinth of the internal subconscious, which gradually enters and takes over until the conscious self retakes control only to find that his mind has been changed. In the novel by Fuentes there is no take-over; instead there is a struggle that ends only with death. The Mexican metaphor of burning water becomes a paradigm that transcends the specific text. Fire and water are opposites as the presocratics held, yet it is only from the opposition of fire or the sun and water that the maize corn will grow and make life possible. By 1995 postmodern literature had enveloped the world, but in the beginning, at least in its Hispanic incarnation, the postmodern text, as I have suggested above, both breaks with modernity and continues certain aspects of it, coercing them to radical extremes. In The Death ofArtemio Cruz the making of narrative meaning is completely contextualized.

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117

Perception, cognition, even the articulation of the first-person narrator, are meaningful only in the character's social world. His person does not have a transcendent perspective or language. There are no eternal truths except in the fantasy of Utopia, but even the language of fantasy is socially contextualized as escape. The continuation that the Hispanic postmodern develops from its modernist paradigm is self-reflexivity and historicity. The second-person narrative voice forces the first person to reflect on a life of abuse and exploitation, and in so doing, it absorbs the reader, especially the Mexican reader, into this painful redescription of the Mexican economic miracle of the 1950s. On the other hand, the third-person narrative voice historicizes the entire life span of Artemio Cruz, but not in chronological order. There is a disconcerting fragmentation of time as the reader goes back and forth over the character's life without apparent order. It is only upon some extended reflection that the reader comes to realize that there is order in the third-person narration, but it is not linear order. The thirteen scrambled historical passages are in the nonlinear order of the character's Mexican heritage; his response to life's challenges have been concomitant to that of a person born under the sign of the obsidian knife. The full effect of these three voices, read in alternation in thirteen sequences, is disruptive, challenging, with a violence to traditional storytelling. The reader has become not just the recipient, but the active agent that makes the narrative possible. In 1955 an impoverished literary criticism of Latin American literature, too long accustomed to its marginalization in the world of letters, did not have the critical depth to recognize that this was the end of modernism. Instead Latin American literary criticism has been plagued by the intellectual poverty of such banality as 'boom literature' or 'magic realism' to characterize these works. Carlos Fuentes was part of a revolution, who from the margins of the cultural empire drew from his Mexican and European halves and came up with the living paradox of miscegenation, both ethnic and aesthetic. Whether he realized it or not, whether he recognized what he had achieved or not, the fact is that he had taken up the challenge of the paradox where Unamuno had left it almost sixty years before, and had used it not only to express a unique Mexicanidad but also to subvert the safety of the reader as a passive recipient of another's fiction. The postmodern deluge of questions and questioning had been released on an unsuspecting world. One year later, another Latin American writer proved that Fuentes was neither alone nor a mere aberration. Julio Cortazar published Rayuela

118 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense (Hopscotch) in 1963. The postmodernity of this novel made evident the simplistic inadequacy of the designation of 'magic realism/ Cortazar's novel has three parts: 'from this side/ 'from that side/ and 'the disposable chapters/ The latter are disposable if the reader remains a passive recipient of someone else's fictions. But if the reader accepts the challenge of active participation, the reading of the novel becomes a disturbing and eventually self-exploratory plunge into creativity and reflexivity. The reading pattern for the active reader can be summed up as a constant exposure to semantic impertinence. We read a plotted, vaguely mimetic, chapter and then flip ahead anywhere from thirty to sixty pages and read one or more of the disposable chapters only to return to the plotted chapters again. The non-plotted chapters are a mass of what appears to be random clippings from newspapers, magazines, books, graffiti, even blues sung by Jelly Roll Morton. The semantic impertinence of the creative metaphors has been elevated from the level of discourse to that of texts. In addition to the creative juxtaposition of the texts, Cortazar includes the aphorisms of his alter ego, Morelli. In only a few years the list of innovative writers from Latin America swelled: Alejo Carpentier, Jose Donoso, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Manuel Puig, Augusto Roa Bastos, Severo Sarduy, Ernesto Sabato, and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name some of the first. They were joined by a new generation of writers in literatures from other parts of the world, like the Caribbean, Africa, India, and the marginalized from inside, like Torn Morrison and Alice Walker in the United States. But it was when writing from the centre, with writers like John Fowles, Giinter Grass, and Milan Kundera, recognized that it was impossible to write closed fiction anymore that the postmodern revolution had ended the reign of modernism. The most recent development in postmodernism has been the subversion of history as the objective presentation of a common past. The first of the great Latin American novels to take up this question was Augusto Roa Bastos' I, the Supreme (Yo, el supremo) of 1974. This novel about a Latin American dictator takes a special place in the company of such novels as Alejo Carpentier's Reasons of State (El recurso del metodo, 1974), Ernesto Sabato's The Angel of Darkness (Abaddon el exterminador, 1974), and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch (El otono del patriarca, 1975). And before all of them stands the modernist classic Tirana Banderas (1927) by Valle Inclan, and Miguel Angel Asturias' El senor presidente (1946). I, the Supreme, however, is quite unlike anything written before or after because of the seamless narrative prose that forces the reader to make all

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 119 the shifts of narrative voices without any graphic indicators. Simply knowing who the enunciator is and what the context of the narration is, often becomes problematic. The other key factor in making this novel postmodern with respect to narrative conventions is the extensive intertextuality. Not since the first volume of Don Quijote have we been confronted with so much interpolation. The basic difference from the interpolated stories in Don Quijote or in Unamuno's Mist is that, in this case, they are purportedly by the protagonist or about him. We, of course, have Don Quijote's discourse on letters and Sancho Panza's invention of the enchanted Dulcinea, but once again there is a difference, for in Cervantes' masterpiece these are intentional acts of the two characters, while in I, the Supreme these inclusions are the willed act of a shadowy compilador. This novel is the postmodern transformation of the historical novel. It is the verbal construction not only of the protagonist Dr Jose Caspar Rodriguez de Francia, supreme dictator of Paraguay from 1814 to 1840, but of more consequence, of his historicity, that is, his narrativity. By narrativity I refer to the way persons see themselves and their communities and the way in which they draw from the multiple layers of stories upon stories they have heard or read in order to narrate their own lives to themselves. Every time we retell the story of that night when such and such happened, the storytelling is part of our listener's narrativity and an essential force in our own developing personal narrative identity. I, the Supreme narrates the life of the dictator in a non-chronological sequence that owes more to a Joycean free association and memory than to narrative, beginning with the end, when Francia is near death in 1840. The historical Francia has been called the American Robespierre because of his austerity, devotion to his country, and utter contempt for human rights. His arrogance was only matched by his cruelty. He closed Paraguay to the outside world for more than twenty-five years. The postmodernity of this novel is in the paradoxical rewriting of history and fiction. The text is made up of a monodialogue, as Francia dictates to his private secretary Patino, this monologue includes the responses and queries the secretary makes and Francia's angry retorts. But it is all narrated in the same first-person narrative voice, as if Francia had appropriated dialogue from the past and forced it into one continuous stream. In addition to the texts and their circumstance dictated by Francia, there are also random selections from 'Francia's notebook/ as well as long segments that are entirely privileged transcriptions of Francia's stream of consciousness. Near the end of the novel, Francia's stream of consciousness features a dialogue with his dog Sultan. The dog calls him

120 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense Supremo and chides him for having verbomania, of trying to find immortality by writing himself into a text to be read by others. Readers of Unamuno, of course, will be reminded of Augusto Perez and his dog Orpheus, who had the same thoughts on immortality. The verbomania of Jose Caspar Rodriguez de Francia is on the surface a long and historically detailed self-justification. This surface impression is dispelled once the reader realizes that the narrative voice of Francia expresses two temporal viewpoints: one is in 1840 and can be considered the perspective of an aged dying man, but the other is in 1970, some 130 years later. There are references to the history of Paraguay in the Chaco war of the 1930s; to Joao Guimaraes Rosa, the author of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (Grande Sertao: veredas, 1956); and to the characters of Roa Bastos' novel Son of Man (Hijo de hombre, 1960). The postmodernist paradox that creates the conceptual metaphor of imagined past as history and imagined present as action works in five levels of contradiction. The inner core of the self debates his actions, using the shadow of his secretary as his alter ego to justify himself. A second level is that of the monodialogue, as the dog Sultan accuses Francia of pride, arrogance, and unspeakable cruelty to others. The third level reaches out to intertextual alterity through the multiple interpolated documents, some of which are historically contemporaneous with the early nineteenth century in Paraguay, while others are the 'as if creations of the writer; in both cases there is a sense of a community that is being managed by the will of the dictator. A fourth level of paradox is achieved as the compiler adds his notes, much in the same way that the narrator, translator, and historian of Don Quijote all had their say; this is the level of the fictionalizing of the implied author and the historicizing of a fictional voice. The fifth level is the inherent conflict between the implied reader, who is constantly being addressed, and the actual reader, who will more often than not break away from the role that he or she has been given in the narration. I, the Supreme is a postmodern novel that transcends the historical genre of fiction, because it offers the reader the role usually reserved for the historian - to make history a refiguration of the past in the present, one that will come out of the conflict between the world of the text and the world of the reader. The postmodern idiom in Latin American poetry is today a major aesthetic accomplishment. Through all of its variations two salient characteristics can be pointed out: its open-ended conceptualization and its deliberate subversion of textual distance. In Spain, poets like Angel Gonzalez have continued to press the conceptual impertinence of crea-

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 121 tive metaphor to its limits, but perhaps the most remarkable postmodern poet writing today in Spanish is the Mexican Jose Emilio Pacheco. He engages the reader in the act of reading, confronts the prejudgments that have been taught, and makes the reader think. When the Mexican poet was beset with requests for an interview by a graduate student who had read his work in English translation, he was in a quandary as to what to do. Pacheco felt that he could neither respond nor remain silent; he opted for a public response, and wrote a poem. In part the poem is as follows:8 In Defence of Anonymity To begin not responding I shall say: I have nothing to add to what is in my poems, I am not interested in commenting, I am not concerned with my 'place in history' (if indeed I have one). I write and that is all. I write: I give half of the poem. Poetry is not made up of black signs on a white page. I call that place of meeting with another's experience, poetry. The man, the woman who reads will make, or not, the poem I have but sketched. We do not read others: we read ourselves in others. It seems a miracle to me that a stranger is able to see himself in my mirror. If there be any value in all of this - said Pessoa It belongs to the verses, not to the author of the verses. If by chance the author is a great poet he will leave four or five true poems surrounded by failures and drafts. His personal opinions are in truth of very little interest. I continue to think that poetry is more A form of love that only exists in silence, in a secret pact between two persons, almost always two strangers.

