Understanding as Over-hearing: Towards a Dialogics of Voice

Richard Aczel

New Literary History, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001, pp. 597-617 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2001.0025

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/24571

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 Understanding as Over-hearing:
Towards a Dialogics of Voice
Richard Aczel

T
he splendid conceit which closes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 tells
us all we know on earth and all we need to know about the
relationship between speech and writing: “So long as men can
breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
For the poet, for his beloved Youth, and, indeed, for the poet’s failed
metaphor itself (the less lovely and less temperate summer’s day),
writing is the absolute guarantor of eternal presence—so long, of
course, as all three can depend upon the voice of another to breathe
them back to life. Such breath, however, is necessarily ephemeral, no
more than a mortal sigh against the permanence of the written word
which outlives all instances of its vocal iteration and plucks the beloved
from the shade of death by transfiguring him “in eternal lines to time.”
If Shakespeare’s couplet is “logocentric,” its logos is the word of writing,
not of speech, which is, as Spenser reminds us in a sonnet that builds on
essentially the same conceit, as transient as words written on a palimp-
sest of sand and washed away by the sea. But to what end is this logos—
this writing as the guarantee of eternal presence—to be preserved, if not
for the seeing, breathing (dying) other, whose eyes, Shakespeare tells us
in a further conceit in Sonnet 23, are also ears: “To hear with eyes
belongs to love’s fine wit.” The seeing of reading is always at once a
hearing.

This essay will explore the resources for an understanding of reading

as an over-hearing of voices. The over is used in four discrete but related
senses: it is at once the complex over of overdetermination; the tempo-
ral, historical over of something repeated, done over again; the incom-
plete, falling short over of overlooking; and the combination of fortu-
itousness and intention that informs the over of the more usual sense of
over-hearing. Thus the over-hearing of voices in literary texts will be
understood as something overdetermined, unfinal, in process, and
historically situated: the intentional activity of a subject whose intentions
are subjected to the historical dialogue which renders his or her speech
possible. In an earlier article in this journal on “Hearing Voices in
Narrative Texts,” I offered a critique of structuralist narratological

New Literary History, 2001, 32: 597–617

598 new literary history

approaches to voice as a unified speaker position or textual level and

argued instead for a notion of voice as a composite configuration of
quoted speech styles, closing with a call for a more fully reader-oriented
understanding of voice.1 This paper is an attempt to move further
toward such an understanding. I begin by showing how the essentially
Bakhtinian notion of voice as composite and quotational which I
developed in my earlier article can provide a fruitful response to the
critical anxieties of deconstruction concerning voice. Next, I argue that
by returning Derrida’s notion of différance to Heidegger’s concept of der
Unter-Schied (“dif-ference”) from which it logically—and perhaps even
philologically—derives, we can tap a richly suggestive resource for an
understanding of dialogically overdetermined over-hearing. Then I
return to Bakhtin to pursue a number of hints in the later work as to
how his essentially text-immanent notion of discursive polyphony can be
rethought in terms of a reader-oriented approach by critically articulat-
ing his dialogism with the hermeneutic dialogism of Hans-Georg Gadamer
and the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss. Finally, I consider the
turn towards the reader in constructivist, cognitive, and “natural”
narratology, exploring parallels and discontinuities with my own ap-
proach to reading as over-hearing.

I. Deconstruction and Heteroglossia

Voice, conceived as origin, as pure self-presence, has, for some thirty

years, figured as the bugbear of a whole species of literary and critical
theory. From Jacques Derrida’s anxieties about “the privilege of the
phone” in Speech and Phenomena and the subsequent project of
“grammatology” to subvert the hegemony of speech over writing,
through Roland Barthes’s apodeictic “writing is the destruction of every
voice,” to Andrew Gibson’s criticism in Towards a Poststructuralist Theory of
Narrative of the hankering after “presence as source and origin” that
informs the concept of narrative voice, voice has been the stand-up
infidel of poststructuralism’s crusade against the “metaphysics of pres-
ence” that has apparently dominated Western thought since Plato.2
For all the ink that has been spilt on the question of logo- and
phonocentricity since Derrida’s second book on Husserl, Speech and
Phenomena (La voix et le phénomème), that work continues to offer perhaps
the most convincing presentation of the notion of voice as self-presence,
together with its most challenging critique. Derrida equates the “epoch
of the phone” with the “epoch of being in the form of presence, that is,
of ideality” and identifies “an unfailing complicity between idealization
and speech (voix)” in so far as the “signifier, animated by my breath and
understanding as over-hearing 599

