Anger 2005

Suzy Anger. Victorian Interpretation. Cornell UP, 2005.

• An Overview
  • 1: “[In the Victorian period,] knowledge, it might be said, became aware of its historical and cultural constitution.”
  • Hermeneutics in her definition:

1) textual interpretation (emergent from Romantic/Schleiermacher work) and 2) in a more metaphysical sense: “the idea that human experience is fundamentally interpretive” (5) 3) with the goal being “overcoming differences (often historical) between the text and the reader so as to understand the true meaning of the text,” (6) though that may be an unattainable ideal as the increasing historicization of knowledge through the lens of perspectivism and cultural situatedness create questions “about how fixed meaning is possible (12)

• • 2: Her project: a “sustained account of the pervasive concern with interpretation in the period” and a representation “of Victorian views on interpretation in the context of current hermeneutic controversies.”
  • 4: Argument: “secular interpretation in both the Victorian age and today is far more indebted to the strategies and conceptual models of sacred hermeneutics than has been acknowledged.”
  • 16: nice list of the range of hermeneutic questions the Victorians began asking
• Mention the structure of chapters and intertexts
• 1: Victorian Scriptural Hermeneutics
  • 23: “trajectory of hermeneutics in the C19 from theology outwards into secular interpretation; by century’s end, literary criticism had become the ascendant practice.”
  • Theology responding to challenges from Higher Criticism and Darwinian evolution with “new exegetical principles that acknowledge the growing evidence of the Bible’s historicity…One crucial consequence of this hermeneutic innovation was the dissolution of the boundaries that traditionally separated the Bible from other literature.”
  • Case study: Benjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol College, Oxford) (“biblical narratives must be understood in the context of the time when they were written” (24)) vs. Newman (“the text must constantly transform…meaning can only be unfolded historically” (24))
    • Jowett: politically liberal, intentionalist/subjectivist, 1 historical meaning, rejecting subsequent ecclesiastical authority (“overturning the church’s authoritative control of meaning” (27)), Essays and Reviews (1860)
    • Newman: politically conservative (Anglo-Catholic), what we’d now call presentist, meaning changes over time, embracing doctrine/traditions that follow Scripture, “Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine” (1844)
• Interesting to note that the “dissolution of the boundaries” between Bible and literature originated in the more politically conservative project: “His theory stands as another Victorian example that indeterminacy need not be aligned with any particular politics; indeed, in Newman’s case, the assertion of the inevitability of shifting meaning becomes a way of maintaining the church’s control of the text. Newman’s ultimate aim is to demonstrate that, despite the personal and perspectival nature of any experience, certain knowledge is attainable. But he does this by insisting on historical contingency.” (39)
  • 33: “Newman rejects the idea that the meaning of the text is to be found in the intentions of the original writer, arguing instead that the text should be understood in the context of an interpretive community [Fish] and in the light of tradition”
    • Anticipating Gadamerian hermeneutics, “we are always bound by our historical horizons”

o 39: Theology responded to the development of evolutionary discourse with “the emergence of a theory that combines an evolutionary model of history with textual exegesis” – “the widespread adoption of evolutionary models in all areas of thought in the late C19 signals new ways of understanding the world” (41)

