25. A Future in the Past: Peter Szondi’s Material Hermeneutics*

Peter Szondi’s redefinition of the science of literature challenged the influence that the analysis of Heidegger’s structure of Dasein had exerted in Germany, in university circles, both during and after World War II. [1] Szondi takes aim at the model constituted by Heidegger’s commentaries on the poems of Hölderlin, Trakl, and Rilke. What actually underlay Szondi’s struggle in favor of a critical philology was his rejection of an approach based on a theological premise. Even in France, where some thinkers are fascinated by the deceptive allure of going beyond traditional scholarship, such an approach appears to be dominant.

Although the model for the new ways of reading had been borrowed from the philosophy of existence, it was well suited to the stylistic traditions and age-old practices of exegesis. Hans Georg Gadamer included and legitimized them in his theory of hermeneutics. [2] He found “philology” too unrepresentative of positivist science to be incorporated in his theory of hermeneutics or to contribute to the business of “regenerating” knowledge. He aimed to separate the theory of historical understanding from the method of the so-called historico-philologists. The success of this new codification depended on the justification of current practices in literary discourse, but also on positions assumed in the cultural and political arena. {353|354}

The role played by the “inexplicable” or by implicit structures survives today in almost identical form in other types of discourse. Although these do not assign the permanence to the values of “tradition” that Gadamer did, they have the same function as Gadamer’s discourse: they work to erase the boundaries and blunt the edge of a criticism that differentiates between its objects.

All the critics maintained the radical distinction that had been introduced between “thought” as a noble term, and what was reduced, by the very process of distinction, to a positivist science of literature, even though scholars like Gadamer expressed reservations about the violence perpetrated on texts, or about the obsessive interrogation of language as it was pressured into revealing its contents. The distinction remained in force even after the anti-positivist reaction that Szondi had encountered in his youth, in immanent or empathetic exegeses, had been abandoned in favor of the auscultation of language; and in the shifting of signs, it continued to reveal the intermittent structure of Being, just as existentialist philosophy was doing. The explication of poetic texts, enhanced and ennobled by the prestige of their reference to sacred texts, with their eclipses and their proximity, had the advantage of being strengthened by a theory. At the same time, the ontological leap, through a kind of hyperbaton [3] or exaggeration, concealed a regression, which brought interpretation, falling short of analysis, to a rhetoric conceived as a collection of figures, what we might call a trans-substantiated rhetoric.

Now that positivist science had been irreparably devalued, reduced to the common rank of historical fact, an alternative conservative legitimacy had to be found. Neither theoreticians nor interpreters were ready to give up the premise of the continuity and unity of Greek and German cultures. Whenever a claim was made for science, it was treated with scorn, as being out of reach and illusory; it was compromised even before being examined and compared to a collection of facts that could exclude it from the field of hermeneutics. Science was considered contingent and trivialized. What remained, auscultation of the text, was not subject to any analysis; indeed, it referred to the psychological expectations that structure it, [4] owing to the hermeneutic circle.

Consequently, Szondi’s critique of the deficiencies of philological criticism came with a turn to “hermeneutics,” construed as a “science” on the basis of a redefinition of its specificity (literary, historical, or juridical) and determined {354|355} by the nature of the object (see below, p. 358). With hindsight, we can better understand the implications of what seems like a closing-off, because Szondi intends not only (intra muros) to analyze the errors caused by excessive application of the positivist methods of the natural sciences to philological knowledge, [5] he is also concerned (outside this sphere) with the pretentious contestation, still alive today, of any critical approach in the field of writing, and with the way this attitude is legitimated by the assumption of total knowledge, an all the more dangerous assumption because it embraces and authorizes ignorance. Heidegger’s arbitrary transfers between languages, applied to the reinterpretation of texts, had changed the rules. The claim to immediate existential knowledge, based on trans- and a-historical categories, eliminated anything in textual analysis that could not meet philosophical expectations, creating an unexceptional methodology inherent to the discipline. Critical justification of these approaches had fallen out of favor. Hence the twofold movement imposed on what was a real advance. In the face of such contempt, one had both to distance oneself from the rejection of critical re-examination within scientific production and to demystify the theme of external immediacy that phenomenology provided. This dual orientation is a fundamental characteristic of Szondi’s approach—the critical catharsis in action—and of the battle he waged against a form of usurpation. The domain of textual criticism should be expanded; rules would ensue from that expansion.

