Sounding Hermeneutics: Two Recent Works

Abstract

Hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, began as a tool of historical inquiry. The polymath German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher invented it in his study of ancient Greek sculpture. By following the rules, he maintained, modern critics could understand an ancient work of art better than its maker and, indeed, they could reconstruct a dismembered work from a small fragment. In his study of New Testament texts, Schleiermacher himself turned this new tool from sculpture to literature. Still, even in Schleiermacher's day, doubters questioned that modern interpreters could escape the mental boundaries of their own circumstances and recover lost ways of thinking about composition in distant ages and alien cultures. In time, Nietzsche, with his habitual swagger, put such facts beyond recovery; all, he said, was interpretation. For many, this extreme, antihistorical stance has remained compelling, especially for recent critics who are convinced that all is discourse and, consequently, that, far from penetrating through the text to the author's intent and circumstances, interpreters endlessly, perhaps aimlessly, dismember and recombine all works of art into ever-shifting discourse. Given the disparity between words and things, language itself is a study in bad faith, and making the sense of words, an exercise in power. For others, the original impulse of hermeneutics has remained: with fidelity to the materials, to recover the lost principles of composition, and thus of thought and understanding, followed in a work of art. Among them, scholars who hold to one or another strand in phenomenology have notably kept the historical objectives of hermeneutics, and they have commonly indicated their assumption of general framing structures prior to individual works of art by using words with the prefix meta- (as, for example, in metacriticism). The two recent books under review illustrate the liveliness of the hermeneutic tradition and, naturally, the degree to which, in its present manifestations, it is able to accomplish its historical objectives, including fidelity to an artist's or author's original intent. Suzanne Reynolds's book deals with the smallest units of language-syllables, words, and phrases-as interpreted by glossators in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Its signature is metalinguistics. Brian Stock's book works on a large scale. It represents conceptions guiding Augustine of Hippo in