Literature III - Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics is not a term one hears often, if ever.  Hermes was the Greek messenger of the gods, whose task was to make known to human intelligence the utterances of the divine.  Ironically enough, he was also the patron of liars.  Quick not just on his winged feet, but with his witty cunning.  Thus, this word, hermeneutics (literal translation: interpretation) is the realm of how meaning is communicated and how we make sense of it once it is.

The first question is where the meaning is located.  Phenomenology (a philosophical school of thought) says meaning comes from the mind that conceives the poetry/literature/art.  Practical Criticism (and fundamentalist religion) say meaning is embedded in the text itself (as in the Bible). Or is meaning something that the readers/viewers/audience decide upon together - like juries or social groups?

Is there a single meaning or as many as their are minds that perceive it?  Can it change as times change?  As social values change?

There's an example given of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and understanding it.  If you had a choice to go forward or backward: Forward all the way into the future, when every analysis and critique has been written throughout the ages on the ideas and views and extrapolations of Hamlet... or backward, back in time to 1601, to the very first production and performance of Hamlet in Elizabethan England at the Globe Theatre on the London South Bank - before anyone had seen it... which would you choose?

People usually always choose to go back and see the original.  Why is this?

In the 1800s and 1900s, German commentators debated whether Biblical texts were to be taken literally or figuratively, or whether their meanings were debatable.  Back in those days and earlier, living or acting out one's interpretation of the Bible could land one in a dungeon or burning at the stake.

One puzzle is the 'Hermeneutic Circle'.  Can you know a text as a whole if you don't understand all the parts?  Can you understand a part if you don't know the whole of it?  What if the author dies before finishing the story - can the meaning ever be known?

Another paradox, posed by Roland Barthes, is first vs second reading.  Upon first reading we follow the 'hermeneutic code' - paying attention to what happens next, in relation to what came before, gathering data without really knowing what will be important later and what won't.  The second and consequent readings we follow the 'symbolic code' - situational attention to background and side details we overlooked before, with an overarching knowledge of the big picture and how things fit into it all.

It is one thing to read literature, and another entirely to understand it.

(this is a paraphrasing of chapter 3 of 50 Literature Ideas by John Sutherland)