One of the things I found I liked most about Ricoeur was his description of the world created in front of the text. If, as he suggests, the work is separated from the author by physical distance and by its objectification as labor, and if we don’t believe structure can contain the entire meaning of the text, then the world of meaning we contemplate or conjure must be outside the text, sharing the position of the reader in front of the page—a very democratic notion. Though this subverts the working metaphor of my professional life—that of the page as a window into the text wherein waits the author—as a reader I am happy to stand before this shimmering meaning.

Like Heidegger and Gadamer, though, Ricoeur seems to believe we only know ourselves through language (“we understand ourselves only by the long detour of the signs of humanity deposited in cultural works”). I wonder, then, how the explanatory function of structure, the mediator in the work of finding meaning, sprang so fully formed in the first written texts; and, too, at the non-textual forms of meaning-bearing that seem to be indicated by the visual metaphors imbedded in non-phonetic alphabets and even the graphic origins of our own alphabet. In other words, how, if we know ourselves only through literature, could meaning already be present in the elemental components of writing?

Still, in the context of Ricoeur’s analysis, it is easy to accept that the author’s intention can be traced in the structure of the work and that some truth will be disclosed in appropriation. However, there still remains the problem of “right” interpretation. Rosenblatt addressed this in her analysis of different interpretations of poems, but implied that a correct reading could be determined with a combination of close reading and historicism. Ricoeur seems to believe that there exists a “repeatable” meaning in discourse, but that this changes. It is the work itself that has intentionality and that it can disclose other than that which the author intended. The author, then, is standing in front of the text with the reader. A very beguiling idea, this, but it begs the question of responsibility: Can an author have responsibility for their text and its uses, or is it only in appropriation that a text acts (creates meaning that mediates self-understanding)?
This takes me back to the poem I brought in last week. The unnamed “you” in the poem approximates the immediacy of discourse increasing the power of the address, but as a written discourse, distanciation allows the poem to be appropriated in multiple ways. It is possible that the ambiguity is linked to Ricoeur’s idea of the text having it’s own intention, not always congruent with the author’s. The narrator is unknown at the beginning of the poem, and the author’s desire to achieve moral balance between action and punishment might actually contribute to the possible reading of the first section being in the voice of the terrorist. Perhaps the good news is that the distributed interpretation on the internet eventually worked in the author’s favor, toward discarding the false reading and restoring his intended meaning.
--Ann

ps. I forgot to choose discussions the first time--where did my first posting go?