BERNEVAL

Who you hold hands with influences your experience of the circle.

The hermeneutical analysis of the interrelation of literary understanding and historical understanding follows from and encapsulates the arguments of previous chapters for the essential interconnection of understanding, interpretation, and criticism. Poetic truth is interpretive truth in the sense that the work has to be brought into an interpretation even to be understood. This movement raises the danger of relativism, the possibility that anything at all can be read into the text. Therefore criticism of the interpretation and its validity and legitimacy must be possible. But criticism is possible only if the understanding of the text is interpretive (if the one right understanding of the text were immediately given, criticism of the understanding would not be necessary or even possible.) To understand how the text has been intepreted, the understanding that conditioned the interpretation must be examined; understanding of the text is also self-understanding. But such self-understanding is always interpretive, since one can never completely objectify oneself.

In this case we have been holding hands with David Couzens Hoy through the opening paragraph of “Literary History and the Interpretative Circle: A Synopsis” which is the concluding section to his The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics.

And so for day 747
29.12.2008

In Jack Vance’s 1978 sci-fi novel Wyst: Alastor 1716 we are treated to descriptions of Arrabus on the planet Wyst which is an “egalistic” nation. Our protagonist, a visitor to this world and nation, is in conversation with the alluring Kedidah who explains why she is considered by some as a sexivator

“Oh — I don’t really know [why]. I like to tease and play. I arrange my hair to suit my mood. I like men to like me and I’m not concerned about women.

At this point a footnote reads:

*A more or less accurate paraphrase. The Arrabin dialect avoids distinction of gender. Masculine and feminine pronouns are suppressed in favor of the neutral pronoun. “Parent” replaces “mother” and “father”; “sibling” serves for both “brother” and “sister.” When the distinctions must be made, as in the conversation transcribed above, colloquialisms are used, almost brutally offensive in literal translation, reference being made to the genital organs.

So by a form of back translation (the use of genital-specific “cock” and “cunt”) the heteronormative tumbles out as one specific possibility — the coarseness of the language making it evident that other combinations can exist. The lack of their expression may be entirely due to the proclivities of the characters through which the narrative is focalized. Someone could borrow the world and write the unsaid.

And so for day 741
23.12.2008