|
|
|
|
|
|
|
author did not or could not foresee. With time, anyway, original external contexts tend to get lost and unintended recontextualizations to proliferate; indeed, in the case of ancient Greek and Latin literature, not only have specific circumstances been lost, but so too have whole cultures, within which those circumstances made at least certain meanings accessible which will now never be recovered. And even where the original context has not been lost, texts can be deliberately decontextualized so that they can be recontextualized within ideological systems which provide them with a new truth value, positive or negative (Plato's various discussions of Greek poetry offer numerous examples of this procedure). |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In the most general terms, interpretation is nothing other than recontextualization, the elaboration of hypothetical external contexts within which problematic texts can be embedded in such a way that coherent and detailed analysis of them can derive their peculiarities from determinate features of these postulated contexts. As a general rule, the internal context provided by the text itself generates the external context (for the latter was invented only as a response to features of the former), but then goes on to provide a test for its viability (for at every moment the text can be measured against the imagined external context to determine to what degree the former can be derived from the latter), so that in practice the two kinds of context tend to be inter-dependent. There are many different varieties of external context which can be used for purposes of recontextualization: for example, the author's historical circumstances, the audience's, the author's psychology, the reader's, the text's genre, various systems of belief, and so on. The differences between schools of interpretation usually derive from differences in the type of external context they prefer to imagine, those between individual interpretations from differences of detail between specific hypothetical contexts. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Obviously, this is a risky procedure, no matter how cautiously it is performed: it trades in hypotheses which no evidence will ever be able finally to warrant. It is often thought that the securest form of external context is historical, for example that provided by the first audience; but in fact over-confidence on this score would be self-delusive. For the richer in detail the imagined historical context is, the more transparent its fictitiousness becomes, no matter how solid the documentary basis upon which it seems to rest (for such documents can never confirm a hypothesis, they can only permit it by not contradicting it). On the other hand, even a stubbornly formalist interpretative strategy, like New Criticism, operates on the basis of detailed premises, concerning the type of text involved and the type of intention and interest to be ascribed to author and audience, which constitute an external context that ought not to pass as self-evident. The fact that interpretation is ineluctably speculative is of course not at all a reason not to interpret, for no other, non-speculative way to discuss the meaning of |
|
|
|
|
|