Robertson Davies: A Mingling of Contrarieties

Authentic Forgeries: Hermeneutics, Artifice, and Authenticity in Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone

Authentic Forgeries: Hermeneutics, Artifice, and Authenticity in Robertson Davies' What's Bred in the Bone DAVID HALLETT When SimonDarcourt calls Francis Cornish a "true son of Hermes" early in What's Bred in the Bone, he provides a hermeneutic "skeleton key" both to meaningin the novel and to a comprehension of Davies' sense of self as moral fictionist.1 The figure of Hermes organizes and gives meaning to the novel's many uses of artifice and invention, even as the hermeneutic notion of "horizon(s) of expectation" enables a recognition of the didactic component of Davies' fiction. Reference to devices such as retouched photos, player pianos, stories and lies that characters tell each other, and, especially, art restoration help to authenticateartifice as both an instrument for teaching and a record of genuinehumanemotion.Beginningwith theories of the horizon of expectation, as developed by Hans Robert Jauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, I will argue that all the artifices-imitations, copies, and genuine articles alike-and the novel that contains them represent efforts to shape and expand the human horizon of expectation. More importantlyfor Davies, the novel challenges specifically Canadian horizons of expectations, as held by Canadians of themselves and ostensibly as held by the rest of the world perceiving Canada. The novel, by engaging the real world of which it is a part, becomes an"authentic forgery." After making averybrief comparison of What's Bred in the Bone with William Gaddis' 1955 novel, The Recognitions, I will argue that in What's Bred in the Bone Davies creates a Sidney-esque "defence of fiction" by employing fiction bothto define its own terms of authentification andto present a challengeto Canadiansto find valuein the self. Thus, thoughthe 112 novel displays manyofthe definingcharacteristics ofwhat Stanley Fish calls the "self-consuming artifact," it is not self-consuming but self-authenticating. Hermes figures significantly in What's Bred in the Bone as Mercury, "patron of crooks, thejoker... themischief-maker whoupsets all calculations" (13). Hermes is also "the reconciler of opposites" (14). The potential of artifice to convey truth rests in this reconciliation of opposites, which proposition immediately suggests the aptness ofreading of What's Bred in theBone with the hermeneutic circle in mind: "a part of something is always understood in terms of the whole andvice versa."2 For example: the words of a sentence may only be understood in relation to the sentence as a whole, and a sentence may only be understood by analysis of its component words. Gadamer proposes that we understand, not in spite of our historical and cultural prejudices but because of them. Paul Ricoeur adds onefurther refinement to the hermeneuticprocess: "the self... cannot be understood by ... direct scrutiny, but only by way of a detour through cultural works, particularly works of art" (Kerby 92). Thus, if our historical and cultural prejudices can be actively changed, so can our understanding; through art,we can come to understandsomethingof ourselves. Hermeneutics stresses "the crucial importanceof interpretation to most if not all aspects of human endeavour and culture" (Kerby 90). What's Bred in the Bone repeatedly emphasizes the importance of interpretation, from Aunt Mary-Ben's certainty that her skullcaps are "the head-dress of servitude" (45), through Dr. Joseph Ambrosius Jerome (itself a "loaded" name full of hermeneutic possibilities) andhis reading oftheworld as "a huge disease"of which humans "are all part" (196), to the narrator's comment that the role of "the experts" is "to sink their learned teeth into [a work] and worry it to some sort of satisfactory interpretation" (392). The "crucial importance of interpretation" is always in the foreground of the novel,3 and the horizon of expectation is vital to any act of interpretation. Gadamer considers the horizon as "an essential part of every interpretive situation":4 it provides a vantage point "that limits the possibility of vision, resulting from our necessary situatedness in the world" (Holub 553). Most important to analysis of Davies' novel is that this horizon is not fixed, but a "continuously evolving vantage point... intimately linked to theprejudices we bring to any situation, since they represent a 'horizon' over which we cannot see" (553). The "historical" bent of What's Bred in the Bone, its assertion that knowledge of what was "bred in the bone" of a given individualis essential to a comprehension of whatever that individual eventually becomes (18-19, 59, 113 379, 435), seems to encourage a hermeneutic analysis. For...