World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts 9781487574215

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WORLD-MAKING The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts

In literary texts writers express their views on a great variety of issues, some of which they take seriously, others of which they treat with levity. Even in those statements to which cultural circumstances assign a transcendent meaning there is a wide range of commitment from marginal to central concern in the discursive context. Mario J. Valdes calls these assertions truth-claims. Drawing on the works of a wide range of authors, including Proust, Tolstoy, Woolf, Lorca, Solzhenitsyn, and Fowles, Valdes explores the phenomenon of truth-claims from two perspectives. One, textual semantics, deals with the content of a given truth-claim; the other, hermeneutics, is concerned with the reader's interpretation of the truth-claim. In the reading of the text the subject making the truth-claim is not the author or a collective abstraction but rather an enunciating voice or voices. The subject enacting the truth-claim is the reader in his or her textual encounter with the discourse. Everything that happens in a text is recognizable and ultimately knowable because it is made possible as a world constituted through language by a reader. The subject-matter of truth-claims is therefore not the physical data of the world that corresponds to the statement, but rather the reader's accessibility and relationship to those data within the lived world of language.

Mario J. Valdes is Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish, University of Toronto, and President of the Modem Language Association of America.

WORLD-MAKING The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts

Mario J. Valdes

UNNERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1992 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN 0-8020-2791-1 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8020-6847-7 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper Theory/Culture Series 4

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Valdes, Mario J., 1934World-making: the literary truth-claim and the interpretation of texts (Theory/culture; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-2791-1 (bound) ISBN 978-0-8020-6847-7 (paper) 1. Truth in literature. 2. Phenomenology and literature. 3. Literature - History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN49.v34 1991

801

c91-093221-2

For pennission to reprint, the author and publisher are grateful to: Faber and Faber Ltd and Alfred A. Knopf Inc. for lines from 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream' and 'The Idea of Order at Key West,' from Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens; New Directions Publishing Corporation and David Higham Associates for lines from 'And Death Shall Have No Dominion,' from The Poems of Dylan Thomas (Copyright 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corporation); and Macmillan Publishing Co. Ltd for lines from 'Easter 1916,' from The Poems of W.8 . Yeats.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

This book is dedicated to my students at New York University, El Colegio de Mexico, and, especially, the University of Toronto, 1985-1990, who shared in the making of it.

Contents

Preface ix

Chapter one A Phenomenological Approach to the Aporia of Truth in Literature 3 Chapter two The Truth-Claim and Literature 13 Chapter three The Analysis of the Truth-Claim in Literary Discourse 38 Chapter four The Textual Function of Truth-Claims: Jacob 's Room, Death of a Salesman, and 'Prose of Death's Head' 78 Chapter five The Historical Study of Truth-Claims 113 Chapter six The Phenomenology of the Truth-Claim 136 Notes 157 Bibliography 163 Index 173

Preface

This book began as a lecture series at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, entitled 'In Search of Truth in Literature,' offered in January and February 1984 and co-sponsored by the departments of Italian and Hispanic Studies and English. I am especially indebted to Professor John Walker for his personal and intellectual support. The final draft was completed in Chatenay-Malabry in August 1988, where I was, once again, privileged to share in the scholarly and intellectual life of Professor Paul Ricoeur and Professor Etienne Guyon of the Ecole Normale Superieure. Every chapter has been reworked a number of times, and there are, of course, echoes of this material in the numerous lectures I have given in the intervening period. I am grateful to the many colleagues who accepted my invitation to discuss the issues and, especially, to Maria Elena de Valdes, who has a permanent invitation. The best literary criticism has the possibility of attaining a dialogic engagement with another's text across time and space. This aim has been and remains central to my work. In this book I have made every effort to create a colloquium which includes the voices of Cervantes, Dylan Thomas, Samuel Beckett, Wallace Stevens, Marcel Proust, Federico Garcia Lorca, Arthur Miller, Virginia Woolf, and many others. I have tried to do justice to all the authors I address even though I cite only fragments of their texts. In the case of work in languages other than English I have indicated the translations I have used, with the exception of Spanish. All translations from Spanish are my own. The only text I cite in its entirety is my translation of Jose Emilio Pacheco's 'Prose of Death's Head.• The translation and publication are with the author's permission. I am most grateful.

WORLD-MAKING The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts

Chapter one

A Phenomenological Approach to the Aporia of Truth in Literature

The primary focus of this book is the claim, whether implicit or explicit, that a textual assertion is to be considered true by the reader. In literary texts, writers express their views on a great variety of issues, some of which they take seriously, others of which they treat with levity, and even in those statements that cultural circumstance assigns a transcendent meaning there is a wide range of commitment, from marginal to central concern, in the discursive context. Thus my point of departure cannot be authorial and must be textual. I have undertaken here to examine those expressions that, as a whole, can be considered textual determinacies in context, and to elucidate the function such elements perform in the configuration of meaning in the reading experience. Configuration, as the complex process of making the text, encompasses much more than the recognition and acceptance of semantically meaningful patterns; it must also be seen as the actualization of the textual sequence within a sense of order. Consequently, I am not pursuing the question of who is making the truth-claim or why, but am concerned only with reading the truthclaim. The pertinent questions are what the truth-claim is about, i.e., textual semantics, and what the readers are to make of it, i.e., hermeneutic interpretation. To the reader of the text, the subject making the truth-claim is not the author or a collective abstraction but rather an enunciating voice or voices. The subject enacting the truth-claim is the reader in his or her textual encounter with the discourse. Everything that takes place in a text is a happening that is recognizable and ultimately knowable as such because it is made possible in a world constituted through language by a reader. The subject-matter of truthclaims is therefore not the physical data of the world that corresponds to the

4 World-making statement, but rather the reader's degree of accessibility and relationship to that data within the lived world of language. In the same manner in which theoretical physics has supplanted the inquiry into matter in search of relations, my analysis will strive to bring out the relations of readers to texts in the general process of world-making that is at the root of all reading. Because the basic aim of this book is that of dialogical criticism, which is always commentary on the reading experience, it is necessary to establish an ontological distinction between the reading experience and the critical commentary that may follow it in the pursuit of dialogical literary criticism. The act of reading is an event that yields a temporary sense of time, place, purpose, and movement in the reader's experience. The reader's rapid purview of textual indicators is a process of the selecting of some elements and the discarding of others in the process of consistency-building, as scope, intention, and range are established in a rudimentary form of understanding. This instinctive and intuitive grasping of the purport of the writing is largely determined by the reader's previous readings, which have given the individual a repertoire. The fragmentary and incomplete nature of this meaning sacrifices depth for the sake of continuity and consistency; it progresses in the play of world-making unless it becomes evident that some of the choices that have been made are inadequate and the reader must begin again, seeking a more successful route. Both players in this game of world-making, text and reader, vary considerably in their respective repertoires, ranging from naive to highly developed, over a spectrum that expands as the community of readers evolves and the accessibility of texts grows. Subsequent readings by the same reader of the same text build up the common area shared between the two repertoires, but the level of understanding remains limited to the individual reader if there is no attempt to share the meaning that has been developed from the various readings. The move towards sharing the meaning leads directly into explanation and thus to the enrichment of understanding. The function of interpretation is to produce understanding and thus share specific meanings with other readers. But we must examine the questions of whose understanding is at stake and just what it is that purportedly has been understood. We might respond that some aspects of texts are being presented as understood. These aspects are those that have been taken by the criticinterpreter to have meaning. We must not fall into the common error of postulating that everything has meaning, for there are many things that do not: this is so not because these things are hermetic or unintelligible, but because the application of meaning to them is not warranted. It is a logical error to hold that anything that can be described can consequently be interpreted and

