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I don't get it: humour and hermeneutics1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2007

Peter J. Leithart
Peter J. Leithart*
Affiliation:
New St Andrews College, Peniel Hall, 3961 Darby Road, Moscow, ID 83843, [email protected]
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Abstract

Poststructural emphasis on the intertextual character of texts appears to threaten the integrity of texts, opening them to a dizzying infinite variety of meanings. One might respond by trying to shore up the boundaries around texts, but it is undeniable that texts take their meaning by harmonising with other texts. How can this dilemma be resolved? Using jokes as a paradigm, the paper defends the notion that texts are ‘porous’. A text has its own integrity and specific meaning, but the boundaries between text and text are permeable. In dialogue with Kevin Vanhoozer, I argue that texts must be permeable if they are to have meaning at all. Jokes only work when the hearer has relevant information from outside the joke itself. The porosity of texts does not destroy authorial intention; the joker intends for the hearer to bring outside information to bear on the text. In these senses, every text is a joke, and a good interpreter knows the information from outside the text and has the wit to know what information is relevant. Good interpretation is always a matter of ‘getting it’.

Type
Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2007 , pp. 412 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2007

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References

2 Perhaps he had even appeared in some previous joke. Bartenders in jokes are usually anonymous, so it is impossible to say.

3 This was confirmed for me recently when I was told about a Chinese viewer who was completely lost through the entire movie.

4 I will focus particularly on Is there a Meaning in this Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998). See also Vanhoozer, First Theology: God, Scripture and Hermeneutics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), parts II and III. For a comparison of Vanhoozer with Francis Watson, see Scott A. Blue, ‘Meaning, Intention, and Application: Speech Act Theory in the Hermeneutics of Francis Watson and Kevin J. Vanhoozer’, Trinity Journal (Fall 2002).

5 Other theologians have also discovered resources for combating postmodernism in speech-act theory. See Michael Horton, S., Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2002), pp. 126–31Google Scholar; Francis, Watson, Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), ch. 3Google Scholar; Nicholas, Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

6 Is there a Meaning?, p. 247.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 232.

9 More recently, Vanhoozer has been willing to drop ‘single’ from this formulation, since ‘it is still implied in the really important qualifying term determinate’ (First Theology, p. 178).

10 Vanhoozer recognises, of course, the role of allusion and citation, but even here there are problems. He treats allusion as a particular sort of textual ambiguity, by which he means ‘the uncertainty surrounding words or texts that seem to give rise to two or more senses’ (ibid., p. 256). Allusion is an indirect reference to ‘a person, place, event, or other text’. He notes that allusion is important in scripture, especially in the form of typology: ‘In typology’, he writes, ‘allusion can refer not only back, to something earlier, but forward, to something future. According to Paul and a number of the early church fathers, Adam is a “type” or “figure” – an indirect reference to Christ’. When he goes on to discuss Umberto Eco's meditations on the possibility of unconscious allusion, Vanhoozer rejects the possibility: ‘From the standpoint of the hermeneutic realism advanced in the present work, whether a text alludes to a previous text logically depends on what the author could have done in tending to his words. An author's knowledge of a name or a phrase is a necessary precondition for her being able to allude to it. Allusion without authorial intention is a logical contradiction. Were a New Testament author to produce an Old Testament phrase verbatim, it would be only an accidental coincidence, not an allusion, if he had not previously known it’ (ibid., pp. 256–7). It is not clear, then, how this later account of allusion makes room for the textual realities of the Bible, in which, as Vanhoozer himself admits, writers are capable of making ‘forward’ allusions to events and persons they could not possibly have known.

11 Kristeva herself claims that intertextuality involves the ‘transposition’ of a sign from one position (one text, or one social location) into another, which ‘demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and denotative positionality’, and distinguishes it from mere ‘study of sources’. ‘If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (and intertextuality), one then understands that its “place” of enunciation and its denoted “object” are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated. In this way polysemy can also be seen as the result of semiotic polyvalence – an adherence to different sign systems’ (Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller; New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, pp. 59–60). For discussions of its variety of meanings, see Barbara Godard, ‘Intertextuality’, in Makaryk, Irena R. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 568–72Google Scholar; Hayes, Richard B., Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1989), pp. 14–21Google Scholar; Jonathan, Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literary, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981Google Scholar), ch. 5; Anthony, Thiselton, New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992), pp. 495–508Google Scholar.

