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history of interpreting the 'Soracte Ode', we see that controversy arises about how far the system can be extended. L.P. Wilkinson submitted that the third strophe 'gains enormously in significance, and unites the whole poem, if we feel the storm to be the storm of life, and the calm the calm of death'; Steele Commager, among others, added that the ash-trees are 'old' and that cypresses have funerary connotations.55 But it has been objected that the poem's argument demands that the calm be reassuring, so that this particular correspondence must be abandoned.56 In this case, the rejection of symbolism is motivated by considerations of consistency, but we also find refusals to read the winter in the first strophe as symbolic of old age, although here consistency is not at stake; West, e.g., bluntly declares: 'Horace's snow is simply snow'.57 His motive is a fear of reductionism: if many terms are metaphorically equated, they all become instances of the same overarching category, which is then often proposed as the 'theme' of the poem (as when Commager writes: 'mortality is the poem's real theme').58 In somewhat technical terms one could state that Commager and others, by establishing connections of similarity and opposition between elements in the poem, convert the syntagmatic order of these elements into a paradigmatic order; this too is a powerful, but (as we see) contested convention.59 |
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Now the two conventions I have identified are not logically incompatible. One can hold without contradiction that at the level of the communication between speaker and addressee the poem is uttered in a certain situation and reveals a certain frame of mind, whereas at the level of the communication between poet and reader it is constructed in such a way that symbolical connections obtain between elements of the text. Yet readers are often disinclined to be that catholic. I have already instanced West's refusal to read symbolically, but there are also many examples of refusals to reconstruct a situation in which the poem is a conceivable speech act.60 This suggests that discussions about the interpretation of the 'Soracte Ode' cannot be resolved simply by looking harder at the poem, but have to take into account the framework within which the text is read, or (in Jaussian terms) the 'horizon'. But this also suggests that one cannot speak of 'the' horizon of a certain historical moment, as Jauss does, because the horizon is not in fact homogeneous. People negotiate about their various horizons, and in the modern age the main vehicle for this negotiation is interpretation. |
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But interpreters negotiate their horizons not only with the horizons of other interpreters, but also with what they know or think they know about |
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55 See Wilkinson (1951) 131 and Commager (1962) 271. |
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56 E.g. Pöschl (1991) 3840. |
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57 West (1967) 11; similarly e.g. Pöschl (1991) 45 and Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 118. |
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58 Commager (1962) 271. |
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59 Roman Jakobson's famous description of the poetic function (Jakobson 1960) turns this convention of reception into a principle of production; cf. Posner (1982) 17179. |
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60 See e.g. Commager (1962) 271, Nisbet and Hubbard (1970) 11718, Davis (1992) 15253. |
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