122 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense In reality the poems you read are yours: you, their author, who invents them, reading. Workings of the Sea, 72-5 (my translation)

Pacheco's poem is within one of the oldest traditions in poetry: the writing of an ars poetica. However, both in poetic structure and in aesthetic concepts, the poem is a radical break with the immediate past in Latin America. The language is idiomatic, the tone and rhythm are clearly epistolary, the images are commonplace (such as reading the poem as the agora of the imagination), but the main idea that is promoted is anti-modernistic in the extreme. Pacheco depreciates the idea of the poet as the high priest of culture, and presents poetic writing as fundamentally incomplete. Completion of works of art occurs only in the reading, in the text-reader interaction. The reader responds to the injunctions of the text; the poet's text provokes a process of self-reflection by way of the imaginative experience of making the text. In order to round out this section on the Hispanic invention of reality in postmodernism I should like to turn to cinema, specifically to the 1983 film Carmen, by Carlos Saura. The film ostensibly is about the choreography of a new flamenco ballet based on Carmen, not only the famous opera of 1875 by Georges Bizet, but also the novel of 1845 by Prosper Merimee. The choreographer is also the lead dancer, Antonio Gades, who will play the part of Don Jose. Laura del Sol is the young, wild flamenco dancer whom Antonio hires to play Carmen. Paco de Lucia plays himself as guitarist, composer, and Antonio's friend. Cristina Hoyos, the lead dancer in Antonio Gades' company, plays herself. Antonio brings the company together in his rehearsal studio, plays Bizet's opera to them, and reads from the Spanish translation of Merimee's novel. He is looking for the essential Carmen: part wild and primitive with an urge to express herself and part unrestricted seductress. The etymology of the name Carmen goes back to early pre-Christian Europe, and it means the song that bewitches. With this idea of the primeval Carmen, Antonio is not satisfied until he finds a woman who can seduce at will. The film moves through the progress of the making of the ballet, the rehearsals, and the ensuing love affair between Antonio and his Carmen. The parallels between the fiction and the reality are drawn out. In scene after scene the viewer is not completely sure on which level the scene is. The conclusion is, of course, the murder of Carmen by Don Jose; this time

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 123 the viewer is left in a complete quandary as to whether Antonio/Jose played the part in life and actually plunged the knife into Carmen. The conceptual power of Saura's film is that it erases the separation between fiction and reality, it recuperates a Spanish idiom from its pseudoSpanish expression in French literature and music, and at the same time it involves the viewer in the imaginative creation of sexuality, freedom, and domination. The open-ended configuration of the viewer transcends the plot and the magnificent dance scenes and, through intertextuality and ontological contradiction, moves the viewer into a creative configuration that is always new and always collaborative. The film is Spanish because of its subject-matter, because of its dance idiom, and because it is postmodern paradox in the spirit of Unamuno, who was at the peak of his creativity almost eighty years before when he wrote How to Make a Novel (Como se hace una novela). We should note in passing the profound structural similarities between Saura's film and The French Lieutenant's Woman' (1981), its script by Harold Pinter based on John Fowles's novel (1969) of the same title. If self-parody and contradiction are at the centre of postmodernism in general, as I have said, and if these characteristics are manifest in Spanish literature and art beginning with Cervantes and Velazquez in the seventeenth century, if they have been renewed in the twentieth century by Unamuno, and if they have culminated in the last quarter of this century with the Hispanic genius of Rulfo, Carpentier, Cortazar, Donoso, Fuentes, Garcia Marquez, Puig, Roa Bastos, Sabato, Sarduy, and Vargas Llosa, and with the new Spanish cinema of Saura, Erice, and a number of younger cinematographers, then are we claiming postmodernism for Hispanic art? Not at all. But what we can claim is that Latin American testimonial literature has developed the decentred discourse that critics such as Lyotard, Hutcheon, and Jameson have identified as part of the intellectual force of postmodernity. Elena Poniatowska's work stands out as a high point of Latin American postmodernism. The innovative direction of such works as Cortazar's Hopscotch, Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz, and Vargas Llosa's The Green House, which all moved in the direction of establishing the commonality of a community's narrative interhistory, have led to Poniatowska's communal narratives. The extraordinary La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) is the decentred narrative of a people in response to the tragic massacre of hundreds by government troops in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, Tlatelolco, on Wednesday, 2 October 1968. Postmodernisms constitute a range of universal aesthetic perspectives.

124 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense All we have to do is look out the window in any large urban centre and see postmodern architecture around us. The cinema festivals, the literary prize competitions, and the art galleries around the world all pour forth endless variations on the creative contradiction of postmodernism. Hispanic art is only one part in the cacophony of world voices, but it is unmistakably a voice of leadership. Today's leaders are about to be overtaken, and not from the old centres, but from farther out in the empire, from Lagos, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Trinidad, or Bombay. Without question, this is a very unsettled and unsettling period. But it is also a time of remarkable human creation. Never before have persons around the world been so keenly aware of the suffering of others in dozens of places heretofore obscure names on a map, and never before has the underlying struggle of different national, religious, and ethnic forces been so fragmented. There are mixed groups against mixed groups of people all over the world. And in the midst of this destruction critics are talking about literature and art. Not only do I not apologize for what we are doing as critics, I insist that the power of art and literature has never been what is taught about it - if anything is taught at all - for prescriptive art is dead art; the power of art is the creation of reality, and as critics, whether we know it or not, we are above all commentators of the world-making process that art fosters in our lives. It is through the intimate challenge of creating an image that does not correspond to the accepted reality of the world we live in that we question the rules. Once the questioning begins in earnest, there is no stopping it. Consequently, I argue that the human family of the twentyfirst century will come out of the reality we are making for ourselves today, and the primary role of art in this world-making is to challenge our unquestioned axioms about ourselves, our others, and our relation to them. When we ask why racism, why sexism, why ethnic cleansing, why rape, violence, and starvation, we can do so as outraged citizens of the world or we can do so as part of the reflection that art enjoins us to do, questioning the rules of the game of living and the institutions that make the rules. The Literary Historical Process In 1958 Fernand Braudel wrote that the human sciences were in a state of crisis; history and geography had reached such an impasse that a divorce was imminent.9 In the intervening years French historiography has led the way in bringing the social sciences into social history. This enrich-

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 125 ment of enquiry is in evidence in such achievements as Braudel's Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II and, more recently, in Claude Bataillon, Herve Thery, and Jean-Paul Deler's work in the geography of Latin America.10 Unfortunately, with a few notable exceptions, the general area of literary and art history has remained marginal to this interdisciplinary expansion in social history. The reasons for this isolation have been multiple, not least of which has been the literary historian's disinterest in the social contextualization of literature.11 One hundred years ago the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno began to write about the relationship between historia - a reasoned narrative account of events - and intrahistoria - the long term record of human activity. Unamuno advocated a new historiography that would both explain and account for the past. Some fifty years later, Fernand Braudel wrote a history that was intrahistoria and he chose to write on Spain. And, finally, in the same intellectual climate of Braudel, Furet, LeGoff, and their colleagues of the French Annales group, Paul Ricoeur began his study of historiography in 1952 with History and Truth, which culminated in 1983-5 in the study of human temporality, Time and Narrative. This concluding section is divided into five parts beginning with the broadest philosophical concerns and concluding with the specific task at hand - a comparative literary history of Latin American literature. The five sections are but divisions of convenience in one argument regarding society, literature, and history. The five parts deal with (1) the concept of prefigurative narrativity; (2) the challenge of a history of literary production and reception, (3) an enquiry into agency, texts, and events in literary history; (4) the hermeneutic paradigm for the configuration of interpretations; (5) an outline of the Ricoeur-Braudel approach applied to literary history. 1. Prefigurative narrativity. To tell the story of a community and of the events and actions that make up its history is simply to continue, at a somewhat more reflective and usually more retrospective level the storytelling process through which the community constitutes itself and its actions/ With these words David Carr begins his conclusion to his book Time, Narrative and History. I cite it here as the point of departure for my basic thesis that deobjectifies literature, that removes it from the prevalent concept that it is a cultural commodity. In philosophical terms my thesis is that literature stands at the centre of a linguistic community's identity, with the all-important qualifier that language and, therefore, linguistic communities are not self-contained.

126 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense Miguel de Unamuno's idea of history is that it is a community's continuous effort to constitute itself and that historians have been the narrators of this collective identity. But he insists that historians must rise above the demand to serve the petty nationalism of the state and must recover the unwritten flow of daily life by the people. 'Consciousness is made by speaking. Those who do not speak do not have consciousness of their action. Those who do not express themselves can move but they cannot make' (Tor el son...' 495; my translation.). The lives of the thousands who have lived and spoken, but whose action has not been considered by the historian, represent the vast inner current of history that is the only reality worth remembering. 'History as a science is the memory of peoples, and in history as with individual memory there are immense lapses of memory, but though they be forgotten they are not dead, and from these depths of the unwritten past they operate through indirect means to revive peoples' (ibid.). Mountains of facts and opinions do not constitute the historical record. History is above all the mediation that the historian provides between the unwritten flow of life and the scant record that has been received thereby striving to facilitate the expansion from facts into the record of living. With regard to literature Unamuno stressed that literature was to history what intra-literature was to intra-history, that is, the spoken language of the community is the origin and ultimate recipient of literature. Therefore literary history, he wrote, if ever a work is deserving of this name, would be a history of the identity of a people. Seductive as these ideas are, the accumulation of unresolved concepts of language amounts to an impasse of some magnitude, and it has been so until the full significance of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics has been felt. I shall begin with Ricoeur's hermeneutic premise developed from 1955 to 1985. In Time and Narrative Ricoeur gives what will certainly be the last exposition; he writes that temporality is the structure of human existence and that it resides in language as narrativity. Language as a mode of living is constituted through narrativity and its ultimate referent is time. The claim is a strong one: that the nature of time itself is narrativistic. Thus the argument is that historians do not impose narrative form on facts constituted as events that might be presented through non-narrative discourse, but rather Ricoeur argues that historical events themselves have the same structure as narrative discourse. It is, consequently, this narrative structure that distinguishes historical events from natural events. The presence of human agency, which is central to a historical event, can transform a natural event like an earthquake or a flood into a historical event. But not