by the meaning-intention . . . is in absolute proximity to me” (SP 74, 75,

77). Whereas in every other form of “auto-affection,” the subject must
engage with objects and signs in the outside world, in the production of
voice, Derrida suggests, he seems to be able to hear himself and “be
affected by the signifier he produces” without any “external detour” into
the world of “what is not his own” (SP 78). In order to experience this
voice as a signifying instrument, of course, the subject does have to pass
“outside the sphere of ‘ownness’” and participate in the system of
differences (writing) which precedes his own being—but this is not
Derrida’s main point here. Rather, it is the notion of self-presence and
immediacy which Derrida is, first and foremost, out to deconstruct: “If
we recall now that the pure inwardness of phonic auto-affection sup-
posed the purely temporal nature of the ‘expressive’ process, we see that
the theme of a pure inwardness of speech, or the ‘hearing oneself
speak,’ is radically contradicted by ‘time’ itself. The going-forth ‘into the
world’ is also primordially implied in the movement of temporalization.
‘Time’ cannot be an ‘absolute subjectivity’ precisely because it cannot be
conceived on the basis of a present and the self presence of a present
being” (SP 86). Derrida’s conclusion is well known. It is différance, the
combined operation of both differing and deferring, which “at one and
the same time both fissures and retards presence, submitting it simulta-
neously to primordial division and delay” (SP 88).
Derrida naturally enough delights in the fact that the letter “a” which
distinguishes his différance (as the productive moment of a combined
differing and deferring) from ordinary difference (as an effect of this
moment) can only be seen and not heard, and is thus exclusively an
effect of writing. But surely voice is, in this sense, the bad child of
différance. For what is heard in the voice is not presence per se, but an
echo. If, as Bakhtin suggests, every utterance is permeated with
heteroglossia—the tongues of others, with which every utterance is “over-
populated”—every act of speech is an act of ventriloquism, and the
source of the voice can never finally be fixed in the presence of the
speaker. Far from being a guarantor of self-presence, voice is always an
effect of perpetual differentiation and deferral; a composite, poly-
phonic, and “always already” quotational quality which allows of no final
return to any recuperable originary source. Derrida himself has in
recent years come considerably closer to such a view of voice: “Voice can
betray the body to which it is lent, it can make it ventriloquize as if the
body were no longer anything more than the actor or the double of
another voice, of the voice of the other, even of an innumerable,
incalculable polyphony.”3 This recognition of the possibility of an
“innumerable, incalculable polyphony” inhabiting the voice seems to
acknowledge that voice too can be shot through with différance, or
600 new literary history

perhaps that human speech, just as much as writing, (co)responds to or

enacts the productive and irreducible moment of differentiation and
deferral that is constitutive of language itself. To put it this way is to
paraphrase Heidegger’s characterization of the Unter-Schied (“dif-ference”)
in his 1950 lecture on “Die Sprache,” published in Unterwegs zur Sprache
in 1959.4 This essay in so many ways anticipates and directly informs
Derrida’s essay on “Différance” that it is surely remarkable that Derrida,
who refers directly to other works by Heidegger, makes no mention of
“Die Sprache” and Heidegger’s Unter-Schied in that text.5

II. Heidegger’s Difference

In “Die Sprache” Heidegger challenges, while not dismissing, conven-

tional theories of language “as audible utterance of inner emotions, as
human activity, as a representation by image and concept” (PLT 193),
arguing that none of these brings us to an understanding of “language
as language.” Instead, Heidegger suggests that the essence of language
can better be understood through the formulation “die Sprache spricht”
(“language speaks” [PLT 190]). Language speaks, according to Heidegger,
by calling the things it calls “into the between of dif-ference” (PLT 206)
[in das Zwischen des Unter-Schiedes (US 28)]. Heidegger’s concept of
dif-ference (der Unter-Schied) anticipates—and surely informs—Derrida’s
différance in a number of important ways. Like Derrida’s différance,
Heidegger’s “dif-ference” is “not a generic concept for various kinds of
differences” (PLT 202). It names neither “a distinction established
between objects only by our representations,” nor is it “merely a relation
obtaining between world and thing, so that a representation coming
upon it can establish it.” Rather than being “abstracted from world and
thing as their relationship after the fact,” “dif-ference” is actively
productive of differentiation: it “disclosingly appropriates [ereignet] things
into bearing a world; it disclosingly appropriates world into the granting of
things” (PLT 202–3). Dif-ference is “neither distinction nor relation”; it
might be called a “dimension,” but only if dimension “no longer means
a precinct already present independently in which this or that comes to
settle.” On the other hand, “dif-ference is the dimension insofar as it
measures out, apportions, world and thing, each to its own. Its allotment
of them first opens up the separateness and towardness of world and
thing. Such an opening up is the way in which the dif-ference here spans
the two” (PLT 203).
It is above all this productive aspect of Heidegger’s “dif-ference,” as
that which “eventuates,” measures out, opens up, and at the same time
spans, which most significantly anticipates Derrida’s différance. Just as for
understanding as over-hearing 601