The aporia of truth in literature 5 evaluated, for not everything has a meaning. I can describe a geometrical shape, such as a square or a cube, and I may even engage in a discussion of how well a specific version of a square meets my description, but all of this does not mean anything unless the object described has a function to pe~orm. I will argue that interpretation occurs on a separate ontological level from that of both description and evaluation. Interpretation as a conscious operation, whether formally or informally constituted, denotes a dialectic of explanation and understanding.1 The objects of our attention can be taken up by explanation, but not all explanations will be satisfactory in communicating sufficient information. To explain is to remove the strangeness from the object under consideration, to make it more familiar. The call to explain is not usually a request to redescribe unknown objects, but rather a request to clarify how known objects fit into the criticinterpreter's context. When these objects fit into the recipient's context, they have meaning. For example, a request for explanation comes when the statement or configuration in question does not make sense. The explanation, if successful, assists the questioner in removing the strangeness from the statement and taking it into his or her context of sense. Ordinary language usage is, of course, the root of the concept, which will be elaborated in its phenomenological scope as the experience of language. I will begin my inquiry into the nature of interpretation with a closer examination of the normal activity we designate as explanation. When I make a statement that is not understood by its intended recipient and I am asked to explain what I have said, I respond by elaborating what I take to be the context of my remarks and the response I intend to bring about in this context through my statements. By so doing, I have attempted to remove the strangeness that caused the lack of understanding. When historical events or natural phenomena are explained, the speaker attempts to fit them into the context of the known or into a wider scientific or philosophic framework. Individual objects, as objects, do not usually require explanation; the task of explanation comes into play only when there is a problem in fitting those objects into an established context. Thus, the context that the explanation addresses is a requisite condition for meaning. For this reason, painters and other artists are often unable to explain their works. The intelligible context in question belongs primarily to the recipient and not to the producer. If the explanation of a work of art is related to its historical context, the problem of distinct contexts occurs, for the historical context of a work is the context of the producer and not usually of the recipient. If a personal context is used, once again, a problem of differing contexts occurs, for the context called upon is that of the critic-interpreter and not of the recipients of the work of art in general. It is also possible that the

6 World-making explanation of the work of art can be given on the basis of the technical tradition used in its production. In this case, the explanation attempts to show how the work is put together; thus the context is the system of relationships of the work itself to other related works. This mode of explanation certainly has a practical advantage and a degree of validity, but because it essentially avoids the question of what is in the work itself that makes it a work of art and not just another man-made composition, the issue of a gain in meaning is not faced. In literary criticism, 'exegesis' is the term commonly used for explanation. Thus, as a form of explanation, it applies to a much narrower range, that of written texts. A number of important qualifications are applied in this mode of explanation, foremost among them the literary context to which the specific work in question purportedly belongs. Since everything that is written was created in a social context to which it must allude in some way, if only because it uses the historically marked language of a specific community, the essential context for the explanation of a work of literature is the convention of writing to which it belongs. The problem of interpretation, therefore, is clearly not restricted to what the text purportedly says or does not say , but, rather, extends to the determination of the context in which what was said is to be construed. This is the turning-point of my argument. If explanation by itself is clearly not sufficient, if we must scrutinize the context of the work to engage in useful explanation, we must clearly establish whose context is called for and who determines the context. Let us assume, for the moment, that the contexts of the work's producer, of its critic-interpreter, and of its formal organization are inadequate to the task because they do not coincide with the reader's context. Redressing this deficiency becomes a primary task for the critic-interpreter if the goal of criticism is that of promoting, rather than ending, communication about the text. This view goes against that which posits the role of the criticinterpreter as mediator between the text that is, in some way, inaccessible and the reading public. There is no valid justification for continuing this selfserving concept of the critic-interpreter as the high priest diviner of occult writing. The only defensible function for the critic-interpreter to perform is to take a text that is intelligible to readers of the language community in question and to bring out its human significance, not with a view towards establishing a definitive meaning but for the purpose of opening up meanings. If explanation is social in its orientation, understanding is individual in its realization. 2 But it is because of the relationship between explanation and understanding that interpretation can be a shared meaning. The individual believes that he or she understands a given topic; this understanding is insufficient unless it is a shared understanding, and in order to be a shared

The aporia of truth in literature 7 understanding it must be explained by the individual. This situation represents the beginning of the dialectical process of explanation as it leaves its safe haven of individual understanding and attempts to produce its counterpart in others. In the process of explanation, the entire problematic concern of a shared context emerges. An essential part of this dynamic process is that the initial understanding held by the individual changes as it opens up into a social context, and what is achieved in the other, that is, the new understanding of the other, must now also be socialized as the other attempts to explain what it is that has been understood. The process is a continuous dialogical activity of world-making within the community. The encounter of explanation and understanding is the dynamic source of the act of criticism. Interpretation is here characterized as a highly specialized activity performed for the sake of the community of readers and for the critic-interpreter's own elucidation, rather than being performed because of the special powers of the performer. Historically, the latter concept has its roots in religious exegesis, but it is certainly out of place in contemporary literary criticism. Interpretation today stands at the centre of the activity of textual commentary performed for the mutual benefit of the critic-interpreter and the text's readers in the community. Since interpretation constitutes the general dialectic process of explanation and understanding, explanation ends only when meaning has been conveyed and understanding appears to be complete in the recipient. The problem is that understanding can never be complete since the other must also communicate through explanation. Because explanation always attempts to fit the meaning of the text into a context that will suffice for the specific point of view, over time there can be no limit on the number and variety of interpretations generated by a text. The understanding that is gained is necessarily temporary and incomplete. To interpreta text is, therefore, to appropriate here and now3 the intentionality of the text. To explain is to bring out the structure of the text or, in other words, to comment on the internal organization in the"-context of the body of texts we call literature; to understand is to grasp the unity of the text and to respond to its demands; to interpret, in summary, is to follow the lead opened up by the text and to communicate this experience. In practice, critic-interpreters vary in the direction they give interpretation, which ranges from extensive explanation with only summary conclusions to a brief explanation followed by a thoroughly argued sense of understanding. But, in all cases, the dialectic relationship between explanation and understanding is the force that produces the interpretation. Understanding does not remain static if it undergoes explanation. There is a creative gain in the process. This argument in favour of interpretation is metacritical and non-partisan; that is, it addressed the major issues that have been put forward against

8 World-making interpretation in general, and it does not take up the particulars of specific interpretive foci, those of feminist, psychoanalytic, Marxist, or any of the many established interpretive schools. Descriptive discourse analysis has claimed that in poetic language external reference is eliminated, that poetic language is essentially self-referential. It is the contention of my interpretation theory that this claim is only partially borne out by careful study. There is no question that poetic discourse presents the design of a world liberated by the suspension of, but not the elimination of, descriptive reference. If all external reference were eliminated, the ensuing sign system would be a private language and, therefore, would be unreadable by anyone other than the writer. However, the suspension of reference allows for. the. semantic impertinence to take hold on the basis of the remembrance of the suspended reference. 5 If there is no mode of reference to the world of action, there is no valid interpretive approach. On the contrary, if the dynamic mode of split reference that Ricoeur has described in The Rule of Metaphor is accepted, there is a theoretical foundation for interpretation. Each interpretive approach, that is, feminist, psychoanalytic, and so on, differs not in the analysis of the formal characteristics of the text, but on the emphasis given to the redescription of the world. Thus, for example, a feminist interpretation of Virginia Woolfs Jacob's Room would give priority to the particular world-view of a woman who speaks as the dramatized narrator and suspends around the absent Jacob not merely a way of life, but one specifically defined in relation to women - his mother, his lovers, his female friends, the educated, the uneducated, the shallow, and the profound - who, through their relations with Jacob, establish an extraordinary feminine circumstance for the character, a circumstance not available within a male perspective of the world. The point is that the reader, whether male or female, engages a unique feminist world-view in the redescription of the world that is the aesthetic meaning of reception, A psychoanalytic interpretation of the same text would focus on the ways the individual knows and is known by others; a Marxist interpretation would concentrate on the social dynamics of the characters and their determinants within the richly described social structure of early twentieth-century Britain; and so on, for each focus of interpretation. None of these interpretations would confuse the reader's world of action with the narrative world, but rather each would grasp the 'as if reality that has the power to return to the reader's world and elicit a redescription. In order to outline a phenomenological interpretation theory, it is necessary to elaborate on the act of reading, which is itself the praxis of interpretation. The reader can take the role of a player in an interminable game wherein he or she is involved in the internal network of the text and indefinitely suspend the