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 127 all narrative accounts can be accepted as history. For example, Ricoeur writes, journalistic accounts of events may be well informed and make sense of the facts of the case at hand, yesterday's political event may be well described with a prudent distance of analysis, but these still fall short of being history. This is so because the journalist's story lacks the secondary referentiality of a story within a story within a story. The historian is not a reporter of past events, historians are mediators between events and certain experiences of temporality. Thus there is a poetics of history and a professional critique of the methods of research and also of the ways of emplotting events. A history is a narrative account that reaches conclusions and can be taken as a whole; thus it far exceeds the sum of the sentences that it contains. To emplot a sequence of events transforms the writing from being only a chronicle of events to being a story. This mediation is the ultimate task of the historian. Emplotment is therefore necessary and always limited and questionable. But to say that one form of emplotment is flawed is not the same as saying that the historian could do without the construction of causality. The plot can be depersonalized and human agency can be deferred, but the presentation of event is also the presentation of how and why the event happened. The meaning of stories is given in their emplotment. By emplotment a sequence of events is configured (grasped together) in such a way as to represent 'symbolically' what would otherwise be unutterable in language, namely, the ineluctable aporetic nature of the human experience of time. Historical discourse is a privileged instantiation of the human capacity to endow the experience of time with meaning, because the immediate referent of this discourse is real, rather than imaginary, events. Historians cannot invent the events of their stories, they must find them. This is so because historical events have already been created by past human agents, and by their actions produced lives worthy of having stories told about them. This means that the intentionality informing human actions, as against mere motions, takes us to the creation of lives that have the coherence of emplotted stories. The creation of a historical narrative is an action exactly like that by which historical events are created, but it is in the domain of narration rather than that of action. By discerning the plots prefigured in historical actions by the agents that produced them and by configuring them as sequences of events having the coherence of stories, the historian makes history. While historical meaning is prefigured in the actions of historical agents, the agents themselves cannot foresee it, because human actions have

128 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense consequences that extend beyond the purview of those who perform them. This is why it is wrong for historians to limit themselves to trying to see things from the position of past agents alone, to trying to think themselves back into the mind or consciousness of past actors in the historical drama. They are fully justified in availing themselves of the advantages of hindsight. Moreover they are fully justified in using the techniques of analysis developed by the social sciences of their own time in order to identify social forces at work in the agent's environment even though these forces may have been only emergent in the agent's time and place and not perceivable by the agent. Human actions have consequences that are both foreseeable and unforeseeable, that are informed by intentions both conscious and unconscious, and that may be frustrated by contingent factors that are both knowable and unknowable. It is for this reason that narrative is necessary for the representation of 'what actually happened' in a given domain of historical occurrence. A scientific historiography of the sort envisioned by the annalists, which deals in large-scale, physical and social, anonymous forces, is not so much wrong as simply limited to telling only a part of the story of human beings at grips with their individual and collective destinies. It produces the historiographical equivalent of dehumanized drama that is all scene and no actors, or a novel that is all theme but lacking in characters. Such a historiography features all background and no foreground. The best it could provide would be a quasi-history comprising quasi-events, enacted by quasi-characters, and displaying the form of a quasi-plot. Once a human being is allowed to enter such a scene, inhabited only by forces, processes, and structures, it becomes impossible to resist the narrative mode of discourse for representing what is happening in that scene. Even Braudel must tell stories whenever human beings acting as agents are permitted to enter, to appear against the background of those forces that he would describe solely in quantitative and statistical terms. This must be done in spite of the fact that it goes against his own conscious repudiation of narrativity as the principal impediment to the creation of a scientific historiography. Ricoeur's insistence that history and literature share a common ultimate referent in human time represents a considerable advance over previous discussions of relations between history and literature based on the supposed opposition of factual and fictional discourse. Historical narrative discourse alone is adequate to the representation of the experience of historicality in a way that is both literal in what it asserts about specific events and figurative in what it suggests about the meaning of this experience. What the historical narrative literally asserts about

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 129 specific events is that they really happened, and what it figuratively suggests is that the whole sequence of events that really happened has the order and significance of well-made stories. Narrative discourse does not simply reflect or passively register a world already made; it works up the material given in perception and reflection, fashions it, and creates something new, in precisely the same way that human agents by their actions fashion distinctive forms of historical life out of the world they inherit as their past. Thus conceived, a historical narrative is not only an icon of events, past or present, of which it speaks; it is also an index of the kinds of actions that produce the kinds of events we wish to call historical. It is this indexical nature of historical narrative that assures the adequacy of its symbolic representations to the real events about which they speak. Historical events can be distinguished from natural events by virtue of the fact that they are products of the actions of human agents seeking, more or less self-consciously, to endow the world in which they live with symbolic meaning. Historical events can therefore be represented realistically in symbolic discourse, because such events are themselves symbolic in nature. So it is with the historian's composition of a narrative account of historical events: the narrativization of historical events effects a symbolic representation of the process by which human life is endowed with symbolic meaning. Historical narrative that takes the events created by human actions as its immediate subject does much more than merely describe those events; it also imitates them, that is, performs them, performs the same kind of creative act as those performed by historical agents. History has meaning because human actions produce meanings. These meanings are continuous over the generation of human time. This continuity, in turn, is felt in the human experience of time organized as future, past, and present rather than as a mere serial consecution. To experience time as future, past, and present rather than as a series of instants in which every one has the same weight or significance as every other is to experience historicality. This experience of historicality can be represented symbolically in narrative discourse because such discourse is a product of the same kind of figuration as the events themselves; they have beginnings, middles, and ends just as the actions of historical agents who reconfigure their lives as meaningful stories. The meaning of history resides in its aspects as a drama of the human effort to endow life with meaning. This universal, human quest for meaning is carried out in the awareness of the corrosive power of time, but it is also made possible and given its distinctively human pathos by this very awareness. In this respect, that manner of being-in-the-world that we call

130 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense historical is paradoxical and cannot be apprehended by human thought except in the form of an enigma. To sum up, prefigurative narrativity is the basis for temporality, and therefore historical narrative offers us the only way to make sense out of past events. The historian's task is one of mediation between the events and the story of human agency that gives meaning to these events. If the historian emplots events into a narrative account, we must now ask which events does the literary historian engage in the task of literary history. Can the composition and publication of a book be considered an event, or must we include the reception by the author's contemporaries as part of the event? And, if this be so, how can we account for vastly changing modes of reception of the same work? Can a history of production concomitantly deal with a history of reception? 2. History of literary production and reception. A postmodern literary history can be neither the cumulative record of everything that has been written nor the compilation of themes and topics that have been emphasized by past historians. Literary history can only be effective in our postmodern world if it is an ongoing search for understanding of our sense of the past, which stands behind the texts we read in the present. There is no doubt that at any given point in history the knowledge of the past is partial and reflective of present perspectives. It is for this reason that every writing of literary history is inadequate to the task of reenactment, but nevertheless is a necessity for the cultural identity of the society that produces the writing. A proper historiography of literary history begins with the recognition of the essential problem of description of an event that must be constantly reconstituted. There is no question that the significance of past actions must first be understood in terms of their agents' own values and aesthetic perspectives and not in terms of our very different ones. But on the other hand, to ignore the meanings of our own redescriptions of the events would be to play the fool. There are three preliminary tasks before us: to understand how our narrative form cannot escape our own value spectrum; to abandon the notion of a universal history; and to open up for scrutiny the concept of event itself. The cognitive function of the historian's narrative form is not a neutral compilation of a succession of facts and ascribed purpose and design; it is above all, the making of a whole out of a number of interrelationships that are not in themselves related by necessity but only by purpose of exposition. Narrative form is thus an artifice designed to represent a specific explanation for past activity. We would clearly expect that the narrative form of a feminist like Susan Gubar or a

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 131 Marxist like Fredric Jameson would be the best instrument possible to further their historical ensemble as valid and presenting a general truthclaim. The identification of form with ideology should not be taken as negative. The point to be made is that every telling of a story is partial, limited, and directed, but it is as valid as its telling allows for a debate with other versions. There is no basis for the persistent idea that there is a determinate historical actuality, an ur-history that serves as the referent and measure for our enquiries into what really happened in the past. What really happened is to be constituted by the gradual enlargement of points of view and the elaboration of subsequent ways of examining the facts as they are recorded. The significance of the past is important to us today because of the meaning we ascribe to those events. This significance is understandable only to the extent that it is placed within the narrative description we share with our contemporaries. There can be no doubt that it is we who make the past. When we discuss the historicity of Cervantes, we must be prepared not only for the numerous differences in our descriptions of the context surrounding specific acts of composition or literary events, but also we must recognize that the concept of historical event itself must be examined with care. There are many descriptions of an event and there is no standard that will help us to reduce them to one or even a few. The full cognitive paradigm of historical research in literary history will be dismissed as inadequate unless we come to grips with the construct of a literary event and all that it encompasses. 3. Enquiry into agency, texts, and events in literary history. In literary history, the aesthetic perspectives of the past are established from the differences between the notion of reality expressed in the texts and the idea of reality recognized by historians as their own. Are the constructions of the historian's reconstructions 'what really happened in the past' or are they contemporary constructions on what the past has come to mean in the present? Clearly, there is no agreement on this matter, and indeed most literary historians attempt to do both. Through the use of documentary evidence, historians are committed to the reconstruction of what once was, and in so doing they are also, knowingly or not, making a statement about their own sense of world. Inasmuch as there is a documentary trace of the past, literary historians attempt their reconstruction as representations of who wrote what and when, and may even venture into the question of why. But the problem that makes literary history unique, is that standard historiography can only attempt the reconstruction of the author's circumstances. The work of art itself is left on the

132 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense side, as it must be, because it is not of the past, but of the present. The texts are read by the historian in the present and at best the texts may yield traces of past readings but they are realized in the present. A literary work took place as an event of writing and production, but this event is no longer; it once was. The traces of the event can lead to an imaginative reenactment of the event but no more. In so far as literary historians are not content to consider literary works of art only as events of composition, they also actualize a text and comment on this writing of the past from the vantage point of their present. My first point is that literary history not only attempts to realize a reenactment of a past event, it also presents a contemporary reflection of the writing as an aesthetic experience in the present. Literary history treats writing both as document and as experience. Works of literature are, of course, historical in their composition, but they are also in history as long as there continues to be reception recorded. Certain works of literature are therefore generators of social discourse in the life of a linguistic community, and catalytic agents of change in other communities they reach altered through translation. A history of literature that seeks to grasp together the many versions of the literary work must find new ways of organization. If the work of literature, its production and reception, in the original language and in translation, is the subject-matter of literary history, the literary work must be recast as a historical event, but it is an event that multiplies in time with continuities and discontinuities. Although the production and reception are contemporary at the beginning, they bifurcate soon after, and commentary of reception rapidly exceeds commentary on the work's production. Both change with time, only the composition itself remains stable. There are at least five different versions of the literary work as historical event in its linguistic and cultural community: 1 /The contemporary description of the context of composition and of reception, which includes the gestation, process of writing and rewriting, censorship and self-censorship, as well as institutional support and opposition. 2/The historical reconstruction of the literary work's context of composition and its reception based exclusively on documents contemporary to the literary work, assembled and grasped together by the literary historian working at a much later time. 3/The critical reception of the literary work based on ideas and aesthetic principles subsequent to the composition. An example would be the

