SHAKSPER 2001: Re: Subtext

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 12/22/01 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.2884  Saturday, 22 December 2001

[1]     From:   Martin Steward <MSteward@mds1974.freeserve.co.uk>
        Date:   Friday, 21 Dec 2001 10:00:30 -0000
        Subj:   Re: SHK 12.2870 Re: Subtext

[2]     From:   Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
        Date:   Friday, 21 Dec 2001 23:41:52 -0500
        Subj:   Re: SHK 12.2870 Re: Subtext


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Martin Steward <MSteward@mds1974.freeserve.co.uk>
Date:           Friday, 21 Dec 2001 10:00:30 -0000
Subject: 12.2870 Re: Subtext
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.2870 Re: Subtext

“Are the following examples of gaps [in the text]?” asks Bill Godshalk:
“I don’t know Hamlet’s shoe size.  I do not know exactly what years or
how long he spent in Germany.  I do not know Gertrude’s hair color”.
Well, yes and no. I think that Bill is right to regard these rather as
“gaps in information”. Gaps in “meaning” occur because of deferral of
meaning due to the process of metaphorization (which, taken to its
logical extreme, involves all words, languages, sign systems). Thus, I
could not fix upon an absolute meaning for the word “We”, when Bill
wrote, “we are close”. So, there is a gap in meaning in the following
from Henry V:

                That you may know
'Tis no sinister nor no awkward claim,
Pick'd from the worm-holes of long-vanish'd days,
Nor from the dust of old oblivion rak'd,
He sends you this most memorable line, [Gives a paper]
In every branch truly demonstrative;
Willing you overlook this pedigree.
And when you find him evenly deriv'd
From his most fam'd of famous ancestors,
Edward the Third, he bids you then resign
Your crown and kingdom, indirectly held
From him, the native and true challenger.
                            (II.iv.84-95 Alexander Text)

The text says that the King of France ought to “look over” Henry’s
pedigree, to see the natural justice of his claim. But the subtext says
that to appreciate the justice of Henry’s claim he should he be
“Willing” to ignore this so-called pedigree - to “overlook” it (the more
recent meaning had emerged by the late 16thC, according to OED). After
all, Henry’s lineal descent back to Edward III leaves out the
significant point about his usurping father. So, does this passage mean,
“My King’s claim is based on superior force of arms, which is really
what Kingship is all about in the real world, so, just ignore what this
bit of paper says - it is just a legal formality - and prepare to yield
to that superior force”. Of course, the character of Exeter probably
would not imply such a thing (although he might...) Furthermore, I could
stick my neck out and say that Shakespeare himself did not mean this to
be the reading. But these considerations are beside the point - the
reading is there, it is undeniable, it should be allowed to compete with
the other meaning(s). This is a gap in the text: one might call it
“deferral”, or “amphibology”, or simply (Empson’s 7th type of?)
“ambiguity”. Incidentally, I always think of this as a “most memorable
line” from Shakespeare, one of my favourites. Does not that also reveal
a “gap” in the text of line 88? And might not one argue from this “gap”
that attention is drawn to the similar “gap” two lines later? I’m not
saying this is the right interpretation - it could be a
“misinterpretation”, if there is such a thing; the point is that it all
makes logical, lexical, grammatical sense on some level, even as it
polarizes (and therefore defers) meaning.