Szondi was Emil Staiger’s student in Zurich, where he was introduced to more than just philology: he focused primarily on the analysis of “style” in relation to the differences between genres, which, according to Staiger, emanate from ontological categories, [6] and, more generally, on the theoretical reflection that accompanies interpretation in a process of mutual fortification. It is here, on this single issue, that their positions converged; otherwise, their points of view were diametrically opposed. Very early on, Szondi viewed grandiloquence as a disturbing figure in the decoding of Being, and he rejected it; he took refuge in reading other scholars, particularly Lukács. Thus he fell indirectly, through Staiger, under Heidegger’s influence, but quickly rejected it, offended by a pretention that bore the outward signs of depth and lived off the prestige of literature writ large.

The hermeneutics of the phenomenological schools under the influence of Wilhelm Dilthey holds that the field of historical consciousness controlled by the subject is limited. Consciousness is transcended by the appeal of the “dogmatic” power of tradition, rather than of the work itself. An interpreter cannot escape {355|356} it without hampering the artistic or poetic experience. It is tradition that, in principle, prevails over its objectivization in a “science of literature.” [7] Since the Romantic era, the front lines of literary criticism have been redrawn, and are still in flux. Interpreters remain the slaves of tradition. They can understand a text only if they allow themselves to be imbued by the voice, which stems not from the literary work, nor even from the author, but which nevertheless makes itself understood through the act of writing and listening, always the same and yet multiple. Empathy, doggedly rejected by Szondi, has a theoretical justification. It is not merely a matter of participation; if the literary work produces the elements that allow it to be understood, it is because these elements are inherent to a deep, general, and common structure. “Grasp what grabs us”; the paradox became the watchword of this doctrine for reading. [8] The vicious circle is not only accepted, it is set up as an end in itself. Understanding binds the reader, “grabs” him, just as, in Lacan’s theory, the imagination is in thrall to language. It is from this constraint, which obstructs the path to knowledge, that historical understanding and aesthetic analysis can emerge. Knowledge is pre-structured; its determinations direct and control both writing and interpretation. Order does not originate in the text; rather, it has multiple origins, whether unconscious or informed by layers of preconceptions. The common thread among different points of view is the search for an authority that could possess and at the same time dispossess the reader.

If descriptive hermeneutics methodically disparages the author’s reflection on his own work, and if such reflection is by definition suspect, it is because artistic production escapes the producer, who is continually outpaced by the inherent dynamism, anonymous and collective, of a power flowing through him that he can control only at the cost of becoming a mere “artist,” a master of artifice and fake authenticity. The more fettered the author, the more independent the interpreter. He can discover, re-invent, or even invent the meaning of a work that has not been subjected to the oversight of a consciousness. Indeed, science—as long as it sticks to its method and to its will to objectivize—is thought to misunderstand the nature of its own knowledge, which transcends the analytical power of exegesis, just as creation transcends the impulse of a subject-creator. {356|357}

Instead of reflecting on the difference between the historical situations of author and reader and including this difference in the interpretive process, first acknowledging and then evaluating it, Gadamer uses it against History. The rationalistic gap advanced by the Enlightenment theorist Chladenius between the text or the author, on the one hand, and the meaning of the text on the other, [9] is exploited in favor of a move toward a profound distortion, which testifies against History and in favor of a productive “historicity.” Gadamer praises Chladenius, “who does not yet see understanding in terms of history.” [10] If we agree with Gadamer that “the real meaning of a text ... is always partly determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter,” the radical discrepancy between the points of view appears in his conclusion: “and hence [und damit] by the totality of the objective course of History [das Ganze des objektiven Geschichtsganges].” [11] The “course of history” occupies the position that Szondi assigns to the interpreter. The same credo is applied to the creator-subject and the interpreted subject, invested with the same dogmatic content: “An author does not need to know the real meaning of what he has written.” [12] The gap is the sign of a genuine, “authentic” production, leading not to the author, but to what becomes, and what comes in the place of history, that is, the process (Geschehen). [13]

