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to Jauss this implies that our reception can never be privileged over other receptions: even if we are philologists or historians, we cannot attain immediate access to the work we study, but only an access mediated by the preceding Rezeptionsgeschichte, of which we are ineluctably a part (16873, 18389). To describe what happens in this 'history of reception' Jauss again uses the metaphor of the horizon: whereas in the first model a work acted on a 'horizon of expectation', and, if it was sufficiently new, could bring about a 'change of horizon', in the second model a 'fusion of horizons' (Horizontverschmelzung) takes place, in which the horizon of the readers 'fuses' with the horizon of the work. Here the work has its own horizon from the start, and to this extent Jauss's later division of the horizon of expectation into one of the work and one of the audience can be seen as a harmonization of his two notions of horizon. Yet the two notions derive from different intellectual traditions, as Jauss's own references betray: he notes that the 'horizon of expectation' plays a role in the scientific methodology of Karl R. Popper (20102),27 whereas for the 'fusion of horizons' he acknowledges his indebtedness to the anti-methodological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (18589).28 Gadamer is also the source for 'the logic of question and answer', which we have already encountered as a principle of historical development, and which is here introduced as an instrument of hermeneutics: to understand a text from the past is to understand the question to which it was an answer. Yet, as Jauss remarks, 'Gadamer demonstrates that the reconstructed question can no longer stand in its own horizon, because this horizon is always already encompassed by the horizon of our present'; this implies that 'the historical question needs to pass into (übergehen in) the question that the tradition is for us' (185).29 According to this hermeneutics, therefore, there can be no objective historical reconstruction of the horizon of a work or of the horizon of its audience. Yet we have seen that Jauss aimed at just such a reconstruction and argued that it was feasible. This tension in Jauss' thinking between |
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27 Jauss refers to an article (in German) of 1964, which had originally appeared in 1949; this seems to be the first occurrence of Erwartungshorizont in Popper, who may have taken the term from Karl Mannheim's Mensch und Gesellschaft (1935), the English edition of which he extensively criticized in The Poverty of Historicism. Yet neither Popper nor Mannheim seems to have been Jauss's source. The term was apparently coined by Husserl: it occurs in the 1923 and the 1928 indices to the first book of the Ideen (though not, as far as I can ascertain, in the passages to which these indices refer) and in the 1929 Paris lectures (Husserliana, vol. 1, p. 19). But Jauss knew Husserl only indirectly (174, n. 71, 178, n. 77; also (1982) 66567), and the two concepts of horizon are very different; cf. Anz 1976. See generally the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 3 (1974), s.v. "Horizont" (esp. 11941206). |
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28 See Gadamer (1986) 30512 (28490). The concept of Wirkungsgeschichte, developed by Gadamer in these pages, is at the back of Jauss's Rezeptionsgeschichte. For 'the logic of question and answer' see above, n. 21. |
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29 Jauss partly paraphrases, partly quotes Gadamer (1986) 37980 (356). |
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