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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
No one would think of denying that literary texts lend themselves to “plural” readings, as we say today: the studies collected in this issue are one more proof, as is the title of the collection. Tens of thousands of pages have already been written on Shakespeare and on Montaigne, which does not preclude the enjoyment of those that are offered us here; and the idea would not occur to anyone that this process of re-writing could ever come to an end, aside from the apocalyptic end of all human things, written and unwritten.
1 J. S. Petöfi and C. Reiser, Studies in Text Grammar, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1973, p. 1.
2 M. A. Burnier and P. Rambaud, Le Roland-Barthes sans peine, Balland, 1978.
3 For the analysis of literary texts, one of the most instructive studies is that of J. Natali, "Seshat et l'analyse poètique: à propos des critiques des ‘Chats' de Baudelaire," in J.-C. Gardin et al., La logique du plausible, Paris, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981, pp. 95-145; however, for various historical reasons, it is in the field of archaeology that this type of exercise is most advanced today, the descriptions of material objects (sites, monuments, art vestiges) playing the role of the initial texts "T", while the interpretation of these objects corres ponds to construction C. One will find in the above-mentioned work an over-all view of work carried out over the past 10 years on the T → C process in this field. M-S. Lagrange, La systématisation du discours archéologique, pp. 239-303. On the relation between the analysis of constructions thus understood and artificial intelligence on the one hand, literary analysis and semiologic analysis on the other, see J.-C. Gardin, op. cit., pp. 59-85.
4 R. Jakobson and Cl. Lévi-Strauss, "'Les Chats' de Baudelaire," L'Homme, Vol. 2, 1962, pp. 5-21. In the study by Natali quoted above, a list is given of the "28 commentaries on ‘Les Chats'," which appeared for the most part between 1962 and 1973; additions to his list are still being made (pp. 140-143).
5 G. Durand, "Les chats, les rats et les structuralistes. Symbole et struc turalisme," Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme, Nos. 17-18, 1969, pp. 13-38. A similar point of view was developed a propos of a more or less imaginary poem—"Les Rats" by Baptistin—in J.-C. Gardin, Les analyses de discours, Neuchâtel, Delachaux and Niestlé, 1974, pp. 18-38.
6 Essays having a bearing one way or another on the theme of validation in literary studies are countless. A convenient reference work is E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967. The famous "hermeneutic circle" of Heidegger is obviously not foreign to the endless repe titions of the same considerations, in fact, circular, on the validation of the construing of texts by the "consciousness of their historical efficacity," as proposed by P. Ricoeur (following H-G. Gadamer: "La tâche de l'herméneutique," in Exegesis: problèmes de méthode et exercices de lecture, ed. by F. Bovon and G. Rouiller, Neuchâtel, Delachaux and Niestlé, 1975, pp. 179-200; or even simpler through the "experience" of the reader in which the "hermeneutic arc" of inter pretation must finally be anchored, again according to Ricoeur ("Qu'est-ce qu'un texte? Explquer et comprendre," n Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Vol. 2, ed. by R. Budner et al., Tubingen, Mohr, 1970, pp. 181-200). We are clearly far from the inter-subjective procedures of verification used in the natural sciences ad mittedly based also on "experience" and "consciousness of efficacity" only more widely shared.
7 See the discussion on "The Limits of Pluralism" in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 3 (1977) and its follow-up in later issues, in particular M. Peckham, "The Infinitude of Pluralism," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1977), pp. 803-816.
8 Ch. W. Morris, "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," International Ency clopedia of Unified Science, I, 2, Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1938. I have proposed to use the name "neo-semiologists" for our modern experts in all types of human objects or phenomena, when they refer themselves to semiotics or semiology, as opposed to the semioticians of the first half of the 20th century, who had in view the study of systems of signs developed in science (instead of studying the objects themselves), without this suspicious restriction to the human sciences only: J.C. Gardin, Les analyses de discours, Neuchâtel, Delachaux and Niestlé, 1974, pp. 48-55.
9 The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vol. 5, 434, ed. by Ch. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, 6 Vols., Cambridge, Mass (plus Vols. 7 and 8, ed. by A. Burcks, 1958).
10 The objects of pragmatism are innumerable. Beyond the texts themselves, there are all the "contexts" that the neo-semiologist is free to call upon in order to "explain" the literary work and its specific meaning or value to him (see for example H. Parret, "Le language en contexte" in Etudes philosophiques et lin guistiques de pragmatique, Amsterdam, Benjamin, 1980). To the extent that such exercises form the subject matter of academic presentations, we would be justified in believing that they obey some general principles, such as the "theory of discursive creativity" (sic) that Parret does not hesitate to put forward, (op. cit., p. 189), unfortunately, the strangeness of this formulation, on logical grounds alone, is enough to raise doubts on the whole project.
11 U. Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Text, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1979.
12 See on the subject the edifying survey by Christine Brooke-Rose, A Rhetoric of the Unreal, p. 31 et seq. in which are mentioned successively the "involved reader" of W.C. Booth (1961)—also used by W. Iser (1974)—the "super-reader" of Riffaterre (1966), the "informed reader" of S. Fish (1970), the "qualified reader" of J. Culler (1975) and even the "real reader" to which this latter author returns (1980), in his plea for a transformational grammar of effectively proposed interpretations without however going so far as to undertake himself such a thankless task, as Ch. Brooke-Rose humorously notes (p. 32).
13 G. Hartman, Criticism in the Wilderness, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, p. 41.
14 Putting aside wishful resolutions (for example Culler's, as quoted at the end of Note 12), I know of no effective works in this direction, in literary studies other than those of J. Molino et al., "Sur les titres des romans de Jean Bruce," Langages, Vol. 35, 1974, pp. 86-94; "Introduction à l'analyse sémiologique des Maximes de La Rochefoucauld", in J.-C. Gardin et al., La logique du plausible, pp. 147-238, Paris, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981. However, in the field of musicology, we must quote the parallel and historically connected program of J.-J. Nattiez, illustrated by the collection "Sémiologie et analyses musicales" that he founded at the University of Montreal: the first volume of the collection is an interesting attempt at a theoretical construction verifiable by its productions "in the style of" J.-S. Bach: M. Baroni and C. Jaco boni, Proposal for a Grammar of Melody, University of Montreal Press, 1978. These examples, added to the exercises in reconstruction quoted above (Note 3) are sufficient to point out the complexity of such undertakings, compared to which the usual commentaries of human productions—literary, material, musical— seem to suffer from a certain gratuity.
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