• • • Chambers, Feuerbach
  • 45: Arnold et al. pick up on an evolutionary model of interpretation, that “interpretations are provisional and historically situated,” from exegesis and applies it to literary criticism, arguing that literary critics should discuss the poetical nature of the Bible, too
• I1: Victorian Legal Interpretation
  • 58-9: “Victorian commentators became more conscious not only of the problems involved in discovering intention but also of the ways in which historical distance exacerbates those problems, particularly in the case of the law, where the judge seeks not only to interpret the law, but to apply it in the present…. Interpretation of the law, then, makes unavoidable the recognition of the historical situatedness of understanding.”
• 2: Carlyle: Between Biblical Exegesis and Romantic Hermeneutics
  • The title says it all: Carlyle positions himself between biblical and sacred hermeneutics and Anger depicts him as a transitional figure as such
  • 67: For Carlyle, interpretation is not one method of knowing among others. It is the fundamental mode of all human knowledge. He sees the whole world as purposeful, immanent with meaning, and so approaches it as if it were made to be interpreted.
  • 62: …taken together, his works still offer a complex inquiry into the role of interpretation, and the variety of genres in which he writes allows him to put his hermeneutic principles into practice in ways not possible in a purely theoretical context.
  • 64: Because human understanding is historically conditioned, attempts at articulating divine meaning will necessarily take on different forms in different historical periods [a la Newman]. This does not, however, amount for Carlyle to an interpretive relativism that releases understanding from the constraints of an originating intention. Meaning is grounded in divine intention, but its entirety is always beyond our grasp.
  • Carlyle grafts onto the ideas he finds in German idealism the Christian notion of the world as a text, and the synthesis makes unending interpretation in pursuit of meaning a necessity.
  • 69: …knowledge is inextricably tied to morality. Interpretive constraints enter through the ethical attitude of the interpreter.
    • A commonplace between him, Eliot, and even Wilde (in Anger’s interpretation)
  • 73: While it would be easy, given our current emphasis on undecidability, to see Sartor as a text whose main point is the instability of interpretation, Carlyle’s object is almost the reverse. That is, he wants his readers to recognize that firmly entrenched ideas, customs, social practices are modifiable and that better interpretations are possible. His emphasis is on the difficulty of seeing in new ways, and he tries to dramatize how interpretations take hold and become very difficult to shake off.
  • In his historical writing, he is surprisingly (post)modern in his awareness of “the textuality of historical knowledge, the effects of representation, and the impossibility of giving a complete account of the past,” avoiding some of the pitfalls of the historical positivism that took over later in the C19 (79-80)
  • His thought “unites a belief in the real with a skepticism about our ability to know it” (83)
• I2: Vic Science and Hermeneutics
  • 87: It is often assumed that theorists did not begin to argue that hermeneutic methods were also central to the natural sciences until the second half of the twentieth century, when philosophers of science such as Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn established the importance of preunderstanding for science, arguing that facts are not independent of scientific theories…. Interpretive views, however, were already present in Victorian scientific thought.
  • Contra the traditional view of Victorian science as merely observing, Anger constructs this narrative of the way some Victorian science “half creates, half perceives” in Wordsworth’s phrase
• 3: Eliot’s Hermeneutics of Sympathy
  • This the hardest chapter for me, mostly because I don’t know Middlemarch or Daniel Deronda
  • Anger writing against a critical tradition that holds that the sympathy Elliot’s characters have is always disguised self-interest or narcissistic projection
  • 96: If Carlyle offered a hermeneutic theory that was transitional, located somewhere between the theological and the secular, George Eliot’s thought on interpretation moves hermeneutics fully into the secular realm.
    • “Hermeneutics of sympathy”: “enact[ing] interpretive conflicts not to demonstrate indeterminacy, but to reveal the conditions needed for more accurate interpretation”
• Like Carlyle, there is a real, but it is not always within our perspectival abilities to get to it
• Novels saturated in an ethics of sympathy and selflessness
  • Demonstrates her immersion in Romantic hermeneutics and the way it encounters biblical criticism through her translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, the central claim of which is “that God is a fictitious creation of the human mind, a projection of human predicates, and hence that Christianity is not truth. Yet Feuerbach does not deny that there is any truth. He sees his project as the uncovering of an established, but erroneous, belief system in the pursuit of “unveiled, naked truth.”” (104)
  • 117: “Notwithstanding her forceful dramatization of the difficulties of moving beyond one’s one subjective viewpoint, Eliot never abandons the idea that there are correct ways of interpreting.” Never becoming relativistic in the modern sense
  • 130: It may have come to seem naïve to take Eliot at her word: “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring, human creatures.” (Letters, 3:111). But when her novels demonstrate so complex a grasp of the workings and problems of intentionalist hermeneutics, it seems preferable to take seriously her commitment to the value of sympathetic understanding.
• I3: Vic Lit Crit
  • One of my favorite parts
  • 131: Mapping what happens when “the focus of criticism began to shift from evaluation and judgment to the principles of interpreting literature.”
  • 132: …an extensive and specifically literary hermeneutics emerges in modern British culture only after it had absorbed the German Romantic hermeneutics’ attempts to formulate general theories of linguistic understanding, and only after the reconception of the Bible as literary text had been accomplished.
  • 133: …a confluence of conditions led to a more widespread interest in the interpretation of literary texts. Most importantly, the rereading of the Bible as literature that Matthew Arnold had championed had taken hold, and the methods and concerns of theological interpretation were transferred from the Bible to secular literature. Popular studies in etymology and philology had led to greater interest in the workings of language. Finally and crucially, the formation of a number of learned societies (basically the models for what academics in literature do more than one hundred years later) fostered interpretive debate over meaning, and the movement to make English literature a subject of study in the universities played an important role as well.
    • New Shakespeare Society (emphasis not on textual work but rather understanding the evolution of Shakespeare’s thought) and the Browning Society, the first (British?) society for studying a living author’s work – great anecdote about when questions about interpretation would arise, Furnivall (president) would just write to Browning and ask

