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make literary hermeneutics truly literary (814) cannot be met by simply putting an 'aesthetic' reading 'first'. |
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The third reading is the one which is most obviously continuous with the original project of the aesthetics of reception. Jauss begins by reconstructing the 'horizon of expectation' (813, 847, 849, 853) of the original audience and by showing how Baudelaire took up a 'contrary position' to it (853). We are very close here to the Provokation, which culminated in a discussion of the lawsuit brought against Flaubert for Madame Bovary in 1857; the very same year, of course, saw Baudelaire put on trial for Les Fleurs du Mal (84748). This trial did not particularly address the second "Spleen" poem, which confronts Jauss with a difficulty that he duly notes: receptions of Baudelaire for a long time did not take the form of interpretations (847). The texts Jauss can find are (in chronological sequence) a few essayistic (and even novelistic) treatments of Les Fleurs du Mal as a whole, then two monographs from 1953 in which the second "Spleen" poem gets a few pages, and then three articles from the 1970s which are specifically devoted to this poem (84865). Apparently the practice of reading itself (at least the practice of writing about reading) has changed in the course of history. This would seem to pose a challenge to Rezeptionsgeschichte, but Jauss does not rise to it. Instead, he treats all texts as if they were interpretations competing with his own, and dispenses praise and (mostly) blame, just as he had done in the article on Goethe's Iphigenie. His criterium is 'the intention of the poem' (863) as he had established it in his first and second readings and in the earlier part of the third reading, that concerned with the reconstruction of the historical horizon of the text. Jauss seems to believe that his first and second readings give him access to 'the intentionality of the text' (816), but in spite of this claim, these readings do not offer a new hermeneutics (apart from being distinguished from each other). It is in the context of the third reading that Jauss makes his own contribution: we will gain access to 'the meaning intended by the author' (703) if in the third reading we carry out a Horizontabhebung, a 'setting off of horizons' (82122). |
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The term Horizontabhebung derives from the same context in Gadamer as Horizontverschmelzung, which Jauss had adopted in the Provokation, but now significantly abandons.37 In Gadamer, both terms are intimately linked: when we wish to understand a text from the past, we cannot naively assimilate its otherness, but we have to 'set off' its horizon from our own, only then to 'fuse' both horizons in the act of understanding. This is closely connected with Gadamer's insistence on application: understanding what the |
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37 See the reference in n. 28. Gadamer does not use the noun Horizontabhebung, but he does use the verb abheben with the object Horizont(e). Jauss introduced Horizontabhebung in the "Spleen" essay at 82122, then returned to it in the "Einleitung" to the third part of Jauss (1982) at 65758 and 66669; cf. also Jauss (1989a) 203 (where it is translated as 'differentiation of horizons'). |
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