12 See John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), which Hays uses to define intertextuality.

13 See Jorge, Louis Borges, ‘Pierre Menand, Author of the Quixote’, in Yates, Donald A. and Irby, James E. (eds), Labyrinths (New York: New Directions Books, 1962)Google Scholar.

14 Is there a Meaning?, p. 134. This is already questionable. It is not at all clear that the canon forms a self-enclosed playground for interpreters. The canon provides the primary context for any particular text of the canon, but the canon itself points us to other texts (‘the chronicles of the kings of Israel/Judah’; the ‘book of Jasher’; perhaps in some cases even to Canaanite or Babylonian texts). And it is difficult to see how a contemporary interpreter would want to ignore the ‘reception’ of the biblical text throughout the history of interpretation. Is Vanhoozer denying the relevance of patristic or Reformation interpretations for contemporary interpretations? Do these not form part of the context for theological interpretation?

15 This illustration is somewhat bizarre, since by most normal uses of the word ‘meaning’, Psalm 22 does not mean the same thing in the Psalm as it does on the lips of Jesus. The two meanings are by no means incompatible, and it is possible to say that Jesus’ use of the Psalm ‘deepens’ an existing meaning. But it is hard to see how this Psalm retains a ‘self-same’ meaning through its various appearances in scripture.

16 Ibid., p. 135.

17 Ibid., p. 133.

18 It is odd that Vanhoozer collapses Ricoeur into Barthes and Derrida, when there is a clear difference between intertextuality understood as ‘metaphor’ and a form of intertextuality that dissolves the text. The former assumes the integrity of each text; otherwise, intertextuality would not involve the linkage of two textual fields.

19 A Lacanian interpretation of . . . well, there are limits.

20 Is there a Meaning?, pp. 416–21.

21 Personal communication, April 2005.

22 In a response to an earlier draft of this paper, Vanhoozer writes, ‘I don't have a problem with your notion of porous texts. . . . My only caveat is that this permeability is, again, not an impersonal structural feature of the universe of discourse so much as an aspect of what it means to be a human communicative agent. We make sense with words that have histories, with phrases that have histories, by making reference – direct, indirect, serious, joking – to things other people have said. Texts are porous because texts are the result of human communicative action, and everything we do as communicative agents bespeaks our relatedness to others and our locatedness in the world’ (personal communication, April 2005).

23 Is there a Meaning?, p. 251.

24 First Theology, pp. 299–302.

25 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

26 First Theology, pp. 259, 288.

27 Importantly, Vanhoozer is not just being funny; he has a serious point in each of these sentences. This certainly seems to complicate the issue of authorial intention, highlighting the fact that an author can have multiple intentions for a single sentence. His sentence might ‘count as’ a joke, and at the same time ‘count as’ a serious contribution to hermeneutical theory.

28 In his private response to an earlier draft, Vanhoozer writes that he can accept this version of intertextuality, ‘provided that it is understood as a resource for authorial discourse . . . and not a force that subverts authorial discourse’ (personal communication, April 2005).

29 Culler, Pursuit of Signs, p. 103.

30 At the same time, Culler notes an inherent tension within treatments of intertextuality. On the one hand, broad claims are made for intertextuality. It is, for Kristeva, the ‘discursive space’ in which any particular text is intelligible, yet when she begins to deploy the concept in the interpretation of actual texts, she traces references within texts to their sources in a quite traditional literary-critical fashion. Culler summarises the contradiction: ‘A criticism based on the contention that meaning is made possible by a general, anonymous intertextuality tries to justify the claim by showing how in particular cases “a text works by absorbing and destroying at the same time the other texts of the intertextual space” and is happiest or most triumphant when it can identify particular pretexts with which the work is indubitably wrestling’ (ibid., pp. 106–7). He concludes that ‘intertextuality is more complicated and also more banal’ than advocates or critics realise (p. 110).

31 Ibid., pp. 112–14.

32 Ibid., p. 115. Rhetorical presuppositions can also play a powerful intertextual role. When Baudelaire says ‘It was not a temple with bosky shades’, he makes it clear that it was not a temple, but ‘rhetorically it presupposes that someone would have expected it to be a temple or had claimed that it was’ (pp. 115–16).

33 A version of this paper was presented at a seminar during the Art & Soul conference at Baylor University, 8–9 April 2005. Thanks to Joel Garver, Michael Hanby, Patrick Downey and other participants in the seminar for their comments and encouragement.