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 133 German romantics' rediscovery of the seventeenth-century theatre of Calderon as it affected the reception of Calderon in Spain itself. 4/The critical reception of the literary work based on subsequent methods and techniques of literary criticism. An example would be a narratological commentary on Don Quijote. 5/The critical reception of the work through subsequent interpretive paradigms that challenge ideological and cultural assumptions about the work's social context. An example would be a feminist commentary on Marcela's discourse in volume 1 of Don Quijote. It can be said that by expanding the concept of historical event to include the vicissitudes of subsequent paradigms we have overloaded the argument and made literary history impossible. There is no doubt that by changing the concept of literary event to include reception we have changed the way in which literary history is written. But, I would argue, we have also enriched the historical depth of the literary text. Not all literary works have a constant history of reception; most in fact have a very short time under critical scrutiny. Nevertheless, when a work from the past is brought into the historical record; at least the five events outlined above are in play. When we include works that come into the literary corpus in translation, a sixth event is introduced, which is the rupture of contextualization. Works can suddenly be plunged into a linguistic and cultural community that is different and distant from the context of origin, with extraordinary and unpredictable results, which sometimes can return as aesthetic ideas to the community of origin. A good case for this phenomenon can be made with the Latin American literature of the 1960s, which swept through the nonSpanish speaking world like a firestorm and has subsequently given rise to ideas of postmodernism that now return to Latin America as an aesthetic perspective. What I have begun to sketch out is less a break with literary historians of the past than a more structured plan of operation and a rejection of the master narrative. When David Perkins writes: 'A text from the past embodies a lived experience, an aesthetic, a culture that is alien. Of course, it is not completely alien. Continuities and universals in human experience are the themes of antiquarian literary history and humanist criticism. But most literary histories emphasize the difference of the past' (184-5), I concur. But I cannot agree with the either/or nature of his proposal when a few lines further he writes: 'Here, incidentally, is why literary history cannot surrender the ideal of objective knowledge of the past. Though the ideal cannot be achieved, we must pursue it, for without it the otherness of the

134 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense past would entirely deliquesce in endless subjective and ideological reappropriations' (185). Either we strive for objectivity or we risk getting caught in the morass of subjective relativity. Perkins concludes the paragraph with the telling statement: 'A function of literary history is, then, to set the literature of the past at a distance, to make its otherness felt' (185). Indeed, but this function would be better served by a structure of interpretation that opened the past to the multiple varieties of present appropriations without closing the works or their context to a master narrative. 4. Hermeneutic paradigm for the configuration of interpretations. A basic hermeneutic premise for our probe of literary history has been developed over the past twenty-five years by the German scholar Robert Weimann; he describes literary history as the study of writings from the past, which establishes their historical significance but gives them their meaning in the present. Literary history therefore not only reconstitutes what was once an event, but also rethinks the writing of the past as a product of the present. At the centre of this endeavour there is the concept of temporal distance, which some literary historians do not acknowledge in spite of the fact that it is a primary channel of communication between the text as event and the text as meaning. The historical study of literature is the construction of a complex network of data, imaginative reenactment, and interpretation. One primary aspect of study with respect to the elaboration of textual meaning by the historian is the literary truth-claim as the determinate basis of the literary configuration. The historical significance of truth-claims has three principal factors to consider: the ways in which truth-claims are made in texts are a relatively conservative feature showing little change over the years; the generic forms that govern the use of truth-claims as discourse do change, but in an evolutionary process of gradual mutation; the aesthetic perspective, which is always that of the historian looking at texts from the past, is a relationship of difference and always alien to the text in spite of the historian's best effort to contextualize it. This is the difference between the historian's own sense of reality and that of the textual world, which is never the same as that composite construction of a historical period put together by historians. Thus there are three historicities at work in the aesthetic perspective, that of the commentator, the one of the text's emplotment, and the documentary reconstruction of what was purportedly the author's. Major changes in aesthetic perspectives become evident two or three times in a century and as such present a history of textual

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 135 commentary that must be inserted into both a history of reconstructions of the author's contexts as well as a history of reappropriations. Although the way in which truth-claims are made does not change, the meaning of the truth-claim changes notably from one period to the next. This change is a change in the vantage point of successive literary commentators, as each has a perspective necessarily determined by the ideas of reality generated by their own linguistic and cultural communities. These changes in perspective are discernible through the examination of the difference between the present meaning of texts and their past significance. A good example is that of Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations, which constructs a context for his commentary of Shakespeare's works. Greenblatt does not claim this discursive context is directly attributable to Shakespeare himself, nor does he assert that his interpretation be final. Greenblatt offers us his study of Renaissance England as a time, place, and culture that are quite alien to us but that we can understand through the difference. I have expanded the concept of event in literary history to encompass five related events derived from one composition. They are the antiquarian's assemblage of the original context, the historian's reconstruction of the event as it is most likely to have been, the rediscovery of the work in a new aesthetic climate, a formalist reconstitution of the event, and, finally the neo-historicist appropriation of the event in the present. All five events have a place in literary history and their relative importance depends on the activity that has surrounded the composition. Once again, I turn to David Perkins to state the argument for the other side, for literary history as a master narrative that imposes closure on the works of the past. Perkins writes: But narrative literary history, intent on explaining the events it portrays, must leave the reader's imagination less scope. It does not and cannot give the whole story, as the examples we analyzed abundantly illustrate. But all that it does give must hang together. Events that do not cohere do not explain each other. Interpretations that are potentially open must be closed by argument. This is why narrative literary history cannot use the techniques of modernist and postmodernist fiction. Generally speaking, these techniques have been developed in opposition to traditional, linear narrative and closure. They problematize such narratives, expose them as mere artifice, deny their claim to be explanatory ... narrative literary history has not reflected it [the contingency and randomness of the world] until now. And it will not reflect it in the future, unless it

136 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense surrenders its aspiration to explain ... we note the conflict in the writing of history and literary history between the need to describe the past plausibly and the need to explain it. (48)

I cannot fault Perkins's description of the task confronting the writing of literary history. My disagreement is with the dismissal of alternatives to the proposition of either narrative or non-narrative modes of writing. 5. The Ricoeur/Braudel approach to literary history. The Ricoeur/Braudel model offers us not only a powerful historical instrument, but, of major significance for me, it gives us procedures for approaching complex historical conglomerates of comparative literary history. Latin American literatures, the literatures of Central European cultural centres, the literatures of the African cultural diaspora, are such areas of study. Our paradigm calls for the elaboration of the context separately from the narration of events. This is the essence of the Braudel model as we have adapted it to literary history. The social context thus redresses some of the omissions of the past by establishing a basic stratum of the cultural centres of a society, the social institutions that have been central to the production of literature, and also the politics of readership in the community. In place of periodization based on either empirical evidence - dates of birth and death of writers, publication dates, etc. - or on interpretive aspects of the works - late romantic prose or neoclassical drama, etc. -1 propose time-frames of reception in which the specific works of literature are examined as those mobile attractors of cultural forces for example, The Tempest as a new historical text, Don Quijote as a twentiethcentury definition of Spanish identity in Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and Azorin. Denis Hollier has put it succinctly in his Introduction' to A New History of French Literature: Today it is increasingly difficult to draw one solid line of demarcation between the inside and the outside of a work of art; sometimes it is even impossible to distinguish between form and background' (xxv). There is, however, no getting around the basic fact that narrativization imposes a sense of order, and this in turn implies purpose, which, without question, imposes closure on the historical events under scrutiny. The question of narrative authority is not only linked to the multiple truthclaims the historical narrative proposes to the reader, but primarily to the historian's explication of causality. The exercise of narrative authority is more explicit in nineteenth-century history - for example thefirstvolumes of Michelet's Histoire de la Revolution fran^aise (1847-1862) - but it is present

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 137 in all historical narration. Chantal Thomas, for example, takes the publication of Sade's Justine in the summer of 1791 as a historical event in the sense in which I have been using the term. In her commentary she proposes specific conclusions: 'Sade adheres to Enlightenment ideology, but, unlike Denis Diderot and Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach, for whom materialism means the improvement of human nature, Sade's thought results in an absolute conviction in the permanent existence of evil' (Hollier 580). There are, of course, numerous ways of narrating the same set of historical markers which have been taken as an event, since each historian has to select and sort out the evidence, organize it into a narrative sequence, and give a sense of purpose. The more the series of events take on importance the more do the historical narratives of these events multiply and differ from one another. In all of these versions, each historian has implicitly claimed to be presenting 'what really happened in the past.' Each historical narrative has in fact given form and coherence to an assemblage of data. The demand for closure in the historical narrative is a demand for an interpretive statement of purpose behind the event. Our task is made more complex because we are dealing with multiple social and demographic factors, sometimes of long duration. Narrativization in comparative literary history expresses direction and purpose and, consequently, maps out a quasi-plot for the events. But because of stratified paradigms, these historical narratives are offered, drawing from the wealth of data offered in the social context, and presented as interpretive versions. It is somewhat like the making of a Roman mosaic. The picture must be made from a specific number of stones, a limited range of colours, and in a limited enclosure, but there is an almost limitless variety of depictions possible; the only limitations lie in the historicity of the artist and the skill, imagination, and representational repertoire of the time. If, for example, we examine the terms of historical unity for Latin American literature, we must recognize that it is entirely a construction of literary historians, and yet there is an undoubted referent in the social reality of the continent. The reasons for the apparent paradox are entirely tied to problematics of identity. In the vaguely defined area encompassed by the term Latin America, the aspects held in common are languages and a colonial past. Within the area, the term Latin America is an important, but secondary, identity factor. Outside the area it has become a primary factor rather than a secondary one. Nevertheless it is quite clear that the main identity factor in this area is a combination of place of origin and language. Thus it is that irrespective of the name used, the Spanish-speaking major-

