Victorian Interpretation

Hermeneutics and the Self

e p i l o g u e M Hermeneutics and the Self If the superior psycho-physical mechanism of vision can in dream life seize upon what is really nothing but rows of meaningless blackish spots upon the retina and can convert them into imagined pages of print which may be read with great satisfaction off-hand in a dream, what is it not capable of achieving? That it can cut all manner of capers in hermeneutics I know by abundant experience. —George Trumball Ladd By the end of the nineteenth century, the hermeneutic strategies borrowed from biblical exegesis had made the move into secular literary criticism, but also into a wide range of Victorian disciplines. In this epilogue, I conclude by looking briefly at a Victorian phenomenon in which hermeneutics plays a crucial role without any direct allusion to its biblical ancestry: the new field of psychology and in particular the study of memory. The workings of the mind were understood as hermeneutic by many late Victorians. For interpretation, as we now can recognize, moved from texts into our very imaginations of ourselves, in the new discipline of psychology. Although as it was developing in the nineteenth century, psychology was subject, like the other Victorian sciences, to the requirements of “observation ” that accompanied the growth of laboratory studies, it was subject also to another imperative: that it rely on interpretive methods. George Henry Lewes, for instance, in The Study of Psychology, maintained that our methods of understanding mental processes always involve interpretation. “We have 166 no microscope, balance, and reagent, to see what is too minute for the unassisted eye, to measure what is quantitative, to test what is compound in mental processes: our closest observation is interpretation. . . . Nay, even the observations of external data have all to be interpreted, and their value lies wholly in interpretation.”1 Lewes uses “interpretation” here in the sense that theorizing must always go beyond the already theory-laden observation. Sigmund Freud, at the end of the period, was to conceive of psychology as involving interpretation in ways closer to the process of textual interpretation . In the Interpretation of Dreams, writing that “the aim which I have set before myself is that dreams are capable of being interpreted,” Freud proceeds to show that dream psychology involves a double process of interpretation, the unconscious interpretive activity of the dreaming mind and the interpretive deciphering of the analyst.2 But Victorian writers had themselves already been figuring mental activity as a mode of interpretation, and the self as requiring interpretation. James Sully, whose Illusions: A Psychological Study treats all forms of human cognition as interpretive, described a dream as a “palimpsest” some years before Freud’s work appeared, in an essay whose influence Freud acknowledged: “Like some letter in cipher,” Sully wrote, “the dream-inscription when scrutinized closely loses its first look of balderdash and takes on the aspect of a serious, intelligible message.”3 This interpretive model of human psychology is particularly apparent in Victorian writing on memory. Toward the end of the period, psychological and philosophical theory began to conceive of memory in ways that relied upon models borrowed from hermeneutics. With the development of the experimental study of memory in the nineteenth century, theoretical work on memory came to focus on fallibilities, distortions, and illusions of memory, and this research reads very much like current literary theory on autobiographical texts, with its interest in the construction of the self and time in memory, and, especially, on the interpretive aspects of retrospection. Victorian theorists suggested that memory—and thus identity—belongs in the sphere of hermeneutics. Underscoring the unreliability of reminiscence, they argued that memory was a constructed narrative, at the best distorted, partially imaginary, a mode of interpretation that almost always threatens to become misinterpretation. In the last decades of the century physiological research led to increased knowledge of brain functioning: neurological research provided insights into cerebral localization; experimental psychology, relying on statistics, was introduced in Hermann Ebbinghaus’s laboratory investigations of memory. Even those who most fervently held to memory’s spiritual nature Epilogue 167 began to accept that memory is in part dependent on physical processes.4 The move away from introspection as the primary means of studying memory that came with developments in physiology led to an increasing emphasis in the research on the pervasiveness of forgetting, on the ways in which memory goes wrong, and...