The aporia of truth in literature 9 text's reference to the world of action and to the audience of speaking subjects, of which he or she is one, but the reader can also move beyond the state of suspended reference and concretize the text in the linguistically determined world of action. Without a doubt this position is the aim of reading. The suspension of reference functions as a suspension precisely because it is holding back the natural course of reading from its movement towards meaning. But this suspension cannot hold back the thrust towards meaning indefinitely without displacing the movement to another causeway, such as wordplay. Thus the suspension of reference can function in the process of explanation and the discovery of internal relations only because the text is readable, that is, because it can return to the world of action as communication. Reading is possible because a text is not closed in on itself; it has something to say to someone about something. To read is to merge the reader's linguistic competence with the discourse of the text. This action gives reading the capacity for renewal of the text with each new reading and also gives the text polysemic openness. Interpretation theory must respond to both the demands of formalist explanation and the traditional purpose of such explanation, understanding. The hermeneutic tradition, as exemplified by Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Bultman, emphasizes the integration of text and reader. Although this concept is still a facet of contemporary hermeneutics, it has been somewhat modified through the accommodation given the analytical explanation of Greimas and Lotman, for it is clear that formal explanation can serve as a powerful .means of achieving intersubjective communication by making the explanation itself a common point of departure among various interpretations. However, interpretation theory must also avoid the reductionist closure that deconstructionists claim to be the inevitable end of all interpretation. Claims to definitive interpretations and objective truth have been superseded by criticism that recognizes the redescriptive powers of texts as sources for the making of the reading experience. Hermeneutics was revolutionized by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Truth and Method (196o; Engl. 1975); in that work, the romanticist pursuit of the author' s genius or intentions was rejected in favour of focusing on the critic-interpreters' encounter with the text within a tradition of commentary. This recasting of hermeneutics resolved the subject-object dualistic impasse with which Dilthey had struggled. The priority of belonging, being in the world, over the subject's awareness of self and objects is, in tum, taken from Heidegger's radical phenomenology in his Being and Time (1927; Engl. 1962). When hermeneutics, after Gadamer, has been formulated exclusively as quest for understanding, disregarding explanation, it has been a distinct failure,

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World-making

falling into self-indulgent and intellectualized impressionism. There are two ha.sic reasons why this should be so. The first is that understanding of the text is not an end in itself: such an approach would ignore Gadamer's own injunction about the autonomy of the text. The aim of interpretation is mediation in the community of readers between explanation and understanding. Thus hermeneutic understanding without the explanation of the text's system of signs ignores the essential textual demands on the reader. We have already stressed that explanation without the reflective constitution of meaning is inconsequential; phenomenological hermeneutics joins explanation and understanding together. The other reason why hermeneutics needs explanation as well as understanding is the fundamental need in criticism as communication to establish a common ground with diverse readers of the text and of the commentary. Explanation can accomplish this end. To ipterpret a text is to respond to the intentionality of the text, here and now , for us. Hermeneutics can still remain very much in the tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, but with the addition of two crucial questions: how does the critic-interpreter appropriate the text and on what grounds does he or she engage in the refiguration of its meaning. Phenomenological hermeneutics, after Gadamer and Ricoeur, has rejected the claim that the meaning of the text is tied to the presumed intention of the author, that is, with the historical experience of the writer, and has also rejected as equally unacceptable the claim that there is no stable meaning in the text, that the critical commentary can only be a supplement. Readers of texts become critic-interpreters of texts when they comply with the demands of the text and complete its meaning for themselves and others who share the text. Criticism therefore is a complement rather than a supplement to the text. It is at this point that we can recognize that the ancient task of interpretation has overcome some of the aberrations of the nineteenth century, and understanding has been tempered by explanation. To explain a text is to bring out the internal relations of organization and composition, and to understand it is to grasp its intentionality, which makes it a whole and not merely a collection of words. The task for the critic-interpreter today is to go beyond the subjective process of reading and understanding the text by taking advantage of the marked advance in formal analysis. The formal statics of the text as well as the language in which it is written stand independently of the interpreter and must be engaged as such. But the interpretation that the system of signs permits cannot just be a logical deduction, for the sign system must produce meaning. Interpretation is a commentary, a gloss, on the sign system in relation to the knowing subject. Although this dialogical concept of interpretation has been present in the

The aporia of truth in literature

11

philosophic tradition of scholars such as Juan Luis Vives, Giambattista Vico, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Benedetto Croce, and E.H. Collingwood, it has always been a dissenting voice in opposition to the absolutisms of the day. Let us remember with Aristotle that interpretation is intepretation by language before being interpretation of language. Interpretation thus avoids the pitfalls of both objectivism and scepticism because it is symbolic expression with an ontological status that is distinct from the text under scrutiny. Whatever the method used in explanation, the inescapable fact is that the relationship of interpretation to the text is possible only within a community of speakers and hearers of, and commentators on, the text and other texts similar to it. The task of criticism that interpretation performs can neither be reduced to the explanation of the formal organization of the text nor be made into the random speculation of the critic-interpreter. The process of explanation serves as a creative mediation of the individual understanding of the critic-interpreter. Interpretation in this tradition of criticism is characterized as indefinite and temporary in its claims, but nevertheless as an elucidation of the text addressed to a community of scholars and verified by the community. Without the communal source and adjudication, interpretation would become the self-indulgent promotion of personal taste, which we are, from time to time, burdened to read. If it is true that there is always more than one way of interpreting a literary text, this does not mean that all interpretations are equal and can be written off as speculative approximations. The literary text presents a limited field of possible configurations at any given point in history; thus, we are not dealing with an unlimited number of variations. Furthermore, essential to the argument is the logic of validation, which, at any given time in history, within a specific community of speakers, will move to a consensus and avoid both dogmatism and scepticism. It must always remain possible to argue for or against an interpretation, and to confront rival interpretations, or to mediate between them and to seek a common ground. This is the nature of the scholarly community. In conclusion, whatever the specific methods used to explain the configuration of the text and whatever ideologies and cultural prejudgments are part of the understanding process of the interpreter, intepretation consists of the considered expression of the interpreter's understanding mediated by the whole of the explanatory procedures that may precede it but always accompany it in the critical commentary. Explanation releases a dynamic meaning that this made the interpreter's if she or he is to communicate it to someone else; that is, she or he must understand the referential indicators released by the explanatory procedures. The dialectic of explanation and understanding is the power of disclosure of interpretation. Making sense of a text is the first step towards understanding; making

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sense of a text for others is the first step to explanation; and moving between explanation and understanding is the first step towards interpretation. This common activity of human interaction in a community has become a discipline concerned with written texts judged to be of some significance to the community at large, e.g., religious, legal, historical, and literary texts. The nature of interpretation, as I have described it here, is initially dialogical and subsequently generative of a measured balance between the power of the appropriating pole of making the text one's own and the demands of the expository pole of making the text the figurational property of others. When reading a text, every reader uses models of coherence based on life experience in general and, specifically, on previous readings. These models of coherence are usually challenged and, at times, disrupted in the reading of literary texts. Thus the phenomenology of reading literary texts can be described as the initial application of patterns of coherency; their continual development and modification; and ultimately their replacement. The criticinterpreter' s role in this process is not to interrupt it, but rather to move it from the realm of the subjective to that of the intersubjective - in other words, to pursue the opening up of the literary text and bring about dialogue concerning the text as part of the creative life of the community, present and future .

Chapter two

The Truth-Claim and Literature

Our knowledge of the truth about any statement, unlike our knowledge of material things and other objects of our attention, does not depend on experience alone, but primarily on the dialectical relationship truth or the truthclaim has with its opposite in the logical dichotomy of true and false. When the empirical knowledge of things is in question, either we know them or we do not, and such knowledge is entirely dependent on consciousness, perception, and acquaintance. Whatever it is that we have encountered has a place in our sense of order. We can and do make mistakes about the shape, purpose, and origin of objects, but the encounter with the object itself cannot be mistaken. However, in the case of statements that purport to be true, that is, claim to stand independently of the maker of the statement, the recipient of the statement must make a judgment to accept or reject. Most of us accept some statements almost instinctively because they clearly correspond to 'the familiar serviceable world' one has 'jerry-built from fragments of scientific and artistic tradition and from one's own struggle for survival' (Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, p. 20). Some of us reject other truth-claims precisely because they conflict with our concept of how things are in the world (e.g., Picasso's cubist painting Three Musicians) as a valid representation; more often than not, most of us suspend judgment or give the maker of the statement the benefit of the doubt until enough evidence has been gathered to move us to make a judgment. The denotative indicators of statements do not normally oblige us to make judgments since they are either applicable or not applicable and are immediately accepted or dismissed (the exception occurs with denotative indicators in a relationship of semantic impertinence);' it is the connotative indicator of