138 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense ity exclude English- and French-speaking people of the Caribbean and only partially include Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Neither language alone nor place of origin is sufficient, for Spain and Portugal are not accepted as part of any identity paradigm of the area. Consequently, it should be clear that the referent of Latin America, as weak and diffuse as it is, cannot in itself constitute the basis for a comprehensive study of the literary production of the area as a distinct world category. Furthermore, the ethnic make-up of this area covers the full spectrum, from ethnic homogeneity in villages to urban centres of extensive mestizaje in Mexico, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru, as well as Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and other areas like most of Argentina and Uruguay that are almost entirely made up of a population of European descent. Also, it must be remembered that the colonial pasts of Spain and Portugal diverge markedly after the first settlements. Spain was intent on founding an empire with full centralized control in Madrid; Portugal had neither the resources nor the ambition of empire. Therefore, it should be made clear that a comparative literary history of Latin America cannot be a composite of national literary histories or a catalogue of Latin American-born writers, but rather a comparative instrument that establishes the contextualization for interpretations, keeps this context open, and offers some, among many, interpretations of the most significant works of this continent. In Latin American comparative literary history, period concepts have usually been taken from political history in a largely unreflective continuation of national histories. Thus we begin with a pre-conquest period of various lengths depending on the extent and richness of these years in the country in question. It is followed by a somewhat shorter period of conquest and early colonization, normally taking up the sixteenth century. The so-called colonial period is by default everything in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries bounded by the conquest on one side and independence on the other. The nineteenth century is the period of independence and nationalism, and the twentieth century is treated as one of Latin American post-colonial expansion. These periods and the period concept, in spite of their deep-rooted establishment, are irrelevant for our project. Of course, the historical events of conquest, foundations, independence, etc. remain, but they are no longer the signposts designating a historical period. The pace of development of the cultural centres is dictated more by social and economic factors than by political decisions about peace and war and the arbitrary ceding of land from one European power to another. The Latin American institutions that controlled access and participation

Postmodernity and the Literary Historical Process 139 of the cultural centres also responded to other motives that were largely ideological, like the counter-reformation, and still others that were economic and demographic, like the massive insertion of African slaves into the still small communities of the seventeenth century. Finally, the narration of the significant works of Latin America bears little resemblance to the purported national periods of history. In place of periodization based on either empirical evidence or interpretive internal aspects of the works, I propose an extensive contextualization informed by the development of social institutions that control access, in which the specific works of literature are examined as the attractors of cultural forces that in turn create ideas, images, and ultimately dialogue about the world we live in. This hermeneutic foundation of a situated literary history is a dialectic of past and present. As the work of Hayden White has shown, it is in the present that the historian shapes and orders the events of the past, making meaning more than recording it. History's explanatory or narrative emplotments, to use White's term, are never innocent or without consequence. To admit any of this is to challenge the cognitive status of historical knowledge as it had come to be known in empirical and positivist terms in the past century. The philosophical basis for historical hermeneutics is Paul Ricoeur's three-volume Time and Narrative, with its carefully argued study of prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration of human temporality through narrative emplotment, both historical and fictive. Ricoeur's work has provided the necessary bridge between the cognitive challenges faced by historians and those that confront the literary scholar and historian. As a human construct, literary history is also a narrativizing of literary events, and its archive is a textualized one in only a more immediate self-evident way than is the archive of all historiography. The historical record as a constituted rendering of the past, in our case the literary past, has come under close scrutiny in the wake of poststructural and post-colonial critiques, which point to discontinuities, gaps, ruptures, and above all, exclusions rather than linear development, evolution, or continuity. In short, today, the very task of the historian has to be rethought. In White's words: 'a specifically historical inquiry is born less of the necessity to establish that certain events occurred than of the desire to determine what certain events might mean for a given group, society or culture's conception of its present tasks and future prospects' (487). This shift from validation to signification has also created an impetus to reconceptualize the literary historical process to include the relations between texts and the contexts of production and of reception. The key

140 Hermeneutics of Poetic Sense question of historiography is also the question of literary history: how did a given phenomenon enter the system entitled history? The historian, of course, names and constitutes an assemblage of data as an event by selection and narrative positioning. And this constitution of the past is carried out by historians who are as situated in the particularities of time, place, language, and gender as were the people who first produced the works being considered. It is in this sense that we recall Nietzsche's words: you can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present. This observation must not be construed as anti-historical; quite the opposite, purpose will emerge: a hermeneutic re-writing of history.

Notes

1: Hermeneutics in a Postmodern Context 1 This chapter is the fruit of an ongoing dialogue between Etienne Guyon, an experimental physicist, director of the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and myself. The text of the section on serendipity was written by the two as a series of responses to each other's views. 2 Umberto Eco quite correctly observes that the mirror does not reverse or invert the images it reflects: 'It is the observer (so ingenuous even when he is a scientist) who by self-identification imagines he is the man inside the mirror and, looking at himself, realizes he is wearing his watch on his right wrist. But it would be so only if he, the observer I mean, were the one who is inside the mirror (Je est un autre!). On the contrary, those who avoid behaving as Alice, and getting into the mirror, do not so deceive themselves ... So we use the mirror image correctly, but speak of it wrongly, as if it did what we ourselves are doing with it (that is, reversing it)' (205-6). 3 The original Spanish poem, for the purist in all of us, is as follows: 'La escritura poetica es / aprender a leer / el hueco de la escritura / en la escritura / no huellas de lo que fuimos / caminos / hacia lo que somos' ('Carta a Leon Felipe' 91). 4 The concept of self-similarity is, of course, as varied as the typical Russian dolls to Bach's twelve-tone scale. The poetic concept lies between Bach's scale and a two-sided infinite geometric sequence, e.g., Sn =..., 1/8,1/4, 1/2,1, 2,4,8); see Manfred Schroeder, 80-95. 5 The full text of Paz's poem follows: Apremio Corre y se demora en mi frente lenta y se despena en mi sangre

142 Notes to pages 10-27 la hora pasa sin pasar y en mi se esculpe y desvanece Yo soy el pan para su hambre yo el corazon que deshabita la hora pasa sin pasar y esto que escribo lo deshace Amor que pasa y pena fija en mi combate en mi reposa la hora pasa sin pasar cuerpo de azogue y de ceniza Cava mi pecho y no me toca piedra perpetua que no pesa la hora pasa sin pasar y es una herida que se encona El dia es breve la hora inmensa hora sin mi yo con su pena la hora pasa sin pasar y en mi se fuga y se encadena

Salamandra, 68

6 I acknowledge the chapter on Libchaber in James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science. My reading of 'The Experimenter' (189-211) coincided with my stay at the Ecole Normale Superieure in 1989. Gleick's parallel between experimental physics and the poetry of Wallace Stevens gave added momentum to my own research on poetic meaning. 7 Here is the original poem: 'Fluyen por las llanuras de la noche / nuestros cuerpos: son tiempo que se acaba, / presencia disipada en un abrazo; / pero son infinites y al tocarlos / nos banamos en rios de latidos, / volvemos al perpetuo recomienzo' (150). 8 The original Spanish text is as follows: 'La vieja desdentada que me guifio el ojo se prueba la gorra de bano color frambuesa contoneandose al son de los aplausos de las demas ... Este paquete: este. Usted se va poniendo tensa, impaciente, tiene que ser este paquete el que contiene la clave para saber lo que la Brigida quiso decir. Este. ^Quiere abrirlo? Bueno. Si, Mudito, abrirlo con respeto porque la Brigida lo envolvio para que yo comprendiera, no, Madre Benita, no, no se engane, la Brigida hizo este paquete y los demas porque tenia miedo. Fue reina, verdugo, dictadora, juez, pero amarraba

Notes to pages 31-67 143 cosas y las guardaba como todas las viejas. Se que usted esta implorando que este paquete contenga algo mas que basura. Le saca el papel cafe y lo bota. Aparece otro papel, mas fragil, arrugado, lo rompe, lo deja caer al suelo. iPara que sigue abriendo y rompiendo envoltorios, este de tafetan color manzana, debajo un envoltorio de diario - Roosevelt y Fala y la sonrisa de Stalin a borde de un barco - si tiene que saber que no va a encontrar nada? ... Escarba, deshace la hombrera con sus unas urgentes y deja caer el algodon (31-2). 9 See especially chapter 9, 'Extraits d'un catalogue de decouvertes imprevues/ and chapter 10, 'Conclusions previsibles. L'imprevu, la science ouverte et la place du merveilleux.' 10 The ancient curiosity about transforming base metals, which was expressed through medieval alchemy, has never disappeared, only the procedures have changed; see, for example, the recent account of high-pressure research on carbons by Robert M. Hazen (210ff). 11 Saint-John Perse, 'Poesie/ 444: 'In truth all creation of the mind is first "poetic" in the full sense of the word; and in the equivalence of spiritual and sensible forms the same function is exercised, initially, for the enterprise of the scientist and for that of the poet' (my translation). 2: Text and Self: Memory, the Other, the Community 1 The Spanish originals are: 'Muchos afios despues, frente al peloton de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendia habia de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevo a conocer el hielo' (9); 'Aureliano, en cambio, dio un paso hacia adelante, puso la mano y la retire en el acto. "Esta hirviendo," exclamo asustado' (23); 'Cuando el peloton lo apunto, la rabia se habia materializado en una sustancia viscosa y amarga que le adormecio la lengua y lo obligo a cerrar los ojos. Entonces desaparecio el resplandor de aluminio del amanecer, y volvio a verse a si mismo, muy nifto, con pantalones cortos y un lazo en el cuello, y vio a su padre en una tarde esplendida conduciendolo al interior de la carpa, y vio el hielo' (115). 2 The Spanish original, titled 'Piedra de sol/ is a long poem of 584 lines. The lines commented upon in my text are as follows in the Spanish: 'Verde soberania sin ocaso / como el deslumbramiento de las alas / cuando se abren en mitad del cielo.' 3 The Spanish original is: Tulgor de la desdicha como un ave / petrificando el bosque con su canto / ... / Una presencia como un canto siibito, / Como el viento cantando en el incendio.'

