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enactment or re-enactment of its first perception, but for other readers it may consist in a more 'static' contemplation which requires the first perception to be completed. This differentiation between readers brings up the question of the status of 'the reader'. |
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Jauss does not engage in a typology of implied, informed, ideal or superreaders (apart from rejecting the latter), but puts himself 'into the role of a reader with the educational horizon (Bildungshorizont) of our present day' (819). One could ask how homogeneous that horizon is (a question which also arises about Jauss's earlier dealings with 'the' horizon of 'the' audience), but here I would like to draw attention to another issue. Jauss undertakes 'to suspend for the moment his competence in literary history and in the language' (819) and indeed, in reading a poem by Baudelaire entitled "Spleen", he elaborately tries not to know anything about the meaning of 'spleen' or about the role of that word in Baudelaire's work, and even contrives to ignore that in Les Fleurs du Mal the poem stands together with three others also called "Spleen" (82526). His impulse seems to be not so much to evade the hermeneutic circle (about which he does not talk) as to keep the 'aesthetic perception' as pure and as absolute as possible. In other words: Jauss's first reader (and his second to some degree) is an unredeemed practitioner of werkimmanente Interpretation, refusing to acknowledge that his reading is set in a historical horizon of previous knowledge and existing commitments. If we now expect Jauss to point this out and analyze the expectations and presuppositions which went into the making of his reader's 'progressive horizon of aesthetic perception' (825) or of his 'retrospective horizon of explicative understanding' (836), we will be disappointed: since Jauss has decided to identify himself with his reader, he must share both this reader's horizon and his attempt to forget all about it. Jauss does not even explain why he selected this particular poem in the first place: apparently because he had just presented his interpretation of it at a scholarly conference.36 In this case Jauss himself overlooks that a reading is always set in some horizon, some framework within which it is a meaningful activity, and that published readings (like his own) are usually set in the framework of academic debate between scholars who have strong investments in the interpretations they propose. |
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Now Jauss does analyze the history of the reception of the poem, but only in the third reading, after his interpretation is already finished. This obscures the fact that the interpretation has been strongly guided by the history of the reception. In theory Jauss of course admits this (824), but his failure to feed back the third reading into the first and second (and the second into the first) conveys a false suggestion about the reading process. The demand to |
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36 See Jauss (1989b) 18688 for the interpretation and 166, n. * for the conference and its date (1978). |
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