14 World-making a statement that makes it a truth-claim. The connotative code calls upon the recipient to give relative weight to the applicability of a statement. While denotation determines the range of applications of a sign and, therefore, of a system of signs, connotation is the subcode that opens up the range implied by the sign. The truth-claim, therefore, becomes a factor of determinate information at the connotative level of enunciation. The question is how broad a range the subcode allows the sign to have and what the limits are of the implicit applicability. These distinctions apply to any statement that purports to be true. We must now begin to give a sharper focus to our inquiry. How is it that these distinctions related to purported truths apply in the case of literary texts? Leaving to one side the hopelessly naive distinction between fiction and nonfiction, we can discern our target texts as those whose capacity to make the readers redescribe their own world sets them apart from other kinds of writing. In redescriptive writing, the process of world-making is an intentional undertaking; this characteristic distinguishes it from writing that calls attention to referents in that undifferentiated habit we tend to call the real world. The former is literature, whatever the intention of the author, and the latter is discursive denotation, the type of writing found in a range of works from cookbooks to car-owners' manuals. According to my theory, the literary text has three dimensions: first, the prefigurative, in which it is rooted, that is, the world of action regulated by the conventions, norms, and institutions of the linguistic community; second, the configurative, which is the intentional activity of organization and composition that transforms the linguistic diversity into a whole, into a text; and third, the refigurative, which is the dimension of the reader's actualization of the textual codes into the experiential reality that is the only reality in art. Readers of Paul Ricoeur's Time and Narrative will recognize my indebtedness to him, but also, I trust, will see my expansion of his philosophical argument into the concerns of literary theory. Where in this broad spectrum does the truth-claim stand? The answer is in all three dimensions of the text, but in each it has a different role and a different effect. The three are interrelated and should be understood as three subordinate questions of the main query: what is determinate in the literary text? At the prefigurative level, the issue is to determine the conditions and means of production. The determinacies in the text are all part of the repertoire in language usage of a particular community. At the configurative level, the issue is to examine how the text was produced; the configurational dimension of the truth-claim deals with determinacies as a mode of organization. At the refigurative level, the issue, which, in fact, has primacy for the reader, is about

The truth-claim and literature I 5 the significance of the realization of the text. At this, the primary level of the reading experience, we inquire about the truth-claim as a vehicle for our malting of the text. The truth-claim is thus enacted in the reading of the text when the reader is called upon to respond to a statement as a determinate feature of the redescriptive process. As we read critically, we are, of course, aware that the truth-claim is part of the intentional strategy of the text and, as such, is a structural or semiotic unit of configuration. We are also dependent on our awareness of the truth-claim as part of the prefigurative repertoire available in a specific linguistic and cultural system. Our acceptance or rejection of the truth-claim as part of the determinate make-up of the text lies in the recognition of its relative validity in the repertoire, which, in turn, informs both the configurative understanding of the text and the refigurative use to which we apply it. In our present endeavour, our focus is on the problem of truth in written discourse and, specifically, the special class of written discourse we have designated as literature; therefore, we are not concerned with the acquaintance with and recognition of objects. Rather, we are going to examine the truthclaim in some of its principal aspects as the basis for determinacy in literary texts. Let us begin with the proposition that every claim that a statement is true carries with it the possibility of the opposite claim, that the statement is false. Thus the claim, explicit or implicit, that a statement is true postulates unequivocally that the statement is not false. For truth has no other meaning than the rejection of untruth. A second general proposal is that we recognize that there will be cases in which a genuine difference of opinion as to the validity of a truth-claim arises; there are always three possibilities: that the truth-claim can be substantiated; that, conversely, it can be proved to be in error; or that it is impossible to validate or reject, because of insufficient evidence, but it nevertheless remains a truth-claim. In the first two cases, we are dealing with evidence, proof, and examination of the interpretation of the purported proof. In the third case, we are dealing with claims that are beyond final proof, where the argument stands or falls on the basis of extralogical factors such as faith, authority, and our imaginative capacity to envisage. Thus our analysis is now twofold: truthclaims based on evidence and truth-claims based on other factors . We can further analyse the problem by scrutinizing the nature of the two types of truthclaims. Truth-claims that can be validated can be subdivided into two types: first,

16 World-making claims that are based on an appeal to empirical evidence; second, claims that are supported by analogical evidence. For example, when Eugene, in Balzac's Pere Goriot, stops at the Palais Royal to have his shoes polished and then walks through the Paris streets until he arrives at the rue du Helder, we have an implicit truth-claim about the layout of Paris that, even today, can be verified. By contrast, the claim made in the same novel that the following day would be among the most extraordinary for one of the characters can be validated only by weighing the events of the day within the context of the world of the novel in an analogical relationship to our world. But, a further third distinction must be drawn, in both of the cases noted above, between truth-claims made with regard to the action and those made in the description of the narrative world or imagistic context based on a historical truth-claim, since there is also a truth-claim about the comportment and action of characters as p~ of a narrative event that can be verified by an extratextual appeal to the historical record. An example would be the behaviour of Napoleon in examining the battlefield at Austerlitz, as depicted by Tolstoy in War and Peace. The empirical truth-claim with regard .to the literary configuration is verifiable through the examination of the physical setting, which is purportedly described with accuracy. The analogical truth-claim of action is verifiable through an appeal to verisimilar comportment, which is plausible in comparison to the experiential world. The historical truth-claim can be verified through a comparison of the historical record and the purported event that has been made part of the literary configuration. In our second major division of truth-claims, those that are non-verifiable, there are only two subtypes. The first is the appeal on the basis of authority by the enunciating voice, and the second is the appeal to agreement or disagree• ment within the reader's own scale of beliefs and values because of the reflection that has been prompted by the text. I would like to begin my analysis of literary truth-claims with the latter, the most problematic of truth-claims: the claim to truth of self provoked by the reading of a literary text. Can this be called a truth-claim? Some will certainly dispute that it can. Let us begin with an examination of the imaginative capacity of figuration that brings about the truth-claim. Blaise Pascal has called the imagination 'the mistress of falsehood and error,' and this view has long prevailed; yet, I think that this traditional view of the imagination is on the wrong track. My colleagues from analytical philosophy would rule out the possibility that the imaginative configuration can make a serious truth-claim. Their argument is that the imaginative experience is non-falsifiable and also non-verifiable; therefore, it is not a truth-claim, for

The truth-claim and literature 17 verifiability requires the possibility of confirmation, and thus, since any claim to truth on my own terms must be simultaneously a rejection of falsehood, the imaginative construct is neither true nor false . The imaginative configuration, this argument continues, by presenting itself to the imagining subject alone, makes it ineluctably first person in character. I can, _of course, make specific claims concerning what I experience, but it would be futile for others to consult their imaginings to determine if what I say of my imagining is true. Since they cannot confirm my claims, their response to such claims must take the form either of believing me or of suspecting that I am deceitful in my reports. No first-person statement that asserts an inner experience, such as .the possession of an image, can be corrected by a third person. It must be accepted or rejected as personal experience; it cannot be shown to be mistaken. In what sense can we legitimately speak of first-person reports of the imaginary as true? We may grant that these reports cannot rightly be called true in terms of whether they correspond to others' reports of their own frrst-hand experiences. Nor does it make sense to refer to a veridical state of affairs to which all such reports (mine and others') might correspond. Yet, the correspondence model of truth that is operative in this argument is not the only model. Two alternatives to the correspondence model of truth are the expressionist model and the phenomenological model of reflection of the reader's refiguration of the world. For the expressionist model to be operative, the author must be judged to have made a non-deceitful report ·to others concerning his or her own experience of imagining. The author can, as can any human being, make true or false statements. He or she can also be mistaken and state that something is true when, in fact, it is false . We must, however, challenge this view as being valid only for the historical or biographical consideration of the author and not for his or her works, which must state and support any truth-claim, irrespective of the social or moral character of the person who wrote it. In the phenomenological model, the reader-interpreter, rather than the author, makes a true report of an imaginative experience, that is, does not report what was not experienced, but describes what was experienced as a potentially shared experience. Kant wrote, in the Critique of Pure Reason, a nominal definition of truth: 'that it is the agreement of knowledge with its object which is assumed as granted (p. 36).' This corner-stone of theory of knowledge was not challenged but merely adopted when the discussion turned to truth and the truth-claim in art in general, and in literature, in particular. For example, Monroe Beardsley, in his Aesthetics (1958), writes that 'truth involves a correspondence of