So, to cite a particularly apt example, the myths of antiquity are reduced to “mythical beliefs” and confused with religious and even pedagogical traditions; at least the interpreters’ conventional wisdom has always taken this to be the case. Gadamer is merely codifying a practice that goes against the text. Tragedy, if defined as a “demonstration of myth,” derives its meaning or its message from that demonstration. [14] Euripides strips myth of its truth, reducing it to the reality of contemporary events. Why does he write of the gods if he does not believe in them? Is it a dramatic effect sought by a man of the theater, or a demonstration of the absurd by a critical thinker? Art is a profession, a questioning of values. In true hermeneutic tradition, meaning is handed down as a legacy; it animates and determines invention. Euripides is nothing but an inspired scriptwriter, a {357|358} wandering minstrel. If the poet is defined by what he transmits, he is not worthy of this title. In the plays of Aeschylus, who is closer to the origins of our culture, the character embodying the Chorus stepped outside his role to become the mouthpiece, not of the poet, but of the myth, of “the divine causality behind the tragedy.” According to Gadamer, “what happens in tragedy is changed”—by the voice of myth—“because understanding is always a genuine event” (“weil Verstehen immer ein echtes Geschehen ist”). [15] What remains is neither authentic nor productive.

Gadamer refrains from adapting hermeneutics to the specific features of the text he is analyzing and from problematizing the relation between texts and existential exegesis, the hermeneutics of the artifact that literary analysis is required to take up. After banishing criticism from the temple and relegating it to its secondary and preparatory function, he makes a double detour via theology and law to come back to the tabernacle of art. The validity of meaning—salvation in the Bible or the Roman legal code—is united through a “historicity” in which the origin persists. The application to the new situation, [16] its actualization and relation to the present, becomes part of the continuity linking history to its mythical foundation, and shapes the prerequisites for understanding (“fore-meanings” is Heidegger’s term). [17]

Szondi was totally opposed to Gadamer’s approach, partly because of his own reserved temperament, but also with regard to method, where he subjects the criticism of literary understanding to the specificity of its objects. Tradition entails ruptures. Their presence can be detected only through their shifts. On the one hand, history can be grasped in the dialectical movement produced by the work, with its formal structure, and the external conditions of its production; on the other hand, it can be grasped in the distance experienced by the interpreter, since the latter can only overcome this separation in history by scrutinizing the initial gap through a critical reflection on his own distanciation. The interpreter includes the analysis of his own determinations in the act of comprehension. Thus one break in viewpoint can capture another. The critic situates himself by situating the author, who had situated himself before him. {358|359}

Subjective prejudices are obstacles set up between the interpreter and the object of study, risking further distancing and distortion; they are viewed neither as positive elements, within the range of a productive “application,” nor as a contribution to general understanding, independent of the work. The postulate of a trans-subjective element, “beyond races and cultures,” leads to a misunderstanding of the specificity of historical mediations, and for Szondi such mediations can be placed among the prejudices and biases that Gadamer believes he can single out. [18] Similarity might mask differences; the hermeneutic experience might posit other universals, not recognized as such, whose description would have been precluded by the hypothesis. The results obtained by Szondi’s method clearly demonstrate that the prerequisites of a common perception and the repetition of the original conditions establish a fictitious permanence and identity. The reader is both complicitous and deceived.

For Szondi, history embraces real life experience, but above all its tragic truth; it challenges its own celebration, be it vitalist or organicist. Indeed, history is revealed in failure and exclusion, in the distance taken and the distance sustained. Its excesses are inherent to movement since, being inscribed in its negation, they are anticipated by it. Ideology doubtless has its source in the negation of this negation, more definite and more absolute than the hypostases derived from Presence or Absence. One failure is not the same as another. Each one is unique, a single signifier. Movement is not unique; neither is swallowing up. Movement neither adds nor subtracts anything, but it does destroy. The work is the moment of an unremarkable resistance; it derives its meaning from that moment because the moment is not followed by any other that concerns the work: the instant in question is just “that instant, there,” for want of a “being-there.” This threat is what ensures the work’s unique identity.

The Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics links the multiplicity of dogmas or normative rules that philosophical hermeneutics had taken on at the time of its pre-philosophical origins. [19] Szondi analyzes this hermeneutics as a total impasse. Art, which is not art but a call to art, affects the work as it does the commentator—giving rise to an artificial mediation, theological in essence, and to a communion. This a priori arouses such a strong aversion in Szondi that he fears he might find counterparts in the systems of Marxist inspiration or orientation that he has espoused, and especially in Adorno’s work; thus he carries out yet another cathartic selection, which allows him to carefully separate the principle of mediation, in all its forms, however refined the principle may be, {359|360} from etiological constructions. Speculations run the risk of merging together because of their violent nature, and in spite of their conflicting propensities. [20]

Szondi never invokes History. We are subjected to it in specific situations. And the very utopia that inspires him in the works of Benjamin or Adorno appears in his books more as a commonly used concept than as a principle. He speaks of historical philosophy only as a reference. If his reticence attests to a scruple, it also derives from a method: History, like other etiological systems, implies an arbitrary bond.

Clearly the method implies the permanence of cognitive elements in a changing world. Differences produced by historical evolution, which has been popularized in texts, do not bring about a radical epistemological break. The analysis of differences clearly defines a conceptual outline in the object. If the continuity of the conditions of understanding is accepted as a given, discussion no longer introduces responses that block critical analysis, and it no longer prevents the interpreter from making free use of his cognitive tools. With regard to literary hermeneutics—that is, “material” hermeneutics—Szondi chose to adhere to this pragmatic stance.

In his opposition to the philology of immanence, Szondi used the criterion of social mediation; the work was no longer considered the depository of traditional values. His demonstration remained incomplete because he deliberately limited his purview to the specific genealogy found in variable systems of interdependencies. Since he did not address directly either the social sciences or a science of society, he was able to avoid a direct approach to the problem of totality, at the heart of which dialectical movements occur, and from which they derive their meaning. Theories are documents designed for the historical understanding of the period in which they were conceived, reproducing their determinations as well as their interpretive opinions. Depending on the topic, Szondi confined himself to pointing out the text’s opposition to a prejudicial reading.

Duality creates historical hermeneutics. First of all, in the object, there exists another, always earlier moment, which is not the moment of the work, but the other moment that the work breaks away from, present in absentia, {360|361} various; the moment of the work still takes place within it when it authorizes, through its own temporality, the coexistence of contradictory positions, and the internal dialectic of the genetic method, which Szondi notes in his Introduction as one of Schleiermacher’s important contributions. [21] Finally, the duality of viewpoints caused by another temporal difference, changing the meanings from reader to reader, means that hermeneutics is principally the art of establishing a distance; and it can only eliminate the relativism of differences and indifference by analyzing both instances, that is, the complex time of the subject and the complex time of the object. Nothing could be more contrary to the Gadamerian “fusion of horizons” [22] through identity, which Ast is assigned to defend in the Introduction, erasing the intractable element of the particular. [23] Szondi overcomes historicism by a full and methodical acceptance of the consequences of historical hermeneutics.

