Finally getting around to Jorge Gracia’s Theory of Textuality . It’s got a lot of strengths. Gracia recognizes the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of textual meaning, and sensibly tests theories by their ability to explain our actual experience of texts. Postmodern diffusion can’t explain the fact of daily communication; Hirsch and his cohorts who speak in terms of single strictly limited meaning have a hard time explaining what goes on in literature classes - or, they simply condemn literature students as puffy-headed relativists.
Gracia also notes, sensibly again, that it’s a mistake to try to set the same limits to every sort of text. It’s not the case that every text is a scientific treatise, or a poem. And what makes these texts different is the “cultural function” of those texts. This is where Gracia lands in his discussion of the limits of understanding, and it enables him to establish a nuanced view of the variability of the limits of understanding:
“The view I propose is one in which the meaning of texts is determined by various factors, in accordance with the cultural function of the texts in question. In some cases, the cultural function determines that that the author’s understanding of the text is the determinant factor of the meaning and in other cases it is the audience, or the context, or various factors combined and so on. The meaning of texts is not always determined in the same way because texts have different functions.” Religious and legal texts, for instance, require expertise to interpret, at least in some cultural contexts. In such cases “cultures develop rules for the determination of meaning and thus rely on expertise and authority. In many cases, credentials are required.”
In this context, he discusses the notion that texts have a core meaning: “Texts do have a core of meaning, but what that core is and how stable it is depends again on the cultural function the text performs, that is, on how society has come to look at the text. Thus, there is ample room for change as well as continuity and stability. The point is that there cannot be uniform rules for all texts regarding these matters, because texts function differently, and it is the functions they have, as determined by the culture, that have the last word.”
A few thoughts: First, the notion of a potentially unstable “core” is odd; it seems a mixed metaphor. Second, if I get Gracia here, a change in cultural function would mean a change in the limits and rules applied to a text, and thus change the meaning of the text. (By his definition, which strongly links textual meaning to textual identity, it would mean a new text.) Here again the notion of a “core” sits strangely in his theory.
Third, we can think, as a concrete example, the changed function of the Bible in Western higher education. At one time, it’s cultural function depended on the conviction that the Bible is God’s word that bears divine authority. Now, the Bible is, at best, an object of literary analysis. Does that mean the “core” of the Bible has changed from, say, “religious” to “literary”? It certainly means that the limits and standards used for understanding the Bible have changed. At one time, the Bible’s meaning was determined by theologians, a magisterium, a church council. Now in the university classroom, it’s a much more openended text. I suppose that Gracia would respond that the Bible functions different in different sub-cultures - the church on the one hand, and the academy on the other. They are, in some respects, working with different texts. But, again, what’s happened to the “core meaning”?