18 World-making something to reality' (p. 368) and Jerome Stolnitz, in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism (196o), writes: 'whether the expressed truth is indeed a truth depends on its correspondence with commonly observable facts' (pp. 325--6). In literary criticism, the first authoritative modem view is that of I.A. Richards. In Principles of Literary Criticism (1925), he states 'the acceptability of the things we are told . . . not their correspondence with any actual facts' (p. 269) is the only satisfactory notion of truth in literature. But this position puts the critic in a serious bind, for truth as correspondence, in the scientific sense, is present in literature in only a trivial, superficial way. On the one hand, there are truth-claims in literature; but, on the other, these cannot be considered truth because art is not limited to correspondence with objects. The argument therefore now turns on whether truth as correspondence has any place in literature and, if not, whether we should continue to speak and write about truth in literature. My position is as follows: first, truth-claims in literature are an integral part of the text-reader relationship and, second, the correspondence theory of truth is not applicable to the literary truth-claim. There are two components to the correspondence theory: similarity and correctness. The similarity argument is that an idea must be like the source from which it originates. When this view is applied to literature, it asserts that the claim in the work must share a common pattern with its referential object. But this argument is in danger of making the literary truth-claim meaningless. For example, if I speak of a dancing tree, have I made a truth-claim? The answer is no, for truth does not arise merely because a common lexical sign with a clear referent has been used. There must be a further attempt to relate one to the other. Let us say that I now state 'the willows at Stratford were dancing in the wind.' Is this a truth-claim? The answer is yes, because I have made a claim about the relationship between my trees and the trees the reader knows, not in terms of an isomorphic correspondence but in terms of a relationship between objects, namely, the relationship of movement. Because similarity is seen as being overly restrictive, such theorists as T.M. Greene opt for correctness, or fit, as the basis for the truth-claim. Greene writes, in The Arts and Art Criticism (1940): 'What is expressed must in some sense conform to what is actually the case' (p. 454). Therefore, my dancing willows would be acceptable to him. But, I fear that this argument also misses the point: it is not that my trees conform to the reader's trees, but that I have designated a relationship that can be accepted or rejected. The problem is that, in Greene's theory, the truth-claim is seen as unidirectional; one term serves as the paradigm for the other. Thus, to Greene, empirical reality is the paradigm for treating the trees in my statement.

The truth-claim and literature 19 My argument is that the truth-claim is always a relationship between the text and the reader; it cannot be a one-way proposition, for this would suggest that there is an unassailable absolute against which all claims are to be measured. The truth-claim exists when the reader is confronted with a statement that he or she is asked to accept in order to go on reading. I endorse Gadamer's view, expressed in Truth and Method (196o): 'Does not the experience of art contain a claim to truth which is certainly different from that of science, but equally certainly is not inferior to it' (p. 87). In the experience of the truth-claim in literature, the reader and the text enter into an accord. This relation is one of reciprocity and mutual accommodation for the reader whose formal counterpart is discoverable in the inner coherence of the work itself. Such an accord is not a matter of mere correctness; rather, it expresses a sense of concord between the two. But I should point out that this accord is subject to change, for the reader's engagement with the textual truthclaim is an ongoing process wherein changes will, and do, take place. Thus, the reader's own sense of world will be maintained in its own identity, and the text's many manipulations of claims and counter-claims will also maintain a sense of identity. The truth-claim in many ways operates like metaphor. It requires a certain tension, which is never dissipated, even after the reader has gone on to other matters. The tension does not exist between the truth-claim and an external standard, but rather is intrinsic to the act of judgment itself. Reading a literary text can be described as enc~mntering a pattern of stresses that are temporarily resolved by the reader, but the tension remains as long as the reading experience continues. Truth in literature is primarily a matter of the action of appropriation, which at all times calls for judgment. Truth-claims in every theory involve reference to something other than themselves, and the position I am presenting is no exception; referentiality is the basis of the truth-claim. Indeed, one can even go on to say that some sense of reference is essential to any conception of truth or meaning. The referentiality I will touch on here, and will develop later, is what Ricoeur calls 'splitreference. ' To sum up my argument to this point: the truth-claim in literature does not correspond to anything actual or possible. When there is an empirical truthclaim, the proposition is not validated because there are, for example, trees yew trees - in Middlemarch that are similar to trees found in churchyards in England today, but because the function of those trees in the novel is related to that of trees in the reader's world of action. Both kinds of trees are present in the reading, and the claim is temporarily resolved as the reader chooses an actualized meaning. The contrast is not between believing or denying

20

World-making

something a text says but between granting the text, at a particular moment, a referential function, so that it can be true or false, and treating it as figure so that the inevitable moment of referentiality is postponed while the reading experience develops. In pragmatic terms the truth-claim has three essential properties: first, it must .be recognized by the reader; second, it must claim that a relation of meaning exists between reader and text - I have identified five kinds of these relations: empirical, verisimilar, historical, authoritative, and phenomenological - and, third, it must have an imperative of acceptance or rejection for the reader. The British aesthetician Kingsley B. Price, in his article 'Is There Artistic Truth' (1949), agrees that the correspondence theory is not applicable with regard to literature, but since this is the only basis of truth that he can accept, he is obliged to state that 'there is no artistic truth' (p. 240). However, R.G. Collingwood, in Principles of Art (1938), writing somewhat earlier, asserts: 'Art is not indifferent to truth; it is essentially the pursuit of truth' (p. 288). Thus, we are faced with a crucial question. If we have rejected the correspondence theory of truth and have instead turned to a theory of truth in literature as a relationship of meaning to meaning, how does literature embody truth? The object of our inquiry is to examine as fully as possible the text-reader relationship with regard to truth-claims. At this point, the implicit question as to who is making the truth-claim requires a response. I am not interested in pursuing an authorial truth-claim. My aim is to delineate those features in a literary text that induce the reader to recognize a truth-claim, implicitly or explicitly. I also wish to outline the basis for the reader's acceptance or rejection of the truth-claim. Turning from the theoretical outline of the problem to the five classes of literary truth-claims, the text-reader relationship can be seen as a dynamic process of world-making. I / The truth-claim of referential empirical fact in literary texts: Literary discourse has an external reference as well as the highly visible internal reference. Sometimes the external reference may be reduced to the eclipsed external reference in metaphor; at other times there is an explicit reference to the external physical configuration of the world. In either case, the truth-claim is implicitly verifiable through an appeal to empirical experience of the world. This type of truth-claim involves a set of text-reader relationships of assimilation that controls the scope of the literary world. 2 / The truth-claim of verisimilar representation in literature. This class of truth-claim is also verifiable, although in a more subtle manner. The entire

The truth-claim and literature

21

basis for the truth-claim, based on verisimilitude, rests on the strength of the as if proposition and the deduction of logical consequences from the specific circumstances depicted. In the consideration of characterization and action, the effectiveness of the truth-claim is directly proportional to the grade of recognition accepted by the reader. In the case of the literary world, the argument for truth of lifelikeness is tied to the utilization of analogous depiction of situations based on general experience. For example, a reader may never have been in a prison, but a narration of prison life must still claim its authenticity through the utilization of experiential analogies. The scope of verisimilitude is broader than the scope of referential empirical data, for, in the former. entire patterns of behaviour are represented. 3 / The truth-claim of historical understanding in literature. The most direct form of truth-claim in literature emerges not only from the use of historical fact in literary texts, but, of more significance, from the subtle yet powerful assertion that there is historical understanding in literature. There are obviously two sides to the historical truth-claim: one is obvious, concerning the accurate depiction of recorded incidents and events; the other is more subtle, involving the historical plausibility of the presentation of events not only in the case of the historical novel or drama, but also in poetic reference to historical events. This class of truth-claim has a complex function, for it effectively involves the world-making process of the reader as part of the historical process of which he or she is also part. The ramifications are far-reaching as fictive constructs and the reality of the world of action interact. 4 I The truth-claim of textual authority. This non-verifiable truth-claim is supported exclusively on the strength of the authority of the enunciating voice. The reliability of the narrative or lyric voice must carry the full weight of the argument. It remains a truth-claim if the statement purports to be a general description and not a private belief or fantasy. Thus we are not dealing with unreliable voices such as those of the mentally ill, or the retarded. This fourth class of truth-claim purports to express the truth of the general situation in the textual world. This is a difficult truth-claim to sustain for there is the everpresent risk of falling into fantasy of hermetic dimensions or of an idiosyncratic make-up. Consequently, such a truth-claim has authority, only if the purported truth is that of the human condition in the textual configuration. 5 I The truth-claim of.the selfs own sense of order. This truth-claim is based on the presupposition that shared experience is part of our own reality. The generation of the self's own sense about the world can be a truth-claim if it can be shared; it is only personal fantasy if it cannot. The empirical truth-claim in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich functions through an overt grip:

