Page 72 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes distinguishes what is sharable and determinate about it from the associations that may, in certain
circumstances, accompany it (for example, "I should have eaten less at supper," "Crisp air reminds
me of my childhood in Vermont"), he is counting on his readers to agree so completely with his
sense of what that shared and normative verbal meaning is that he does not bother even to specify
it; and although I have not taken a survey, I would venture to guess that his optimism, with
respect to this particular example, is well founded. That is, most, if not all, of his readers immediately
understand the utterance as a rough meteorological description predicting a certain quality of the
local atmosphere. But the "happiness" of the example, far from making Hirsch's point (which is
always, as he has recently reaffirmed, to maintain "the stable determinacy of meaning") makes
mine. The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in
a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is because the Words are heard as
already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious. One
can see this by embedding the words in another context and observing how quickly another
"obvious" meaning emerges. Suppose, for example, we came upon "The air is crisp" (which you
are even now hearing as Hirsch assumes you hear it) in the middle of a discussion of music
("When the pieces played correctly the air is crisp"): it would immediately be heard as a comment
on the performance by an instrument or instruments of a musical air. Moreover, it would only be
heard that way, and to hear it in Hirsch's way would require all effort on the order of a strain. It
could be objected that in Hirsch's text "The air is crisp", has no contextual setting at all; it is merely
presented, and therefore any agreement as to its meaning must be because of the utterance's a
contextual properties. But there is a contextual setting and the sign of its presence is precisely the
absence of any reference to it. That is, it is impossible even to think of a sentence independently of
a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified,
we will automatically hear it the context in which it has been most often encountered. Thus Hirsch
invokes a context by not invoking it: by not surrounding the utterance with circumstances, he
directs us to imagine it in the circumstances in which it is most likely to have been produced: and
to so imagine it is already to have given it a shape that seems at the moment to be the only one
possible.
What conclusions can be drawn from these two examples? First of all, neither my colleague nor
the reader of Hirsch's sentence is constrained by the meanings words have in a normative linguistic
system; and yet neither is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is
exactly the wrong word because it implies a two-stage procedure in which a reader or hearer first
scrutinizes an utterance and then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be
reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears an utterance within, and
not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear
it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaning. In other words, the problem of
how meaning is determined is only a problem if there is a point at which its determination has not
yet been made, and I am saying that there is not such point.
I am not saying that one is never in the position of having to self-consciously figure out what an
utterance means. Indeed, my colleague is in just such a position when he is informed by his
student that he has not heard her question as she intended it ("No, No, I mean in this class deo we
believe in poems and things, or is it just us) and therefore must now figure it out. But the "it" in
this (or any other) case is not a collection of words waiting to be assigned a meaning but an
utterance whose already assigned meaning has been found to he inappropriate. While my colleague
has to begin all over again, he does not have to begin from square one; and indeed he never was
at square one, since from the very first his hearing of the student's question was informed by his
assumption of what its concerns could possibly be. (That is why he is not "free" even if he is
unconstrained by determinate meanings.) It is that assumption rather than his performance within
it that is challenged by the student's correction. She tells him that he has mistaken her meaning,
but this is not to say that he has made a mistake in combining her words and syntax into a
meaningful unit; it is rather that the meaningful unit he immediately discerns is a function of a
mistaken identification (made before she speaks) of her intention. He was prepared as she stood
before him to hear the kind of thing students ordinarily say on the first day of class, and therefore

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