144 Notes to pages 67-84 4 The Spanish original is: 'Voy por las transparencies como un ciego, / un reflejo me borra, nazco en otro, / oh, bosque de pilares encantados, / bajo los arcos de la luz penetro / los corredores de un otono diafano.' 5 The Spanish original is: 'Las mil torres del mundo contra un ocaso de oro / levantan su hermosura frente a mi pensamiento. / Un estasis de piedra de mil arquitecturas, / en un deslumbramiento, me lleva, mudo y ciego.' 3: Text and Co-Text: Parody and the Game of Fiction 1 'Mil panderos de cristal, / herian la madrugada' (Federico Garcia Lorca's 'Romance sonambulo'; my translation). 2 The Spanish original: 'Algun dia lo sabre. Este cuerpo que ha sido / mi albergue, mi prision, mi hospital, es mi rumba (1-2); Nadie vera la destruccion. Ninguno / recogera la pagina inconclusa. / Entre el punado de actos / disperses, aventados al azar, no habra uno, / al que pongan aparte como a perla preciosa (14-18); aunque yo olvide y aunque yo me acabe. / Hombre, donde tu estas, donde tii vives / permanecemos todos' (22-4) ('Presencia' 184). 3 Here is the Spanish original: 'Este nudo que fui (inextricable / de coleras, traiciones, esperanzas, / vislumbres repentinos, abandonos, / hambres, gritos de miedo y desamparo / y alegria fulgiendo en las tinieblas / y palabras y amor y amor y amores) / lo cortaran los anos' ('Presencia' 184). 4 In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon describes the range of parody in contemporary culture (51-68), but she also develops one of the best arguments for the significance of parody in twentieth-century modernist and postmodernist writing (69-83). 5 The self's relation to the community is, of course, central to literature of all periods, but with the significant difference that in the twentieth century the time-honoured dictum of following the dictates of the good book, i.e. the Bible or its alternatives, Comtian positivism, the writings of Marx, the sayings of Mao, the Hindu sacred texts, etc. has been made the object of parodic irony. In Spain the textual domination has been the work of the teachings of the Roman Catholic church. Unamuno's treatment of Catholic dogma earned him a special place on the list of prohibited books. In Amor y pedagogia he takes on the scientism that swept through Spanish universities at the turn of the century 6 Unamuno was particularly well informed on these matters because he was the Spanish translator and an avid reader of Herbert Spencer and other scientific sociologists; see Mario J. Valdes and Maria Elena de Valdes. 7 The Indian tantric cult is devoted to 'rousing all the energies he [the tantric

Notes to pages 85-9 145

8 9 10 11

12

13 14

saint] can discover in his body, emotions and mind and combining them into a vehicle which will carry him towards enlightenment' (Philip Rawson, 9). See preface to 1902 edition, 305-9. See author's note and glossary, i, 267-79. See G.W.F. Hegel, especially 'Certainty and Truth of Reason/ and further, in the subheading 'Reason as Lawgiver.' Here is the Spanish original: 'Prociiranse una entrevista en que Avito se propone estar masculine, dominador, cual cumple a la ciencia, y domenar a la materia al punto ... Se pone la Materia tan grave, que al abrir los ojos hace vacilar a la Forma ... Al oir lo de marido y mujer se le encienden las mejillas a Marina, y encendido Avito por ello se le acerca mas y le pone una mano sobre la cadera, de modo que la Materia quema y la Forma arde ... Los labios de la pobre Marina rozan la nariz de la Forma, y ahora esta, ansiosa de su complemento, busca con su formal boca la boca material y ambas bocas se mezclan. Y al punto se alzan la Ciencia y la Conciencia, adustas y severas, y se separan avergonzados los futures padres del genio, mientras sonrie la Pedagogia sociologica desde la region de las ideas puras' (322-4). The flagrant sexist attitude of Avito Carrascal has not been fully examined in the light of Unamuno's lifelong advocacy of women's rights. This should be studied not only in this novel, Amor y pedagogia (1902), but with equal rigour in Niebla (1914), La tin Tula (1921), and San Manuel Bueno, mdrtir (1933). The role of contingency in life is not only central to this novel but also to Niebla (1914), in which free association and chance play a major role. The Kundalini is each man's goddess-world-projection, that is, his capacity to engage the world. Kundalini is the source of world-experience. By yogic and sexual exercises the female within rises and unites with the male and helps the tantrica focus his mind on the meaning of world-experience. Note that Sarah, renamed Kundalini by her Hindu holy man from Watertown, Massachusetts, becomes impatient with the yogic ritual and just wants him to get on with it. Catherine Clement comments astutely on Kundalini: 'Kundalini, the source of innumerable Western daydreams, is the name of this serpentine energy, a figure reducible to shakti, or the energy of the universe. The reason for the fascination of this image among Western daydreamers who are crazy about India is a topic worthy of study' (282). The answer to her query, I suggest, is twofold: Judaeo-Christian sexual taboos, and a superficial knowledge of the tantric doctrine on control over the body and complete concentration by the male on the signs of female orgasm. Clement

146 Notes to pages 90-103

15

16

17

18 19

writes: '[Tantric doctrine] always views woman as Other: the precise moment to be watched for, therefore, is the one when the woman cries out with pleasure. "At the end of sexual intercourse," says the Tantric philosopher in his treatise, "there is a sound that occurs in the form of a spontaneous resonance springing forth involuntarily from the throat of the female beloved: this is an endless and indistinct sound that requires no meditation, no concentration. If one fixes one's thoughts on it, one can become master of the universe"' (139). Fraticelli was the general name given to spiritual Franciscans in the thirteenth century, but as they diminished under progressive persecution for their espousal of the vow of poverty for all clergy, the term was applied to all of the radical reform communities. Dalcino of Novara was one of the strongest enemies of the papacy and its worldly excesses; after his torture and execution in 1307 a number of splinter groups formed and professed principles of communal living and free sexuality. See Henry S. Lucas, The Renaissance and the Reformation. The Spanish original is as follows: 'Al aparecer Augusto a la puerta de su casa extendio el brazo derecho, con la mano palma abajo y abierta, y dirigiendo los ojos al cielo quedose un momento parado en esta actitud estatuaria y augusta. No era que tomaba posesion del mundo exterior, sino era que observaba si llovia. Y al recibir en el dorso de la mano el frescor del lento orvallo fruncio el entrecejo. Y no era tampoco que le molestase la llovizna, sino el tener que abrir el paraguas. jEstaba tan elegante, tan esbelto, plegado y dentro de su funda! Un paraguas cerrado es tan elegante como es feo un paraguas abierto' (109). The Spanish original is as follows: 'Es una desgracia esto de tener que servirse uno de las cosas - penso August -; tener que usarlas. El uso estropea y hasta destruye toda belleza. La funcion mas noble de los objetos es la de ser contemplados. jQue bella es una naranja antes de comida!' (109). See Francis Sparshott's now classic description of 'Art for art's sake' (444-5). The original Spanish is as follows: Tero aquel chiquillo ... ique hara alii, tirade de bruces en el suelo? jContemplar alguna hormiga, de seguro! jLa hormiga, jbah!, uno de los animales mas hipocritas! Apenas hace sino pasearse y hacernos creer que trabaja. Es como ese gandul que va ahi, a paso de carga, codeando a todos aquellos con quienes se cruza, y no me cabe duda de que no tiene nada que hacer. jQue ha de tener que hacer, hombre, que ha de tener que hacer! Es un vago, un vago como ... jno, yo no soy un vago! Mi imagination no descansa. Los vagos son ellos, los que dicen que trabajan y no hacen sino aturdirse y ahogar el pensamiento ... Para trabajo el de ese pobre paralitico que va ahi medio arrastrandose ...

Notes to pages 103-7 147

20

21

22

23

24

25

Pero iy que se yo? jPerdone, hermano!/ ... ^Hermano? ^Hermano en que? jEn paralisis!' (110). The chess games of Augusto and Victor are intimately linked with the chess games of Unamuno's Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez, which, although published late in 1933, was written in 1910. The Spanish original is as follows: 'Ya tengo un objetivo, una finalidad en esta vida - se decia -, y es conquistar a esta muchacha o que ella me conquiste.... no me cabe duda. ^Otro? ^.Otro que? ^Es que acaso yo soy uno? Yo soy un pretendiente, un solicitante; pero el otro..., el otro se me antoja que no es ya ni pretendiente ni solicitante; que no pretende ni solicita porque ha obtenido ... Un cuerpo de mujer irradiante de frescura, de salud y de alegrfa, que paso a su vera, le interrumpio el soliloquio y le arrastro tras de si. Piisose a seguir, casi maquinalmente, al cuerpo aquel, mientras proseguia soliloquizando: 'jY que hermosa es! Esta y aquella, una y otra ... Pero jque alegria es esta chiquilla! jy con que gracia saluda a aquel que va por alia!... jQue dulzura debe ser olvidarse de la vida y de la muerte entre sus brazos! jDejarse brezar en ellos como en olas de carne! jEl otro ...! Pero el otro no es el novio de Eugenia, no es aquel a quien ella quiere; el otro soy yo. ;Si, yo soy el otro; yo soy otro!'" (153-4). Ashes not only have the traditional symbolic apocalyptic connotation of death, but also of circularity and resurrection. In this case, the ashes are symbolic of the sexual other, his father, who is the absent yet present rival for Augusto's mother's affection. The Spanish original is as follows: 'Dice este escritor, y lo dice en latin, que asi como cada hombre tiene su alma, las mujeres todas no tienen sino una sola y misma alma, un alma colectiva, algo asi como el entendimiento agente de Averroes, repartida entre todas ellas. Y anade que las diferencias que se observan en el modo de sentir, pensar y querer de cada mujer provienen no mas que de las diferencias del cuerpo, debidas a la raza, clima, alimentacion, etc., y que por eso son tan insignificantes. Las mujeres, dice este escritor, se parecen entre si mucho mas que los hombres, y es porque todas son una sola y misma mujer' (241). In Amor y pedagogia the parodic irony of Unamuno assails the denial of the self involved in living according to a prescribed text; see the section The Parodic Co-Text,' earlier in this chapter. The Spanish original is as follows: 'No, no existes mas que como ente de fiction; no eres, pobre Augusto, mas que un producto de mi fantasia y de las de aquellos de mis lectores que lean el relato que de tus fingidas ventures y malandanzas he escrito yo; tu no eres mas que un personaje de novela, o de nivola, o como quieras llamarle' (279).