22

World-making

And, though he was in a hurry, he .. . took a look at his ration, weighing it in his hand and hastily calculating whether it reached the regulation five-fifty grammes. He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weigh them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they won't have snitched any .. . He decided he was twenty grammes short as he broke the bread in two. One half he stuck into his bosom, into a little clean pocket he'd specially sewn under his jacket ... The other half, which he'd saved by going without at breakfast, he considered eating on the spot. But food gulped down is no food at all; it's wasted; it gives you no feelini of fullness . .. And so, still clutching the hunk of bread, he drew his feet out of his valenki, deftly leaving inside them his footcloths and spoon, crawled barefoot up to his bunk, widened a little hole in the mattress and there, amidst the sawdust, concealed his half-ration ... Stitch, stitch, stitch, and the little tear in the mattress was mended, with the bread concealed under it. Meanwhile the sugar in his mouth had melted. Every nerve was strained to breaking-point. At any moment the poster-guard would begin shouting at the door. Shukhov's fingers worked fast but his mind, planning the next move, worked faster. (pp. 24-5) Volkovoi, however, has shouted that they were to search ... and so the guards peeled off their gloves, ordered everyone to untuck his jacket (where every little bit of barrack-room warmth was treasured) and unbutton his shirt. Then they strode up to run their paws over the zeks and find out whether any of them might have slipped on something against the rules ... The men had to bare their breasts. And anyone who had slipped on an extra garment had to take it off on the spot, out there in the cold. The cold had got under the men's shirts and now it was there to stay . All that wrapping-up had been in vain. (pp. 31-3) This is a moment that demands complete concentration, as you remove some of the scanty kasha from the bottom of the bowl, put it carefully into your mouth, and shove it about there with your tongue. But Shukhov had to hurry, to show Pavlo he'd already finished and was waiting to be offered a second bowl. He groped in his inside pocket for the scrap of clean rag, found the unfrozen crescent of crust, and meticulously wiped off with it the last remnant of mash from the bottom of the bowl and any that still clung to the brim. Then he licked the crust

The truth-claim and literature 23 clean; then repeated the whole process. The bowl looked now as if it had been washed, with a dull film, nothing more on the inside surface. (pp. 66-7)

These passages present an empirical quantification of food and heat: the relative scarcity of both and the need to put into the body as much food as possible and to let out as little heat as possible. The quantification is explicit. It is -27.5°C outside the hut and -37°C out in the field. The prisoner's ration of fifty-five grams of bread was short by an estimated twenty grams, and the bowls each had one serving of oatmeal. The empirical truth-claim is twofold: first, the quantification is specific; second, the relative amounts of food and heat create an empirical state of hunger and cold. The reader is asked to respond to an extreme situation that most likely has not been part of his or her experience, but because the text stresses an empirical measure, the reader can accept the situation as if it were true. The fact that winters in Siberia are cold and that food in remote prison camps in winter is scarce helps initially to substantiate the truth-claim until it slowly imposes upon the reader an empirical claim to truth that transcends the as if fictive narrative. The empirical truth-claim, therefore, is not based on correspondence or comparison, but rather on an interaction that produces the actualized textual meaning of putting in food and keeping the cold out. The in-and-out relationship establishes the rhythm for the other thematic aspects of the novel to develop. The reader's response to the empirical truth-claim, because it is so basic, is to fall into a rhythm that is as fundamental as the heartbeat itself. The second truth-claim I have listed is based on analogy or verisimilitude. Writers of novels at times describe recognizable settings and narrate action within these settings. All descriptions and narrations are composed by selecting and emphasizing. It is obvious that no account of an event, no matter how long, can be a replica of a real event. The novel that is purportedly true to life is one that presents a systematic selection, and necessarily a distortion of the kinds of things that happen and their various aspects, in order to gain the conviction of readers. A passive acceptance of the truth-claim of verisimilitude is a tacit agreement by the reader to view the world depicted in the work as if it were his or her own world. Reflection on the detail of the discourse reveals that the details are selected in order to lead, and not merely to involve, the reader. The writer uses behavioural patterns that are readily recognizable within the community for whom he or she writes as well as being concomitant with the recognized conventions of the genre, and plays on the tastes and experiences of readers in order to get them to accept the truth-claim that the depicted events are true to life. The irony of the truth-claim is that the more skilful the writer is in getting

24 World-making the reader to accept the verisimilar truth-claim, the more elaborate is the technique in writing. Consider the following passage from Don Quixote: At last, when his wits were gone beyond repair, he came to conceive the strangest ideas that ever occurred to any madman in this world. It now appeared to him fining and necessary, in order to win a greater amount of honor for himself and serve his country at the same time, to become a knight-errant and roam the world on horseback, in a suit of armor; he would go in quest of adventures, by way of putting into practice all that he had read in his books; he would right every manner of wrong, placing himself in situations of the greatest peril such as would redound to the eternal glory of his name. (p. 27)

The initial truth-claim is that the reader accept the extraordinary activities of Don Quixote as true to life for a madman. And it is this double standard that establishes much of the humour in the text, such as 'the terrifying adventure of the windmills•: At this point they caught sight of thirty or forty windmills which were standing on the plain there, and no sooner had Don Quixote laid eyes upon them than he turned to his squire and said, ' Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we could have wished; for you see there before you, friend Sancho Panza, some thirty or more lawless giants with whom I mean to do battle. I shall deprive them of their lives, and with the spoils from this encounter we shall begin to enrich ourselves; for this is righteous warfare, and it is a great service to God to remove so accursed a breed from the face of the earth.• ' What giants?' said Sancho Panza. 'Those that you see there,' replied his master, 'those with the long arms some of which are as much as two leagues in length .' 'But look, your Grace, those are not giants but windmills, and what appear to be arms are their wings which, when whirled in the breeze, cause the millstone to go.' 'It is plain to be seen,' said Don Quixote, ' that you have had little experience in this matter of adventures. If you are afraid, go off to one side and say your prayers while I am engaging them in fierce, unequal combat' .. . he bore down upon them at a full gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in his way, giving a thrust at the wing, which was whirling at such a speed that his lance was broken into bits and both horse and horseman went rolling over the plain, very much battered indeed. Sancho upon his donkey came hurrying to his master's assistance as fast as he could, but when he reached the spot, the knight was unable to move, so great was the shock with which he and Rocinante had hit the ground.

The truth-claim and literature 25 'God help us!' exclaimed Sancho, 'did I not tell your Grace to look well, that those were nothing but windmills, a fact which no one could fail to see unless he had other mills of the same sort in his head?' ' Be quiet, friend Sancho,' said Don Quixote. 'Such are the fortunes of war, which more than any other are subject to constant change.' (pp. 62-3)

The skill with which the text plays upon the reader's acceptance of the narrative world as true to life is based on the fact that Don Quixote is seen to be mad not only by the reader's standards but also by the text's standards of sane and plausible behaviour. The truth-claim begins to build a powerful strategy that will work towards breaking down the accepted bifurcation of the narrative world and the reader's world of action. Let it be recalled that the innumerable narratives, fictive and otherwise, that dominate our lives are made intelligible by the preordained agreement to accept them as if they are part of the experiential world. But this agreement is merely contractual; it is never constitutive, and it can be broken at all times. Every narrative based on a verisimilar truth-claim can be questioned as to its rhetorical mode. Whenever this happens, the truth-claim breaks down. If there is an acceptance by the reader of the described state of affairs, it will be on other grounds. Consider how it is that, from the outset, Cervantes has made an issue of truth: This gentleman of ours was close on to fifty, of a robust constitution but with little flesh on his bones and a face that was lean and gaunt. He was noted for his early rising, being very fond of the hunt. They will try to tell you that his surname was Quijada or Quesada - there is some difference of opinion among those who have written on the subject - but according to the most likely conjectures we are to understand that it was really Quejana. But all this means very little so far as our story is concerned, providing that in the telling of it we do not depart one iota from the truth .

