Interpretation as Pragmatics PDF
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LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY General Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley Selected published titles: Norman Bryson VISION AND PAINTING: The Logic of the Gaze Elizabeth Cowie REPRESENTING THE WOMAN: Cinema and Psychoanalysis Theresa de Lauretis TECHNOLOGIES OF GENDER: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction Mary Ann Doane THE DESIRE TO DESIRE: The Woman's Film of the 1940s Alan Durant CONDITIONS OF MUSIC Jane Gallop FEMINISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Daughter's Seduction Peter Gidal UNDERSTANDING BECKETT: A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett Alan Hunt GOVERNANCE OF THE CONSUMING PASSIONS: A History of Sumptuary Law Ian Hunter CULTURE AND GOVERNMENT: The Emergence of Literary Education Jeffrey Minson GENEALOGIES OF MORALS: Nietzsche, Foucault, Donzelot and the Eccentricity of Ethics Laura Mulvey VISUAL AND OTHER PLEASURES List continued overleaf List continued from previous page Christopher Norris RESOURCES OF REALISM: Prospects for 'Post-Analytic' Philosophy Denise Riley 'AM I THAT NAME?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History Jacqueline Rose PETER PAN, OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF CHILDREN'S FICTION Stanley Shostak THE DEATH OF LIFE: The Legacy of Molecular Biology Lyndsey Stonebridge THE DESTRUCTIVE ELEMENT: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism Raymond Tallis NOT SAUSSURE: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory David Trotter THE MAKING OF THE READER: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry Geoffrey Ward STATUTES OF LIBERTY: The New York School of Poets Language, Discourse, Society Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71482-9 (outside North America on/v) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above, Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmil!s, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Interpretation as Pragmatics Jean-Jacques Lecercle ©Jean-JacquesL ecercle 1999 Softcoverr eprint oftheh ardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-68522-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction,c opy or transmissiono f this publicationm ay be made without written permission. No paragrapho f this publicationm ay be reproduced,c opied or transmitteds ave with written permissiono r in accordancew ith the provisionso f the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the CopyrightL icensingA gency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthoriseda ct in relation to this publicationm ay be liable to criminal prosecutiona nd civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordancew ith the Copyright,D esigns and Patents Act 1988. First published I 999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills,B asingstoke,H ampshireR G21 6XS and London Companiesa nd representatives throughoutt he world ISBN 978-0-333-68694-2 ISBN 978-0-230-37364-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230373648 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Published in the United States of America by ST. MARTIN'SP RESS, INC., Scholarly and ReferenceD ivision 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. !0010 ISBN 978-0-312-22152-2clothbound ISBN 978-0-312-22153-9 paperback Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Pragmatics of Interpretation 1 2 'Let Him Have It, Chris!' 35 3 Alter Ego 61 4 The Reader, or: Imposture 89 5 The Author, or: Intention 118 6 Language, or: Interpellation 152 7 Encyclopaedia, or: The Pragmatics of Literature 199 Conclusion 232 Notes 238 Index 248 v Acknowledgements I would like to thank Denise Riley, without whom this book would not have been written; Ian, Pauline and Isabel Maclean, for their hospitality and patience in answering obscure philological ques tions; the countless students and colleagues, here, there and everywhere, but particularly in the University of Toulouse, who have heard me expound my pet ideas; Edward, Pablo and Marmaduke for their unfailing support. Some of the material included in Chapters 5 and 6 has appeared in Real, 12 (Tiibingen, Gunter Narr, 1996), and Language and Discourse, 2 (1994). I would like to thank the editors, Jurgen Schlaeger and Karl Simms, for permission to republish. I would also like to thank the trustees of the National Gallery for permission to reproduce Wright of Derby's 'Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump'. JEAN-JACQUES LECERCLE vii 1 Pragmatics of Interpretation COME INTO THE CLASSROOM, MAUD This is our first day in the English department at the University of Nanterre. We are headed, with eager step (there is a queue in front of the lift) and panting heart (three floors is a long way up), towards a class with the forbidding name of G1-100, 'Lire un texte', where we are hoping to acquire the rudiments of literary interpretation - to indulge in the practice, and to revel in the achievement (for the term, like many nouns derived from verbs, 'representation' for instance, is ambiguous between process and result). The class begins in a straightforward enough manner. There is a hand-out: the three pages of a story by Graham Greene, 'I Spy',1 squeezed onto a single sheet. Clearly, the text has been chosen not only for its excellence (it is indeed a justly famous story), but for its brevity - it can be read in class, which is exactly what we are asked to do. After ten minutes of shuffling of feet, snuffling and aborted coughs, the proceedings begin. The lecturer offers to parse and give a lexical glossing of the text: this is not our first language, our command of it at the beginning of our first year is still shaky, although there are no difficult words or constructions in the text, for a sound pedagogic mind has presided over its choice. When the parsing is finished, the first task is set: we are asked to provide a brief literal summary of the story. Let me comply: the twelve-year-old narrator, in the dead of night, is stealing cigarettes from his father's tobacco shop to indulge in his first illegal smoke. He is surprised by the unexpected return of his father, between two men in raincoats, who take him away again after customary jokes of the 'not while we are on duty' type have been passed. This, however, although a satisfactory enough summary of the action in 1 2 Interpretation as Pragmatics the story, is inadequate as an interpretation: it does not really say anything about the meaning of the text. The lecturer then makes her second move. By asking questions and providing all the answers herself, she gives us not a lexical but an encyclopaedic gloss of the text. For a dictionary will not tell us that the title of the story is ambiguous, that it alludes to a children's game as much as to the practice of spying. In order to understand the text we need to retrieve information from cliches, like the 'men in rain coats' who 'never smoke while on duty'. Cliches are sometimes easy for us when they are shared between cultures (thus, the dialogue between the hero's father and the two men about cigarettes will eventually, although not yet, evoke 'la cigarette du condamne'), and sometimes not (the men in raincoats might be slightly more opaque, had we not been brought up on American gangster films). On the whole, proverbs, folk-customs, historical allusions, cliches and cultural memories, all that is taken for granted by a native speaker because it is an essential part of her knowledge of her maternal tongue (this is what the hermeneutics of the Heidegger-Gadamer tradition means when it talks of 'inhabiting language', 'living in, or living, language'), have to be interpreted: the interpreter here is only a shorter version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But glossing a text is never simple and straightforward: the very choice of the points to be glossed suggests an interpretive path through the text, the computation of the right inferences, and the construction of the text's meaning which is largely implicit and was missed by the literal summary. This is where the lecturer's choice of this story enables her to pull a white rabbit out of her top hat by asking two apparently innocent questions: what will happen to the hero's father? and when does the action take place? For there is always someone in the class who has not understood that the hero's father is being arrested, and will be hanged for spying, and that the action takes place at the time of the First World War. A network of allusions points to the South of England during WWI: 'a searchlight passed across the sky, lighting the bank of cloud and probing the dark deep spaces between, seeking enemy airships. The wind blew from the sea ... '; ' ... the "Huns", the monsters who lurked in Zeppelins in the clouds.' The lecturer's task, of course, is to explain that the use of the word 'Hun' is dated, and that the Zeppelin in question is not a rock group. She will also point to a network of proverbs that, stemming from the title, spell out the father's inevitable fate: 'May as well be hung for a sheep' (this is the son
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