148 Notes to pages 108-9 26 Here is the Spanish original: 'miro luego un momento a mi retrato al oleo que preside a mis libros, le volvid el color y el aliento, fue recobrandose, se hizo dueno de si... y mirandome con una sonrisa en los ojos, me dijo lentamente: - Mire usted bien, don Miguel..., no sea que este usted equivocado y que ocurra precisamente todo lo contrario de lo que usted se cree y me dice. - Y i,que es lo contrario? - le pregunte, alarmado de verle recobrar vida propia. - No sea, mi querido don Miguel - anadio -, que sea usted y no yo el ente de ficcion, el que no existe en realidad, ni vivo ni muerto... No sea que usted no pase de ser un pretexto para que mi historia llegue al mundo' (279). 27 Iser would argue that the textual intentionality is the necessary paradigm for the reader's reenactment of the story (see Act of Reading, 86-99), but Unamuno goes much further in claiming that the reader's prefiguration is more important than the demands of the text (see my Shadows in the Cave, 1-5). 28 The Spanish original is as follows: 'Se empena don Miguel de Unamuno en que ponga yo un prologo a este su libra en que relata la tan lamentable historia de mi buen amigo Augusto Perez y su misteriosa muerte, y yo no puedo menos sino escribirlo, porque los deseos del senor Unamuno son para mi mandates en la mas genuina acepcion de este vocablo. Sin haber yo llegado al extreme de escepticismo hamletiano de mi pobre amigo Perez, que llego hasta a dudar de su propia existencia, estoy por lo menos firmememnte persuadido de que carezco de eso que los psicologos llaman libre albedrio, aunque para mi consuelo creo tambien que tampoco goza don Miguel de el' (97). 29 The Spanish original is as follows: 'No me exrrana a mi, por orra parte, este consorcio de lo erotico con lo metaffsico, pues creo saber que nuestros pueblos empezaron siendo, como sus literatures nos lo muestran, guerreros y religiosos, para pasar mas tarde a eroticos y metafisicos. El culto a la mujer coincidio con el culto a las sutilezas conceptistas ... Lo erotico y lo metafisico se desarrollan a la par. La religion es guerrera; la metafisica es erotica o volupruosa ... es el instinto metafisico, la curiosidad de saber lo que no nos importa, el pecado original, en fin, lo que le hace sensual al hombre, o bien es la sensualidad la que/ como a Eva, le despierta el instinto metafisico, el ansia de conocer la ciencia del bien y del mal' (104). 30 The Spanish original is as follows: 'Y si, yo le entendia, le entendia, mientras el me hablaba hablandose, hablaba al perro que habia en el. Yo mantuve despierto su cinismo' (299).

Notes to pages 109-13 149 31 The Spanish original is as follows: 'caos en griego significa propia y primariamente lo que en latin hiatus, esto es, bostezo. Y para salir del caos, del bostezo, hay que proponerse una finalidad, y una finalidad humana y no animal' (1188). 4: Period and Process: Postanodernity and the Literary Historical Process 1 The major paradigm shift that has come about in postmodernist thought is a change of the variables that were in question in modernism. These variables were textual, that is, they represented the formal controls of nineteenthcentury art and literature. In postmodernism the variables that have been opened up are those of the reader's reception. Deconstruction, contemporary hermeneutics, Lacanian psychocriticism, the feminist criticism of Kristeva, and postcolonialism are only some of the powerful interpretive movements that have responded to the deregulation of the reader. 2 My use of the terms postmodern and postmodernism refers to a paradigm of interpretation and creativity in which discourse is problematic and all systems are challenged; the latter term refers to a historical period that encompasses the major part of the second half of the twentieth century. If there are no fixed truths in the human experience, is it still possible to explain and understand cultural phenomena? The answer to this question is fundamental. If we begin with the possibility that all truth-claims will be measured by both cultural and individual processes of interpretation that always interact, and often in unpredictable ways, whatever is taken as truth by the community of receptors of the text or work of art is a construct of idealized rational acceptability. 3 One of the most powerful theoretical voices in feminism today is that of Julia Kristeva; she has been one of the most perceptive writers to emerge from Lacanian criticism. With neo-historicism I am primarily concerned with the work of Robert Weimann and Stephen Greenblatt; although postcolonialism has been primarily identified with the recent work of critics like Said and Hassan, it is in fact much older, but submerged from view because the resistance to the cultural colonial centre has in the past usually taken the position of rejecting the language of the colonial power and writing in the vernacular, whether it be Bengali, Arabic or Nahuatl, and thus not affecting the colonial power at the centre. 4 The metaphor of centre and margin has a long history but for our purposes the principal source is Jacques Derrida and his use of centre in such terms as logocentric, phonocentric, etc. See Jacques Derrida, 'Outwork,' 4-5.

150 Notes to pages 113-24 5 The tensional aspects of metaphor are a major part of Paul Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor: 'I... propose a tensional conception of metaphorical truth itself (246). 6 It is my view that the most recent innovation of Latin American postmodernity is to be found in the testimonial literature of Elena Poniatowska, especially La noche de Tlatelolco (1971) and Nadu, nadie (1988), which have taken the anti-modernity of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch and Carlos Fuentes' The Death o/Artemio Cruz and have created fully decentred narratives that come with the collective voice of the community. One of a number of ways in which to study these texts is to begin with the variety and strength of the truth-claims, but that will have to wait for another book; see my Worldmaking (1-12) and Maria Elena de Valdes' 'Fact into Fiction.' 7 Here is the original Spanish: '^Por que, o sea, para que se hace una novela? Para hacerse el novelista. iY para que se hace el novelista? Para hacer al lector, para hacerse uno con el lector. Y solo haciendose uno el novelador y el lector de la novela se salvan ambos de su soledad radical. En cuanto se hacen uno se actualizan y actualizandose se eternizan' (8: 768). 8 Here is the Spanish poem, 'Una defensa del anonimato': 'Para empezar a no responderle dire: / No tengo nada que anadir a lo que esta en mis / poemas, / no me interesa comentarlos, no me preocupa / (si alguno tengo) mi 'lugar en la historia' /... / Escribo y eso es todo. Escribe: doy la mitad del / poema. / Poesfa no es signos negros en la pagina blanca. / Llamo poesia ese lugar del encuentro / con la experiencia ajena. El lector, la lectora / haran, o no, el poema que tan solo he esbozado. / No leemos a otros: nos leemos en ellos. / Me parece un milagro / que alguien que desconozco pueda verse en mi / espejo. / Si hay un merito en esto - dijo Pessoa - / corresponde a los versos, no al autor de los versos. / Si de casualidad es un gran poeta / dejara cuatro o cinco poemas validos / rodeados de fracasos y borradores. / Sus opiniones personales / son de verdad muy poco interesantes. / ... / Sigo pensando / que es otra cosa la poesia: / una forma de amor que solo existe en silencio, / en un pacto secreto entre dos personas, / de dos desconocidos casi siempre. / ... / En realidad los poemas que leyo son de usted: / Usted, su autor, que los inventa al leerlos. (Los trabajos del mar, 72-5).

9 It is significant to take account of the sense of the discipline Braudel had by 1963 when he wrote the preface to the second edition of the Mediterranean and in part responded to the problematics he cited in 'Histoire et sciences sociales, la longue duree.' In the second edition of 1963 he writes: the basic approach around which the whole work is structured, the dialectic of space and time (geography and history)... I have felt obliged to give

Notes to page 125 151 more space to economics, political science, a certain idea of civilization and a more detailed demographic study ... The basic problem, however, remains the same. It is the problem confronting every historical undertaking. Is it possible somehow to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes - and that other, submerged, history, almost silent and always discreet, virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time? This fundamental contradiction, which must always lie at the centre of our thought, can be a vital tool of knowledge and research. (16) This sense of history is the starting point of our endeavour. 10 In Geographic Universelle. Amerique latine, Bataillon, Deler, and Thery provide the perfect counterpoint to Braudel's historical dialectic of space and time from the perspective of the geographer. 11 The great exceptions are clearly Stephen Greenblatt and Robert Weimann. In his ground-breaking book of 1976, Structure and Society in Literary History, Weimann presents an outline of the historical dialectic in his terms as past significance and present meaning. Among Greenblatt's numerous contributions to the debate and rethinking of literary history Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World is exemplary of the refiguration of the historical context that we are undertaking.

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Glossary of Specialized Terms from Science and Philosophy

bifurcation [in a dynamic system] The point at which the system has undergone a split. If the two frequencies are not rationally commensurate, the system will never return to its starting point (Kellert, 8). cascade (see also self-similarity) Self-similarity is not repetition; if the initiator is used only for extrapolation and if extrapolation follows an inverse or upward cascade, the self-similar dynamic system ensues (Mandelbrot, 75). Period-doubling occurs again and again, leading to renewed chaos in another self-similar cascade (Schroeder, 279). chaos theory The qualitative study of unstable aperiodic behaviour in deterministic nonlinear dynamic systems (Kellert, 2) configuration Ricoeur's concept that accounts for the imaginative making of symbolic meaning (Ricoeur, 52ff). dynamic system A dynamic system is a simplified model for time-varying behaviour of an actual system (Kellert, 2) Symbolic dynamics describes the evolution in time of a dynamic system, such as a playground swing or the voting patterns of a political population (Schroeder, 166). entropy The concept of entropy comes from thermodynamics, where it serves as an adjunct of the second law, the inexorable tendency of the universe and any isolated systems in it to slide toward a state of increasing disorder (Gleick, 257).

154 Glossary of Specialized Terms forms of life To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life' (Wittgenstein, no. 19); here the term language-game is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life (no. 23). Wittgenstein's way of putting this is to say that we know how to go on in the same way because we share a form of life (Collins, 15) fractals The fractal dimension describes the scaling properties of a geometrical object, characterizing the way the structure of the object reappears at different degrees of magnification ... it allows us to investigate the way a system changes its behaviour in response to a change in the parameters describing the system and its environment (Kellert, 17). horizon of expectation Gadamer's term for the collective legacy of a tradition that derives the reader's presuppositions in the encounter with the text (Gadamer, 217) nonlinear dynamic systems The nonlinear aspect of these systems arises because of the inclusion of complicated functions of the system variables. The nonlinearity of the equations renders a closed-form solution impossible. So research into nonlinear dynamical systems seek a qualitative account of the behaviour in these systems (Kellert, 3). percolation A concept for plotting the process of random fractals such as the spread of an epidemic, a forest fire, or the drift of ice floes. If a path exists, the lattice through which it flows is said to percolate as in a coffee percolator, the hot water flows through the coffee (Schroeder, 30). prefiguration Ricoeur's concept that accounts for the verbal matrix of meaning through which and from which all expression derives (Ricoeur, 52ff). refiguration Ricoeur's concept for the reflective process that follows the imaginative configuration of the other and that ultimately adds to the prefigurative matrix (Ricoeur, 52ff). self-similarity An ancient concept of a world within a world that had all but been regulated to flights of the imagination until chaos science and its emphasis on scale (Gleick, 115-16). The principle of self-similarity at different scales made it possible to enter into a reconsideration of dynamic systems (Gleick, 227).