Derrida différance “produces” differences, and is “the structured and

differing origin of differences” (SP 141), so Heidegger’s “dif-ference” is
“the injunction out of which every enjoining/naming [Heißen] is itself
first called . . . . The injunction of the dif-ference has always already
gathered all enjoining/naming into itself” (US 30).6
Admittedly, the etymology of Heidegger’s “dif-ference” does not
combine the two impulses of differing and deferring crucial to différance,
but it is none the less, in rhetorical terms, analogously complex and
composite. On the one hand, Heidegger derives the “unter” of his
Unter-Schied from the Latin inter. This inter is for Heidegger the
“between” of world and thing, where the two traverse a middle and are
intimate, but nonetheless remain apart. This intimacy and apartness
Heidegger bases on the Greek root of his “dif-ference,” diaphora, which
Heidegger also translates as “austragen”: a carrying apart that is also a
carrying out in the sense of carrying through. In this sense “dif-ference”
is, in Derrida’s words, and like Derrida’s différance, a “movement of
play” (SP 141). And like that of différance, the etymological moment of
“dif-ference” pulls in two ways, both semantically and rhetorically. It is
crucial to the rhetorical capital of both terms that they can only be
thought paradoxically as, to echo the opening words of Derrida’s
Différance, “differing from themselves.”
For both Heidegger and Derrida, then, language speaks insofar as it
corresponds to, or carries out, while at once producing or eventuating,
“dif-ference”/différance. The human subject, or Heidegger’s “man” (“der
Mensch”), on the other hand, only speaks “insofar as he (co)responds to
language”(“insofern er der Sprache ent-spricht” [US 33]). Derrida will
say something similar in Différance, albeit in the middle of a paraphrase
of Saussure, not of Heidegger. For Derrida, man “becomes a speaking
subject only by conforming his speech . . . to the system of linguistic
prescriptions taken as the system of differences, or at least to the general
law of différance” (SP 145–46).
If deconstruction seems to have overlooked the parallels between
Heidegger’s “dif-ference” and Derrida’s différance—with Heidegger re-
maining the stage villain of presence and logocentricity—the claim that
“language speaks” (“die Sprache spricht”) has nonetheless become a
byword of much poststructuralist theory. But what is involved here is an
odd type of misreading, one which replaces one type of originary agency
(man) with another (language). This is not only to reinsert the notion of
the subject into a philosophical discourse which insists on banishing the
subject-object opposition from its rhetoric (where “world worlds” and
“things thing,” not as objects of contemplation, but as “ready-at-hand”),
but also to misconstrue the question to which Heidegger’s statement is
an answer. The question the phrase “language speaks” answers in
602 new literary history

Heidegger’s “Die Sprache” is not “who speaks?” but “Wie west die
Sprache als Sprache?” (US 12)7 (“In what way does language occur as
language?” [PLT 190]). Heidegger is not interested in replacing the
human subject with the impersonal (and transcendental?) subject of
language. “Die Sprache” begins with the statement: “Man speaks” (“Der
Mensch spricht”) and the essay never denies that “it is as one who speaks
that man is—man” (PLT 189).8 It is only, however, toward the end of the
essay that Heidegger explains the relationship between the claims that
“man speaks” and “language speaks.” On the one hand, as we have
already seen, “man speaks insofar as he (co)responds to language.” On
the other hand, it is the nature of language (das Wesen der Sprache) that
it “needs and uses the speaking of mortals in order to sound as the peal of
stillness for the hearing of mortals” (PLT 208). The “peal of stillness” is
continuous (or contiguous) with dif-ference; indeed, Heidegger repeat-
edly speaks of “the peal of the stillness of the dif-ference.” “Dif-ference,”
as we have seen, is neither a relation that precedes utterance, nor a
relationship established by representation after the fact. Like différance,
“dif-ference” is not a presence that can be re-presented. But unlike
différance it needs to be sounded, or voiced, in order to be the event that
it is. “Dif-ference” is (only) an event for the hearing of mortals.
The apparent conflation of voicing (or sounding) and hearing in the
statement that language “needs and uses the speaking of mortals in order
to sound as the peal of stillness for the hearing of mortals” requires
some explanation as it is crucial to Heidegger’s understanding of
language throughout his work. It is also the source of perhaps the most
decisive difference between Heidegger’s view of language and Derrida’s.
For whereas Derrida’s notion of différance precludes any limitation on
textual free play and thus also guarantees the “unreadability” of all
writing, Heidegger will still insist on the human delimitation of the
speaking of language (das Sprechen der Sprache) and thus also on the
possibility of shared hearing and understanding. It is above all in the
notion of hearing, which turns out to be logically and ontologically prior
to speaking, that Heidegger’s difference from Derrida persists and that
his contribution to an understanding of reading as an over-hearing of
voices ultimately lies.
Throughout the collection Unterwegs zur Sprache, Heidegger insists
that “Mortals speak insofar as they hear” (US 32),9 and that “Speaking is
of itself a hearing” and, what is more, “a hearing not while but before we
are speaking” (US 254). This priority of hearing is already posited, and
perhaps most fully explained, in the section on “Dasein and Discourse:
Language” in Sein und Zeit, where hearing is described as “constitutive
for discourse.”10 Hearing is not simply a physical activity of the ear, but
an orientation, a mode of understanding “something-as-something.”
understanding as over-hearing 603

