Limits to Interpretation: The Meanings of Anna Karenina

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. As I hope this book will demonstrate, the method that I advocate and that grows out of the Russian tradition bears no relation to the following characterization of (mostly French) structuralism by Rivkin and Ryan: “Structuralists saw signs as windows to a trans-empirical world of crystalline order, of identities of form that maintained themselves over time and outside history, of codes of meaning that seemed exempt from the differences entailed by the contingencies of living examples” (334). 2. See Delbanco for a similar characterization of the academic field of English : “It regards the idea of progress as a pernicious myth, but never have there been so many critics so sure that they represent so much progress over their predecessors ” (38). 3. Lotman, Struktura khudozhestvennogo teksta 89. 4. For an example of this position and my arguments against it, see 5.5. 5. See Striedter for a balanced summary of this problem (34–35). See also Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Jacques Derrida, in which Habermas argues for abandoning a conception of context as open-ended and for returning to what Jakobson and the Czech Structuralists saw as the normative constraints on interpretation resulting from formal relations in particular kinds of texts (summarized by Norris 57–58). 6. This bears some relation to both Roman Ingarden’s and Felix Vodi†cka’s different conceptions of the extent to which the “potential of the [literary] artifact is describable” (Striedter 130–31). In my focus on “immanent” structures of meaning I am closer to Ingarden than to Vodi†cka’s more historicized approach. 7. However, for a notable step in this direction, see Brooks’s analysis of the relation between novelistic plotting and the psychology of desire. 8. Parts of the argument below appeared in my articles “Alterity, Hermeneutic Indices, and the Limits of Interpretation” and “Biology, Semiosis, and Cultural Difference in Lotman’s Semiosphere.” 9. Quoted in Tooby and Cosmides 67, following Werner Heisenberg. 301 10. For a similar conclusion in relation to reading, see Attridge: “To be other is necessarily to be other to”; and alterity is “premised on a relation”; thus, “[a]n entity without this relation would simply not impinge on me; and as far as I was concerned, it would be nonexistent” (22). 11. For a characterization of this discipline, see Shweder. 12. Lotman, Kul’tura i vzryv 54. 13. Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View” 132. 14. Helms 707. 15. Landrine 745. 16. Gîtîtî 6. 17. Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View” 134. Haney makes a similar point when he argues that “the structure of the reader’s interpretive relationship to a literary text has affinities with a person’s ethical relationships to others” (38). 18. My approach thus bears only a vague resemblance to some of E. D. Hirsch’s well-known arguments in Validity in Interpretation. For example, I agree that there is a useful distinction between the meaning that inheres in a work and what readers can do with it (Hirsch’s “meaning” and “significance,” 8), but I disagree that we can recover authorial intention (or “will,” 27, 96) or that plural meanings are impossible (45). I do find it interesting and potentially useful, however , at least to consider statements that authors make about their intentions and to see how they relate to their texts. 19. Williams 169–70; Lewis B9; see also Farber and Sherry. 20. For a recent overview of some of these trends, see Morgan. 21. Derrida, Letter, 11 Feb. 1993: 44. 22. Derrida, Letter, 25 Mar. 1993: 65. 23. Wolin 66, emphasis in original; see also Sheehan, Reply. 24. De Man 181. 25. De Man’s partisans acknowledge freely the a priori philosophical positions (one could call them “biases”) that motivate his readings of particular works. For example, Culler speaks of de Man’s general attempt “to undo totalizing metaphors , myths of immediacy, organic unity, and presence and combat their fascinations ” (“Paul de Man’s Contribution” 271). Similarly, Latimer describes the “ultimate question of de Man’s work” as “the irreparable separation of consciousness from Being, or even more insistently, the separation of expression from the intuition of plenitude.” As a consequence of this, de Man “pressures” writers such as Coleridge, Yeats, Hölderlin, and the Russian Symbolists “until they renounce their theological claims and admit poetry’s inevitable enslavement to the merely human and temporal” (Latimer 184). 26. Miller characterizes de Man’s theory of “reading...