o Demonstrates how many of the critical theories of the New Criticism – including the “intentional fallacy,” moving away from intentionalist hermeneutics (or locating intention in the work of art itself rather than the person of the author) – were already present in Victorian literary critical thought (138-9)

• 4: Wilde and Literary Hermeneutics
  • Mainly focusing on “The Critic as Artist,” “The Invention of Lying” (critical dialogues), “The Portrait of Mr. W-H,” a work of quasi-literary criticism and fiction highlighting the homosexual desire in Shakespeare’s sonnets, and then in the reconsideration of the relation between intention and meaning that came late in De Profundis, which is a defense of his own authorial intentions after his trial
  • 142: Although the secular and the aesthetic are his provinces, he concentrates on the same problems of textual interpretation that consumed the biblical exegetes – albeit with a levity that is rarely found in theological hermeneutics. In Wilde, we see the transformation this book has been following, in which literary criticism displaces biblical exegesis as the central site of interpretive activity and speculation.
  • 142-3: Rather than offering a single account of meaning, Wilde stages a particularly rich exploration of the interpretive problems that have continued to be central to literary theory. His thought on interpretation makes his work unusually useful for theoretical discussion because, as we shall see, even the most obviously modern and seemingly amoral of writers in the development of the Victorian hermeneutic tradition founded his theories in the ethical.
  • 143: Wilde has commonly been placed in a line of thought running from Arnold through Pater to Wilde. On this account, the subjectivist position that Wilde advocates is seen as a reversal of Arnold’s claim that the critic’s aim is to “see the object as in itself it really is.” Influenced by Pater’s reformulation of this aim in his “Preface” to The Renaissance – “In aesthetic criticism the first step is to know one’s own impression as it really is” – Wilde again revises the critic’s project, claiming that “the primary aim of the artist is to see the object as in itself it really is not.” In interpreting a text, one is interpreting oneself.
  • 144: Wilde in his dialogues rejects conventional notions of truth, dismisses intentionalism, and denies that a critical judgment should be disinterested.
    • Presaging reader response criticism: that the work’s meaning is only created when it is read and that interpretation is always contingent on the “horizon of expectations” of historical, embodied, partial interpreters
  • But it’s not that easy: in “Mr. W-H,” he says the critic should also be fully immersed in the historical context of a literary text and an artistic sensibility (less clear on what this entails)
  • But not completely amoral, either: in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” he advocates for a form of socialism so that people can be free to develop said artistic sensibility and creative ventures (153)
• Epilogue
  • This was a bit much: drawing in hermeneutics of psychology rather than concluding the book’s overall argument properly
  • Discussing how memory is a constructed narrative that requires interpretation in Victorian thought (167)
  • 171: Our histories of the Victorians need to be modified to come to terms with a theoretical sophistication with which they are rarely credited. Viewing literary theory in the wider perspective afforded by Victorian hermeneutics, we have come to see an important Victorian presence in current thinking about meaning and interpretation, while also gaining new ways to step outside our own perspectives.