Was Szondi actually engaged in a battle on two fronts against ontological historicity and the complementary ideological bias of Marxist reductionism? [24] The stakes were unequal. The steps taken in reaction to nineteenth-century historicism had arisen to compensate for the “crisis of meaning,” the result of relativism and the implicit but often unacknowledged loss of “values.” In practice, these steps blocked all the amendments that dialectical theories brought to positivist reification. The positivist method, the subject of the essay on textual understanding, [25] is not the only one in question; the defense of the legitimacy of the idea of a historical point of view, amended by Marxist theoreticians among others, is also in play. When Szondi discusses the vicissitudes of meaning and the philological consciousness of temporality before the historicist era, [26] and when he sheds light on the need for semantic changes, he defines the difficulty of all historical understanding. The factor of time, encompassed in the distance of the critical act, must be examined in relation to the history of meaning. The object, however, should not be confused with this history, if the point of view of the knowing subject is to remain intact. The relation maintained by the work {361|362} with its users in the tradition can be problematized without resorting to the theory of productivity, as Hans Robert Jauss does. [27]

We should go back some thirty years and look at Szondi’s critical work in the context of the time of his writing. There we can better understand his particular aims, without losing any of his current presence ad nos. Knowledge of the moment when he was elaborating his ideas is not a restrictive move. Historical determination offers the safest criterion in the battle he waged in favor of an analytics of reading. He saw no difference between the two institutional orders—academic and literary—in critical activity. The chapters of the Introduction are part of a course and were published as such after his death in 1971. [28] Each lesson, however demonstrative, becomes autonomous and tends towards the genre of the essay, at once scientific and literary, which Szondi illustrated in masterly fashion. He imposed on the essay the distance of a reflection on the legitimacy of the moment of approach, as a necessary complement to each description.

The debate is not over. Just recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht related the criticisms currently being formulated in Germany against the poststructuralist positions of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man to the survival of a specifically German ideal of “science,” renewing Heidegger’s attack on science (Wissenschaft) in a different form. [29]

Szondi’s thought is always focused on the redefinition of philological practice; in his view, practice is impure because it is methodologically weak, and is impervious to the open analysis of research. The definition of the literary object in its aesthetic determination—historically mediated, prior to the study, in the Introduction, of categories of literary judgment—derives its meaning within the limits of a critical but also very academic struggle for the rights of criticism, even as the author also denounces the biases of anti-academicism. Szondi situated himself squarely in the tradition of the dialecticians, right from his earliest research; that tradition was represented for him by the books of Benjamin, Lukács, and Adorno. [30] Marxist positions and the principle of social {362|363} mediation were made clear in a context of aesthetic reflection. It was with these authors that Szondi learned to decode the movements inherent in the invention of aesthetic forms. If one is to avoid constructing an ineffectual schema, it is important to recognize the relation’s meaningful and accepted link. One must take the references for what the author intended them to be.

The core of the debate bears on the function of the work and of the task. A re-examination of the tools should allow critics to project their aim into the field of that specific and unfeigned “science” that is contested and contestable because of its excessive assimilations, and to acknowledge the precision that it gains. It is preferable not to tamper with the philological tool kit, since it might then have the after-effect of promoting the displacement of hermeneutics toward the “philosophical” position, leaving no space for the critical approach. The position Szondi chose condemns an alliance between a theory and a practice. The one is just as poor in philosophy as the other is poor in philology, if they both avoid the scrutiny of the interpreter’s historical insights.

On this point Szondi differed from such theoreticians of understanding as Dilthey. Material hermeneutics is devoted to the materiality of the text: language and form. The work is inscribed within a gap; it emphasizes its difference. The philologist re-evaluates the appropriateness of the aesthetic criteria deployed in order to understand the viewing angle and to know what he is talking about. The choice of the term “literary” instead of “philological,” which one might prefer when designating this secular hermeneutics, is the result of a refusal, since the philology of the ancients had not been obliged until then to submit its judgment either to a prior definition of the object or to the analysis of the critic’s position. It is clear that the ambition arising from modern philologies is of a resolutely and tactically modernist nature.

This Introduction belongs to a “genre” and to a moment, [31] and to a place, as well—the Berlin of 1967, where student protests and widespread contestations {363|364} prevented Szondi from continuing the course up to Dilthey and the current era, as he had planned. [32] The distance that separates us from them situates them in their own “historicity.” It is up to the reader to be an interpreter, following the very principles the Introduction defends, by comparing the meaning of these thoughts on the history of literary understanding to the statements that inspired them, and to the meaning that they have at this time and in this place. {364|}