A few pages later we read: Having found a name for his horse that pleased his fancy, he then desired to do as much for himself, and this required another week, and by the end of that period he had made up his mind that he was henceforth to be known as Don Quixote, which, as had been stated, has led the authors of this veracious history to assume that his real name undoubtedly must have been Quejada, and not Quesada as others would have it. But remembering that the valiant Amadis was not content to call himself that and nothing more, but added the name of his kingdom and fatherland that he might make it famous also, and thus came to take the name Amadis of Gaul, so our

26 World-making good knight chose to add his place of origin and become 'Don Quixote de Ia Mancha' ; for by this means, as he saw it, he was making very plain his lineage and was conferring honor upon his country by taking its name as his own. (p. 29)

And yet this narrator who has made an issue of the truth of his story and who has fully exploited the verisimilar truth-claim has to admit at the end of chapter 8 that he in fact has no access to the truth, for he is entirely dependent on another author. And so, then, as has been stated, Don Quixote was approaching the wary Biscayan, his sword raised on high and with the firm resolve of cleaving his enemy in two; and the Biscayan was awaiting the knight in the same posture, cushion in front of him and with uplifted sword. All the bystanders were trembling with suspense at what would happen as a result of the terrible blows that were threatened, and the lady in the coach and her maids were making a thousand vows and offerings to all the images and shrines in Spain, praying that God would save them all and the lady' s squire from this great peril that confronted them. But the unfortunate part of the matter is that at this very point the author of the history breaks off and leaves the battle pending, excusing himself upon the ground that he has been unable to find anything else in writing concerning the exploits of Don Quixote beyond those already set forth . It is true, on the other hand, that the second author of this work could not bring himself to believe that so unusual a chronicle would have been consigned to oblivion, nor that the learned ones of La Mancha were possessed of so little curiosity as not to be able to discover in their archives or registry offices certain papers that have to do with this famous knight. Being convinced of this, he did not despair of coming upon the end of this pleasing story, and Heaven favoring him, he did find it, as shall be related in the second part . .. No sooner had I heard the name Dulcinea del Toboso than I was astonished and held in suspense, for at once the thought occurred to me that those notebooks must contain the history of Don Quixote. With this in mind I urged him to read me the title, and he proceeded to do so, turning the Arabic into Castillian upon the spot: History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Written by Cid Hamete Benengeli, Arabic Historian .. . The Moor and I then betook ourselves to the cathedral cloister, where I requested him to translate for me into the Castillian tongue all the books that had to do with Don Quixote, adding nothing and subtracting nothing ... In the first of the books there was a very lifelike picture of the battle between Don Quixote and the Biscayan, the two being in precisely the same posture as described in the history, their swords upraised, the one covered by his buckler, the other with his cushion ...

The truth-claim and literature 27 Alongside Rocinante stood Sancho Panza, holding the halter of his ass, and below was the legend: 'Sancho Zancas.' The picture showed him with a big belly, a short body, and long shanks, and that must have been where he got the names of Panza y Zancas by which he is a number of times called in the course of the history . There are other small details that might be mentioned, but they are of little importance and have nothing to do with the truth of the story - and no story is bad so long as it is true. If there is any objection to be raised against the veracity of the present one, it can be only that the author was an Arab, and that nation is known for its lying propensities; but even though they be our enemies, it may readily be understood that they would more likely have detracted from, rather than added to, the chronicle . So it seems to me, at any rate, for whenever he might and should deploy the resources of his pen in praise of so worthy a knight, the author appears to take pains to pass over the matter in silence; all of which in my opinion is ill done and ill conceived, for it should be the duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and dispassionate, and neither interest nor fear nor rancor nor affection should swerve them from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor. In this work, I am sure, will be found all that could be desired in the way of pleasant reading; and if it is lacking in any way, I maintain that this is the fault of that hound of an author rather than of the subject. (pp. 63, 73)

Thus it is that the verisimilar truth-claim in Don Quixote is so highly developed that it undermines the very supposition on which it is based, moving the reader towards an involvement at a different level with the truth-claim of self. The narrator's lack of authority will eventually draw the reader into the textual world as his or her own sense of order merges with the textual one. Let us now take a closer look at the historical truth-claim. This truth-claim appears, at first encounter, to be the most straightforward, the one truth-claim whose validity can be verified with even a modest library at our disposal, but it is, in fact, the most complex and the most problematic of all truth-claims; largely because of inherent difficulties, it is one of the most interesting problems of literary theory. Let us begin with the depiction of the historical truth-claim in Tolstoy's War and Peace. It is the morning of the battle of Austerlitz and the narration creates the textual event: It was nine o'clock in the morning. The fog lay unbroken like a sea down below, but higher up at the village of Schlappanitz where Napoleon stood with his marshals around him, it was quite light. Above him was a clear blue sky, and the sun's vast

28 World-making orb quivered like a huge hollow, crimson float on the surface of that milky sea of mist. The whole French army , and even Napoleon himself with his staff, were not on the far side of the streams and hollows of Sokolnitz and Schlappanitz beyond which we intended to take up our position and begin the action, but were on this side, so close to our own forces that Napoleon with the naked eye could distinguish a mounted man from one on foot. Napoleon, in the blue cloak which he had worn on his Italian campaign, sat on his small ·gray Arab horse a little in front of his marshals . .. he saw clearly that the allies believed him to be far away in front of them, and that the columns moving near Pratzen constituted the center of the Russian army, and that the center was already sufficiently weakened to be successfully attacked. But still he did not begin the engagement. Today was a great day for·him - the anniversary of his coronation. Before dawn he had slept for a few hours, and refreshed, vigorous, and in good spirits, he mounted his horse and rode out into the field in that happy mood in which everything seems possible and everything succeeds. He sat motionless, looking at the heights visible above the mist, and his cold face wore that special look of confident, self-complacent happiness that one sees on the face of a boy happily in love. The marshals stood behind him not venturing to distract his attention. He looked now at the Pratzen Heights, now at the sun floating up out of the mist. When the sun had entirely emerged from the fog , and fields and mist were aglow with dazzling light - as if he had only awaited this to begin the action - he drew the glove from his shapely white hand, made a sign with it to the marshals, and ordered the action to begin. (pp. 292-3)

The concept of historical event enjoys the same deceptive status bestowed on most common-sense notions. It implies two sets of uncritical assertions: ontological and epistemological claims, the second being based on the first. First, we think of historical events as being what actually happened in the past. This basic ontological assumption itself has many sides; we assume, first, that that which has been differs radically from that which is yet to come; that the past actuality of what has been is an absolute property of the past. By the same token, we assume that the past is determinate and settled (what has been done cannot be undone), whereas the future is still open and undetermined. If we underline the historicity of an event - and not merely its having happened - then we can state that events are historical to the extent that people made them happen. Events, then, designate the deeds of men and women of the past, as they are recorded in a variety of documents. The common definition of history as the knowledge of the past deeds of mankind relies on that restrictive definition of past events as human past. The various historical reconstructions express the initial gap between an

The truth-claim and literature 29 objective account of what actually happened and the idea that a historical event is a non-repeatable lived experience. A lived experience that was unique and is past offers no possibility of an objective depiction. The past as the sum of what has actually happened is beyond all historical reach. This argument is fully elaborated in Henri Marrou's De la connaissance historique. There, history is defined as knowledge of the human past (p. 29) and is treated as an expansion of the traces of human experience in the present experience. For Marrou, the historian's subjectivity is part of the equation of historical knowledge. The idea that the brute facts of the past would exist in a latent state in the document is thoroughly rejected as haplessly nruve. Historical knowledge is basically relational: it is the relation of the historian's research to the traces of the past. The historian, accordingly, is the active configurational component of history. The assessment of history and the events it narrates must be made on the basis of the questions raised by the historian in addressing his or her documents, on the value and, above all, on the conceptual means used by the historian. The alleged actual event has entirely disappeared from the history; in its place, we have a reconstruction. The historian constructs concepts, but these concepts are not themselves historical reality. They do not exhaust the historical object in the network of relations spun by the historian. The basic given, what really existed, is neither the fact of civilization nor the system of explanation, but instead the human being whose individuality is the only real organism authentically furnished by experience. The notion of what actually happened provides both a limit to our constructions and reconstructions and an orientation towards concreteness and singularity that projects historical knowledge beyond its own constructs. The making of a historical event is a narrative act of the historical imagination. What separates it from historical fiction is that the historian does not re-enact events, but rather reconstructs them, imputing motives and causes to those elements that explain the course of action within a given hypothesis. But there is more to the distinction between the historical truth-claim in literature and the truth-claim in history. There is no doubt that there is a dichotomy in reception between the literary truth-claim that is historical and the general truth-claim in history itself. Let us recall Aristotle's famous assertion 'that history deals with singular events which remain contingent occurrences because they have actually happened whereas the poet writes about things as they might possibly occur. Poetry therefore is more philosophical and more significant than history, for poetry is more concerned with the universal, and history with the individual' (51b: 4-7). Both history and literature make use of language, and both narrate. They speak about events actual or possible. Although Aristotle does not speak of

