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Jauss claims that his tripartition itself is directly derived from Gadamer (to whom the original article was dedicated). |
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Jauss refers to those passages of Wahrheit und Methode in which Gadamer takes up the eighteenth-century doctrine of the three subtilitates: the subtilitas intelligendi or Verstehen, the subtilitas explicandi or Auslegung and the subtilitas applicandi or Anwendung, which I will translate as 'understanding', 'explication' and 'application'.34 According to Gadamer, the hermeneutics of Romanticism had already demonstrated that understanding and explication are two sides of the same coin; he now argues that application is also part of this unity, because 'in understanding there always takes place something like an application of the text . . . to the present situation of the interpreter'. One divergence between Jauss and Gadamer is immediately obvious: Jauss's historical reading does not correspond to Gadamer's application; it is not even the history of this application, because it also comprises the history of the 'aesthetic' and 'explicative' moments. More fundamentally, for Gadamer understanding, explication and application are inseparable aspects of understanding the same thing, whereas in Jauss each successive reading understands something different, something which could not be understood in the preceding reading. This becomes particularly clear in Jauss's treatment of understanding and explication, which in Gadamer, after Schleiermacher, are related as 'speaking aloud' is related to 'speaking inwardly'.35 |
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In Jauss, the 'understanding' reading is also called 'aesthetic' and (with something of a figura etymologica) 'perceptual'. 'Perception', according to Jauss, is a linear process in time, and his first reading is tantamount to a 'reader-response' analysis of the experiences 'the reader' has when going through the text (indeed Iser is invoked: 820). When the reading process has reached its end, the 'form' of the text has been 'fulfilled', but not yet its 'meaning': for that to happen, the retrospection of the second reading is required (820, 837). This differential treatment of form and meaning must seem questionable, because the perception of formal features involves retrospection just as well: even a simple rhyme cannot be recognized as such without a memory of what has gone before (Jauss unwittingly acknowledges as much when he slips into phrases like 'looking back' (827, 831) in the course of his first reading). It would seem a truer description that form and meaning are both constituted by the interaction of anticipation and retrospection. Moreover, the reduction of the 'aesthetic' to a linear process must be criticized: the aesthetic experience of a poem (in the sense of the experience of a poem as art) may for some readers consist in the 'dynamic' |
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34 Gadamer (1986) 31216 (29095); the quotation in the next sentence is from 313 (291). These pages were the starting-point for Fuhrmann, Jauss and Pannenberg (eds.) (1981), in which Jauss originally published the first section of his article (cf. n. 14). |
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35 See Gadamer (1986) 188 (17273), with the quotation from Schleiermacher in n. 15. |
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