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curious dialectic: His initial motivation is to show that our own reception is always historically situated, that we are always inevitably in the Rezeptionsgeschichte; yet in the course of his research into the historical determinants of the earlier receptions, he develops a confidence that we, now forewarned, can avoid historical determination, that we can get out of the Rezeptionsgeschichte. Thus, he argues that the earlier receptions have 'covered up the historically original meaning' (705), whereas his own interpretation is not 'a mere concession to the tastes of the present time' (as one might be tempted to think in view of its stress on 'liberation'), but retrieves 'the lost character' of the work (728). The history of reception is here no more than the traditional Geschichte der Forschung, undertaken for heuristic, pedagogical and rhetorical reasons: to find out what the problems are, to show why others have erred, and to set off in greater splendour one's own solution. It seems as if Jauss does not provide any new 'paradigm' of interpretation, but merely couches traditional philological practice in a Gadamerian vocabulary. A number of years later, however, he made another attempt at designing his own hermeneutics, in the article which I mentioned at the beginning, and to which I now turn. |
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In "Der poetische Text im Horizontwandel der Lektüre (Baudelaires Gedicht: 'Spleen II')" from 19798033 Jauss distinguishes three 'readings', which are 'phenomenologically' successive (814), though not, as he admits, in practice. These are an 'aesthetically perceptual', a 'retrospectively explicating' and a 'historical' reading (813), in which we recognize the three dimensions of aesthetics, hermeneutics and history. It would be incorrect, however, to limit the term 'hermeneutical' to the second reading: rather, Jauss's enterprise as such is hermeneutical, and 'explication' (Auslegung) is only one moment in the total hermeneutical process (81314). The key term 'horizon' and its compound 'change of horizon' also recur, now coupled with 'of reading' (already in the title). Jauss describes the first and the second reading as occurring within a 'horizon', so that a 'change of horizon' takes place in the transition from the first reading to the second (820). Not, however, in the transition from the second reading to the third, because the third is not in fact a 'reading', but a study of the history of the reception of the text; in this context, 'horizon' still refers to the horizon of a historical audience, and 'change of horizon' to the modification of that horizon effected by the reception of the text (846). The 'fusion of horizons' is now absent, which signalizes, as we will see later on, a conscious departure from Gadamer. Yet |
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33 The article was incorporated in Jauss (1982) 81365 (at 813 the title is misprinted as 'Horizontenwandel'); the date of writing is given as 1980 at 813, n. 1 and as 1979 at 819. |
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