30 World-making actions, we can interpret what could have occurred as re-enacted action. To put it in other words: can we say that the telling, common to both literature and history, can be construed on a scale of the actual and the possible, that is, the singular and the universal? Do they both share the same truth-claims of historical understanding? The historian and the poet face the same task - the reconstruction of past human action. But, while the historian attempts to delineate what happened in an event and to reflect on the participants in the event, the poet creates a situation as if it had happened in order to reveal the universal core of human action. In the text of War and Peace, a historical event is reshaped into a literary truth-claim that purports to explain what it would have been like to have been there; that is, Tolstoy moves us to consider the universal situation of becoming a witness to history. The fullest development of this truth-claim will thus lead us inexorably to the refiguration of the past through our present. The fourth truth-claim is based on authority. Since human beings are purportedly capable of rising above their prejudgments and exercising their reason to adjudicate the truthfulness of the claim before them, prejudice is deemed to be a characteristic of the uncultivated mind. Like so many other legacies from the Age of Reason, this assumption is not valid. If we were to remove all prejudgment from our minds, we would revert to mental infancy and would be unable to discern, or even recognize, the very issue at stake. The fallacy of the absolute self-construction of reason is a prejudice itself and, as is true of many other absolute prejudices, is one that can be traced to that period of institutionalized intolerance, ironically disguised as an age of freedom. What I am calling for here is a reappraisal of the concept of judgment and prejudgment. A distinction must be made, however, between prejudices based on authority and those based on insufficient knowledge of the situation. I am interested here in examining the role of authority in the consideration of the truth-claim in literature. Authority is sometimes considered to be diametrically opposed to reason and freedom; authority, as such, is construed to be the demand of blind obedience to someone of higher rank or greater power. But this is not the essence of authority in general, and certainly not the case in the truth-claim. Authority in the literary text is based on the recognition by the reader that another has a superior vantage point, more knowledge or experience, and is, above all, reliable. Authority in the reading experience cannot be bestowed, but rather must be acquired, step by step, as the reade(s confidence grows. Authority rests on an initial recognition of superior knowledge and hence on an act of reason itself by the reader who is aware of his or her own limitations and accepts that it is possible that others have a better understanding of a given situation. The

The truth-claim and literature 31 confidence of the reader who has recognized the possibility of authority must, however, be earned. Authority in this sense has nothing to do with blind obedience to commands. Indeed, it has nothing at all to do with obedience, but rather with the acknowledgment of superior knowledge and an acquired sense of trust. The truth-claim of textual authority can be found aptly demonstrated in Marcel Proust's Time Regained. The reader makes the same discovery as Marcel the narrator, namely, that the past can be relived in the present, because the narrator's authority to recall the past has been established beyond question and the reader has already witnessed the incidents of Swann's Way now recalled in this last volume. I compared these various happy impressions with one another and found that they had this in common, namely, that I felt them as if they were occurring simultaneously in the present moment and in some distant past, which the sound of the spoon against the plate, or the unevenness of the flagstones, or the peculiar savour of the madeleine even went so far as to make coincide with the present, leaving me uncertain in which period I was. In truth the person within me who was at that moment enjoying this impression enjoyed in it the qualities it possessed which were common to both an earlier day and the present moment, qualities which were independent of all considerations of time; .. . I had now such an eager desire to live that an actual moment from the past had just been revived within me on three distinct occasions. (pp. 196--7)

The reader accepts the experience of Marcel not only as having been lived by him, but - of more consequence - as the basis for his new insight. Textual authority is high in periods of history in which a mimetic aesthetic has been or is prevalent. In contemporary literature, textual authority is very fragile , laborious to construct and therefore easy to deconstruct. This form of truth-claim operates on the basis of the credibility of the text itself. John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman has given a new dimension to this truth-claim by linking it up with the ·historical truth-claim and a metafictional involvement with the reader as the reader of the fiction that is the text. Where does this take us in our enquiry into the truth-claim in literature? Let me summarize what we have discovered to this point before taking up the fifth and last truth-claim: First, the truth-claim is an essential part of the textreader relationship. Second, it operates through a systematic appeal to the reader to relate pre-established concepts or perceptions to textual statements. Third, the appeal can be on the basis of various mediators - empirical, verisimilar patterns and so on.

32 World-making In every example we have examined thus far, we have found that the claim could not be characterized as unidirectional, based on verification. Rather, we have found that the truth-claim involves a referential relationship, one that is full of the tension born of two-way movement. The truth-claim produces an effect in our reading that is generated from the interplay of two levels of meaning. There is, on one side, an appeal to our preestablished norms and operational sense of reality; on the other, there is the demand for textual meaning. It is not accurate, however, to speak of literal meaning and secondary meaning as if one were hidden behind the other. The truth-claim, as I understand it, is always a textual encounter and an imperative to cope with the specifics of the moment. The truth-claim in literature constitutes the pivotal points that, tied together, make up the detenninate ground from which the indetenninate aspects of the text must be considered. Its truth is not only about personal or cultural phenomena but about certain aspects of reality. Yet, it is tied to reality without corresponding to it in terms of similarity, correctness, or confonnity. Only the mistaken use of such terms allows Kingsley B. Price to deny the validity of the truth-claim in literature. Social interaction is the distinguishing feature of value-sharing speakers of a language. The human being is, therefore, a value sharer, and human communities are defined by the values they share and agree to share. No human community or individual can get by without constantly giving and exchanging values of all sorts. The principal means by which we belong and participate in the world community is the reception and generation of truthclaims from the tales of childhood, the descriptions of the experiences of our parents, the reading of texts. In everything we read, we are involved in judgments and the discernment of values. The reading of literary texts is grounded in the living experience of human action, not only because language itself is the embodiment of human action, but because all construction of meaning and the desire for understanding rests on our judgments of the situations we confront.2 What I have attempted in this chapter is an analysis of the different kinds of textual situations that, as truth-claims, require our evaluative response. I am interested in the delineation of that aspect of the reader- text relationship that Iser has called consistency-building and is the threshold to understanding; my argument is that the examination of the truth-claim is the basic inquiry from which we begin interpretation. Let us speak of the literary work of art as an intensification of reality or, better yet, in Ricoeur's terms, as a redescription of reality. The reality in question is not some abstract notion but the present reality of human action as we experience it, talk about it, write about it, and, most of all, constantly

The truth-claim and literature 33 remake it. The literary text expresses the real through the reader, who has the capacity to imagine, project future action, and change his or her perceptions. The imaginative capacity of the reader makes the aesthetic experience and delineates the boundaries of the truth-claim. Our imaginative grasp of the situations of a poem, play, or novel is a translucent prism, enabling the symbolizer, the reader, to become the symbolized. Each of us creates his or her own imperfect image in response to the challenge of the text. Recognizing this extended sense of symbolic circularity leads us once more to the conclusion that the truth-claim in literature is, above all, the barometer of our world. The functional role of the truth-claims we have discussed thus far is one of stabilization in the process of the world-making, but there is still another truth-claim to examine, and it is one that comes to us as a challenge. The fifth class of truth-claim is the truth of the selfs belief systems. Therefore, the truth-claim of self differs from the other truth-claims we have examined in that it pervades the entire reader-text relationship. While other truth-claims may serve limited functions, and some may subsume others, the truth-claim of self is at the very core of the reading experience. This does not mean that every line or every page of a text jumps out at us as a truth-claim. Quite the contrary, the truth-claim of self is usually built up over time and does not emerge fully until the reader is caught up in a conflict and must take a stand. Much of consistency-building in reading literature consists of taking apart and putting together, and doing both simultaneously. On the one hand, generalizations are broken down into parts, and opinions, themes, and concepts into the subspecies of impressions; on the other hand, our imaginative projection flashes ahead of the particulars; we construct general concepts out of parts and members; we make corrections and enlarge our view into a whole. Such construction and deconstru