Moving on. Bill wonders, “Metaphorically, can we call the universe a
“book” -- as some early moderns did?  Would you say that the universal
text is incomplete?  If it is complete, does it leave no doubts at all?
Or are “gaps in meaning” possible even when the “text” is as complete as
it can be?” It was easier for people who believed the Bible to be the
revealed Word of God to read the universe as a book, because in a sense,
it was - handily written in human languages, Hebrew and Greek, that we
can understand (well, not I - some of us anyway). Post-Copernicus,
Galileo, Darwin, etc. etc., if we are still to believe the Bible to be
the Word of God, we are forced to accept that it is written in metaphor,
which means that even the Almighty has to defer meaning if he wants to
use human languages. But then, it was surely always understood that the
Bible’s relationship to the phenomenal universe was metaphorical. The
universal text might be complete - Saussure seems to have thought so -
but we metaphorize that text by recontextualizing it with our sign
systems. There is no Platonic relationship between the word (signifier)
“Tree” and the real thing-in-the-world signified by the word “Tree”. We
all know what a tree looks like, and we understand this mental image
when someone says “Tree” to us, but it would be impossible for us to
achieve the same mental image as our interlocutor except through the
medium of a specific tree-in-the-world (and even then the issue could
still be debated...) If one buys into post-structuralist thinking, of
course, even the text of the phenomenal universe is being deferred,
however. I assume Bill has read Wordsworth’s Prelude. Isn’t the point of
this poem, rather like Hume’s epistemology, to interrogate the
relationship between cause and effect, the sign-creating mind and the
phenomenal world? And does it not conclude that one cannot experience
the phenomenal world fully unless one abandons the illusion that there
is any such relationship between cause and effect? See the episode
concering “the Boy of Winander” (1805 V.389-413), who gets an epiphany
only when he stops hooting at the owls, because until this point he has
imagined that his hooting has been making the real owls-in-the-world
hoot in response; it is no coincidence that this passage come in the
Book of the poem entitled “Books”. Also, more obviously, the entire Book
VI, “Cambridge and the Alps”, with its similarly epiphanic realization
that thinking of the world as a “book” to be read robs it of its
sublimity, which resides in infinite unknowableness (that is, deferral
of meaning). Newton was wrong! “That day we first / Beheld the summit of
Mont Blanc, and griev’d / To have a soulless image on the eye / Which
had usurp’d upon a living thought / That never more could be” (1805
VI.452-456).

Yours in the best of hume-ours,
m

“The knowledge of this realtion [between cause and effect] is not, in
any instance, attained by reasonings a priori, but arises entirely by
experience”.

- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV,
"Sceptical Doubts Concerning the Operations of the Understanding".

In other words, what goes up must come down is only true each and every
time we experience it to be true, independently. We cannot take this as
an a priori assumption based on a past experience of something having
coming down after it had gone up.

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Clifford Stetner <cstetner@worldnet.att.net>
Date:           Friday, 21 Dec 2001 23:41:52 -0500
Subject: 12.2870 Re: Subtext
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.2870 Re: Subtext

Bill Godshalk writes,

>I would suggest that interpretation and misinterpretation are the same.
>What's "misinterpretation" to me may be "interpretation" to you.  We may
>dispute the "explanation of the meaning."  And, of course, our
>explanations are subject to interpretation, and so on and on.

Aren’t some interpretations necessarily misinterpretations?  When we go
running to the OED to find out if “peter” had any sexual connotations in
the seventeenth century, we essentially are asking about authorial
intention.  If the author/ collaborator/ redactor/ interpolator could
not have intended a sexual subtext, reading such a subtext is a
misinterpretation of the intended meaning.  If we think we detect signs
of allegory in a Renaissance text, reading it as an allegory of the
French Revolution is necessarily a misinterpretation because the
producer(s) of the text (even unconsciously) could not have intended it.
A careful study of historical and artistic context limits the range of
valid interpretations which may be multiple, but are not infinite and
which reside only in the minds of author and reader, not “in the text.”

>Can you explain what you mean by "gaps" in the text?  Are the following
>examples of gaps? I don't know Hamlet's shoe size.  I do not know
>exactly what years or how long he spent in Germany.  I do not know
>Gertrude's hair color. Perhaps these examples are not what you call
>"gaps in meaning." These are gaps in information.

These are not gaps in the text, as they do not create contradictions or
inconsistencies, and they have no bearing on the structure of ideas that
the characters and their relationships are constructed to exemplify.
Claudius’ unidentified motive for requesting Hamlet not return to
Wittenberg is a gap in the text because the nature of Hamlet’s tragedy
is determined by the character of his enemy.  An example of a gap in
text identified by Derrida is the absence of various terms for spirit in
Heidegger.  It amounts to a gap because spirit, according to Derrida, is
Heidegger’s theme, and he is merely attempting to raise it to a
valorized and unassailable position by placing it under erasure.  It is
in replacing what the author has intentionally erased, by showing that
what is intentionally unsaid is in fact said on another level, that we
move to interpretation beyond intentionality.

>Metaphorically, can we call the universe a "book" -- as some early
>moderns did?  Would you say that the universal text is incomplete?  If
>it is complete, does it leave no doubts at all? Or are "gaps in meaning"
>possible even when the "text" is as complete as it can be?

This would be the granddaddy of intentional fallacy.
Clifford

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