World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts by Mario J. Valdés (review)

142 LETTERS IN CANADA 1993 Samuel Johnson, confident that it applies to translation: ITo a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient; the purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside,' The present study reveals the presence of a healthy diversity of styles and attitudes towards translation that defies the familiar old cliche. It would appear that the translators studied, rather than attempting to be beautiful or faithful, or indeed even choosing between the two, have aimed to create texts pleasing to themselves and to their readers, that is to say to an English-language audience, and perhaps, although not necessarily, pleasing to the authors and critics. Humanities/Sciences humaines Mario J. Valdes. World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts University of Toronto Press 1992. x, 178. $40.001 $16.95 paper Humanists - those of us aware that we are trying to understand the world through textual mediations - sometimes recognize that we seem to be chasing our own tails: the local details of the text make sense only within the context of a general framework of understanding, but the general framework can be discerned reliably only on the basis of the local details. We have been inside this Ihermeneutic circle' long before Schleiermacher invented the term, and we can confidently predict that, with one possible exception I will get to later, no theory or methodology currently on the horizon will find a way out of it. There remain, however, significant differences in the way we understand and deal with the situation. In this engaging and wide-ranging book, Mario Valdes argues that, enclosed as we may be within the hermeneutic circle (he does not use the term, but he does not have to), there is very substantial room for manoeuvre, and the manoeuvring is far more systematic and productive than just going around in circles. The book begins with and is directed to substantiating the claim 'that a textual assertion is to be considered true by the reader.' Valdes thus acknowledges the position of 'the reader' at the origin of the interpretive process: 'the individual as a real person, not an abstraction,' is 'the necessary starting-point for all inquiry.' But the apparent conclusion of interpretive subjectivity is one which Valdes strenuously resists; the interpretive process, he insists, is methodologically rigorous and stable as a consequence, in p-art, of the determinate features of texts. He distinguishes among five such features - five Itruth-claims' that texts may be said to assert. The first three of these are more or less verifiable, but the HUMANITIES 143 last two, 'textual authority' and 'the self's own sense of order,' are not; and it is to these that Valdes devotes most of his interest and in which he invests his strongest claims. Although 'the self' seems to refer at times to individual voices within the dramatic action, the concept clearly centres on 'the reader's own scale of beliefs and values' and thus takes us back to the individual interpreting subject. This is no less true of 'textual authority,' which Valdes defines as 'the reliability of the narrative or lyric voice.' This is, he acknowledges, 'a difficult truth-claim to sustain' for, given 'the ever-present risk of falling into fantasy of hermetic dimensions or of an idiosyncratic make-up,' how can we distinguish between a true and false textual authority? Some version or other of this question is, as Valdes remarks early on, 'the turning-point' of his argument: 'if we must scrutinize the context of the work to engage in useful explanation, we must clearly establish whose context is called for and who determines the context.' At the end of the process, then, we shift our attention back from the textual properties of the interpretive object and over to the position occupied by the interpreting subject at the beginning. Although this is still pretty clearly a circular movement, Valdes's preferred epithet to describe the trajectory is dialectical. Hence, though readers may be said to familiarize and take possession of historically strange texts, we do so from a position that is itself, arguably, constituted...