Glossary of Specialized Terms 155 strange attractor Strange attractors are encountered in many nonlinear physical, chemical, and biological systems that are not integrable and therefore show ultimately unpredictable chaotic behaviour. Strange attractors often do have a structure ... they are self-similar ... they have fractal dimensions that hold important clues for our attempts to understand chaotic systems such as the weather (Schroeder, 28). Part of the reason these attractors are called strange is that they reconcile two seemingly contradictory effects: trajectories converge on them, and trajectories initially close together diverge (Kellert, 13-14). stretching and folding The action of a chaotic system will take nearby points and stretch them apart ... thus creating the local divergence responsible for unpredictability. But the system also folds together points that are at some distance causing a convergence of trajectories in a different direction (Kellert, 13-14). turbulence The natural phenomenon was an unsolved problem for classical physics. The break-through in chaos physics is the introduction of phase-space (a mathematically constructed conceptual space where each dimension corresponds to one variable of the system (Kellert, 7). Glossary Sources Collins, H.M. Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Garrett Barden and John Gumming. New York: Seabury, 1975. Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987. Kellert, Stephen H. In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Mandelbrot, Benoit B. The Fractal Geometry of Nature. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1983. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Schroeder, Manfred. Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes from an Infinite Paradise. New York: W.H. Freeman, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953.

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Index

Abaddon el exterminador 118 Abel Sanchez 115 The Act of Reading 148n.27 Allen, Woody 58 'A.M.D.G.' 109 Amor y pedagogia 84-9,91-2,105,106, 114-15,144n.5,145n.l2,147n.24 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion' 12,81 Anderson, Philip W. 18 The Angel of Darkness 118 'Apremio' 9,11-14,37,141-2n.5 Aristotle 4,26 Asturias, Miguel Angel 118 The Autumn of the Patriarch 118 Azorfn 136 Bach, Johann Sebastian 141n.4 Basho 24 Bataillon, Claude 125,151n.lO Becquerel, Henri 30 Being There 103 Ben-Porat, Ziva 89 Bergman, Ingrid 52 Bhabha, Homi 72 Bogart, Humphrey 52 Borges, Jorge Luis 6, 7,113

Braudel, Fernand 49,124-5,128,136, 150-lnn.9-10 Buridan, Jean 31 Butor, Michel 116 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro 133 Campbell, Joseph 85 Camprubi de Jimenez, Zenobia 68 Carmen 122-3 Carpentier, Alejo 118,123 Carr, David 94,125 'Carta a Leon Felipe' 8,141n.3 Casablanca 52-4,56, 57,60,61 Castellanos, Rosario 80,81-2 Cavell, Stanley 52 'Certainty and Truth of Reason' 145n.lO Cervantes, Miguel de 26,109,123,131 A Change of Heart 116 Chaos: Making a New Science 142 Clement, Catherine 145-6n.l4 Como se hace una novela 115 Comte, Auguste 84, 85,87,88,144n.5 The Concept of Order 6 Cortazar, Julio 117-18,123,150n.6 Culler, Jonathan 5 cummings, e.e. 35

166 Index Curie, Marie 26,30,32 Curie, Pierre 30,32 Curtiz, Michael 52 Dalcino of Novara 146n.l5 Dante Alighieri 26 The Death ofArtemio Cruz 116,117, 123,150n.6 The Death of Nature 18 'Una defensa del anonimato' 150n.8 Deler, Jean-Paul 125, ISln.lO Deleuze, Gilles 104 Derrida, Jacques 4,5,23,26,113, 149n.4 Descartes, Rene 22 The Devil to Pay in the Backlands 120 The Dhammapada 85,90 The Diary of a Young Girl 43 Dickinson, Emily 38 Diderot, Denis 137 Dilthey,Wilhelm 52,93-4 Donoso, Jose 26, 35,118,123 Don Quijote 119,133,136 Don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez 147n.20 Eco, Umberto 141n.2 Eliade, Mircea 85 Erice, Victor 123 'Experimental Study of Hydrodynamic Instabilities: Helium in a Small Box' 20 'Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas' 22 Fact, Fiction and Forecast 96 'Fact into Fiction' 150n.6 Feher, George 18 Feibleman, James 6 Felipe, Leon 8

Feynman, Richard P. 5,26 Finnegans Wake 26 Flaubert, Gustave 50,100 Fowles, John 118,123 Frank, Anne 43 The French Lieutenant's Woman 123 Freud, Sigmund 110 Frida 52,54-7,58,59 Fuentes, Carlos 116,123,150n.6 Furet, Francois 125 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 64 Gades, Antonio 122 Garcia Lorca, Federico 76,144n.l Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 46-7,49, 118,123 The Gardener 68 Geographic Universelle. Amerique latine 151n.lO Gide, Andre 101 Gleick, James 142n.6 Gonzalez, Angel 120 Goodman, Nelson 93, 96 Grande Sertao: veredas 120 Grass, Giinter 118 Greenblatt, Stephen 135,149n.3, 151n.ll The Green House 123 Grondinjean ix Gubar, Susan 130 Guimaraes Rosa, Joao 120 Guyon, Etienne 141n.l Habermas, Jiirgen 64 Hahn, Lewis Edwin ix,x Harvey, William 86 Hassan, Ihab 149n.3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 89,91 Hazen, Robert M. 143n.lO Hegel, G.W.F. 83,85,87, 88,145n.lO

Index 167 Heidegger, Martin 31, 64, 93-4 Hijodehombre 120 Histoire de la Revolution frangaise 136 'Histoire et sciences sociales, la longue duree' 150n.9 History and Truth 125 A History of Religious Ideas 85 Hollier, Denis 136,137 Hopscotch 118,123,150n.6 Morgan, John 15,18 How to Make a Novel 115,123 Hoyos, Cristina 122 Husserl, Edmund 93-4 Hutcheon, Linda 6,72,73,123, 144n.4

Kundalini 85 Kundera, Milan 118 Kuntz,PaulG. 6 Kurasawa, Akira 23

The Identity of France 49 L'imprevu ou la science des objets trouves 31 'In Defence of Anonymity' 121 'Intellectual Autobiography' ix Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics ix Iser, Wolfgang 148n.27 /, the Supreme 118-20

Machiavelli, Niccolo 18-19 Mao Tse-tung 144 Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World 151n.ll Marx, Karl 144n.5 The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology 85 Maurer, Jean 20 May, Robert 28 McLuhan, Marshall 71 Medina, Ofelia 52 The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II 125,150n.9 Menchii, Rigoberta 43 Merchant, Carolyn 18, 86 Merimee, Prosper 122 Michelet, Jules 136 Miner, Earl 24 Mist 101-11,114-15,119 La Modification 116 Mookerjee, Ajit 85 Morrison, Toni 118 Muller, Karl 32

Jacques, Jean 31 Jakobson, Roman 3 Jameson, Fredric 123,131 Jimenez, Juan Ramon 67-8 Joyce, James 26 Justine 137 Kahlo, Frida 52,55,59,60,61,62 Kant, Immanuel 26, 88 Kawamoto, Koji 24 Kellert, Stephen H. 11,19 Kosinski, Jerzy 103 Kristeva, Julia 149nn.l,3 Kuhn, Thomas S. 29

Lacan, Jacques 110 Lavoisier, Antoine Laurent 26 Leduc,Paul 52 LeGoff, Jacques 125 Libchaber, Albert 19-21,142n.6 Lorenz, Edward 11 Lorre, Peter 54 Lucas, Henry S. 146n.l5 Lucia, Pacode 122 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois 123

168 Index Nada menos que todo un hombre 109-10 Nada,nadie 150 Neruda, Pablo 113 A New History of French Literature 136 Newton, Isaac 85 Niebla 101-11,114-15,119 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22,140 La noche de Tlatelolco 123,150n.6 Novelas ejemplares 109 El Obsceno pdjaro de la noche 26,35 One Hundred Years of Solitude 46-7, 48 Oneself as Another 83 On Interpretation 4 Ortega y Gasset, Jose 136 El otono del patriarca 118 'Outwork' 149n.4 Pacheco, Jose Emilio 121-2 The Past Recaptured 44-5 Paz, Octavio 7-14,21-2,37,65-70, 113,141n.5 Peirce, Charles S. 3 Perkins, David 133-4,135,136 The Phenomenology of Internal TimeConsciousness 93 Phenomenology of Spirit 83 Philosophical Investigations 5,16,48,95 The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur ix, x Tiedra de sol' 65-70,143n.2 Pinter, Harold 123 Pirandello, Luigi 101 Plato 4 Play It Again, Sam 58 Poem 77 35 Poniatowska, Elena 123,150n.6

Tor el son a la vision' 126 Poulet, Georges 10 'Presence' ('Presencia') 80,144nn.2,3 The Prince 19 Proust, Marcel 44-5,46,49 Psychopathology of Everyday Life 110 Puig, Manuel 118,123 Rawson, Philip 144-5n.7 Rayuela 117-18,123,150n.6 'Reason as Lawgiver' 145 Reasons of State (El recurso del metodo) 118 'Regreso' 21 Remembrance of Things Past 44-5 'Reply to Mario J. Valdes' x Richards, Ivor A. 28 Ricoeur, Paul ix, x, 5,16,18,21,31, 42-3,44,48,49,50,51,52,64,83, 93,96-8,125,126-7,128,136,139, 150n.5 Rivera, Diego 55,61,63 Roa Bastos, Augusto 118-20,123 Rodriguez de Francia, Caspar 119-20 'Romance sonambulo' 144n.l Rontgen, Wilhelm Konrad 30 The Rule of Metaphor 150n.5 S. 84-5,89-92,114 Sabato, Ernesto 118,123 Sade, marquis de 137 Said, Edward 149n.3 Saint-John Perse 40,143n.ll Salamandra 9 San Manuel Bueno, mdrtir 115 Sarduy, Severe 118,123 Saura, Carlos 122-3 Saussure, Ferdinand de 5 The Scarlet Letter 89, 91 Schachtel, Ernest 18

Index 169 Schroeder, Manfred 141n.4 Scientific American 15 Sellers, Peter 103 El senor presidente 118 Shadows in the Cave 148n.27 Shakespearean Negotiations 135 Sol, Laura del 122 Son of Man 120 Sparshott, Francis 23,146n.l8 Spencer, Herbert 85,88,144n.6 Stevens, Wallace 5,22,23,142n.6 Structure and Society in Literary History 151n.ll 'Sun Stone' 65-70,143n.2 Swann's Way 44 Tagore, Debendranath 70 Tagore, Rabindranath 68, 70 The Tempest 136 Teresa de Avila, Saint 80 A Theory of Parody 144n.4 Th