Every theory has its pet names. What does Hermeneutics think of literature, authors, and readers?
What is literature?
According to the Gadamer variety of hermeneutics, each work of literature is an event. It’s an experience in which meaning happens, again and again, each time it is read. Meaning, rather than being locked in the past, begins anew with each new reading and interpretation.
Even the author doesn’t have total responsibility or ownership of its meaning, as the author wrote and interpreted her own work within a historical world that informed her. Once written, the work becomes autonomous and, as Ricoeur would say, a world emerges before it—a world that readers can enter and interpret, reproduce and perform, for their own historical situation.
Because reading is so involved in the theory of hermeneutics, you can say that work of literature is always unfinished.
What is an author?
The author creates meaning, but not out of nothing. You need to grow the strawberries, mangoes, and kale for the literary smoothie, and the author works with the fruits that’ve been given to him.
Authors speaks or write using words, ideas, and berries that they have learned from others; they depict experiences of others as well as their own; they interpret all of this mush of meaning from within their own limited perspective.
So the author is a co-creator of meaning, not its master. Authors whose works have been made into movies know this all too well.
What is a reader?
In Truth and Method, Gadamer says that “reading with understanding is always a kind of reproduction, performance, and interpretation.” So whether you’re reading Crime and Punishment, Gadamer’s theory, or this Shmoop guide, think of the reader as analogous to a musician performing a musical work.
Does that mean you should sing this out loud? Be our guest.
But to continue the analogy, remember that a performance, to be good, has to remain true to the composition—and yet there’s so much more to the performance than what’s dictated by the sheet of paper the notes are written on. No musician plays a piece of music quite the same way.
This is true of the reader of literature, too. Hogwarts may have green turrets in our eyes and be made out of rhinestones for you, even though we’re reading the same words—at least, until we go see the movie and we see it the same way for the rest of time.
Still, the audience plays as big a role in interpreting as the writer in producing the ideas and meanings. And that’s key in hermeneutics.