“Dasein hears because it understands.” We never merely hear “noises

and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle” (SZ
163); even when we are addressed in a language not our own, “we hear
in the first instance unintelligible words, and not a multiplicity of tone
data” (SZ 164). Like understanding, with which it is cognate, hearing
always hears something-as-something. As Heidegger says in the earlier
section on “Understanding and Interpretation,” “grasping which is free-
of-the-as [als-freies Erfassen]” is not prior to, but derivative of, an abstrac-
tion from, understanding something-as-something (SZ 149). By analogy,
the hearing of language as pure différance can only ever be derivative of
and abstracted from the hearing of discourse as oriented towards the
specific possibilities of being and being-with, of being at hand (zuhanden).
To posit the free play of the signifier as a property of writing is to fall
back into the essentially Cartesian dualism of viewing language as a
recalcitrant object perpetually escaping a would-be contemplative sub-
ject. The object of such contemplation is neither logically nor
ontologically prior to the directedness of the event of reading, but an
abstraction from it. Writing is only undecidable or unreadable when it is
already read, and this reading is always already a reading-as based on the
specific attunement (Gestimmtheit) and situatedness (Befindlichkeit) which
gives it direction. It is precisely because the hearing of Dasein is always
attuned and situated that the free play of the signifier comes into play as
a possibility at all.
In what is the hearing of Dasein situated and to what is it attuned? This
question is, for the purposes of the current argument, best answered
through Heidegger’s reading of two lines from Hölderlin’s fragment,
“Versöhnender, der du nimmergeglaubt”: “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind, /
Und hören können voneinander.” [Since we have been a dialogue, /
And can hear from one another].11 As Heidegger argues in both of his
discussions of these lines—in “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung”
and in his lectures on Hölderlin’s “Der Rhein”—we hear with attuned
ears because we are always already situated in a dialogue. Dialogue is not
merely a form which language can take; rather, “only as dialogue is
language fully itself” (“als Gespräch nur ist Sprache wesentlich” EHD
36). In the lectures on Hölderlin’s “Der Rhein,” Heidegger will argue
that it is “in dialogue that language happens [or “events”] and this
happening constitutes its being” (HH 69). In both texts, Heidegger tries
to argue that the “und” between “Seit ein Gespräch wir sind, / Und
hören können voneinander” has no causal or consecutive function; it
does not mean “and we therefore” (“und wir deshalb” [HH 71]). In both
texts he claims that the “ability to hear is not a result of our speaking to
one another, but on the contrary the condition thereof,”12 for the same
reason that he argues for the primacy of hearing over speaking in “Der
604 new literary history

Weg zur Sprache” (US 254) and “hearing as constitutive for discourse” in
Sein und Zeit (SZ 163). But if there can be no dialogue without hearing,
the attunement of hearing is determined by dialogue. That is to say, the
“as”-character of whatever is heard as-something in understanding is
given by the dialogic hearing and speaking with another that is the
essence of language. It is precisely this dialogic element which delimits
the free play of différance and which constitutes the configuration of
voices audible to the attuned and situated ear in any event of (silent or
acoustic) hearing.

III. Dialogism and Hermeneutics

It is this notion of hearing—or rather, of overdetermined, dialogic

over-hearing—that is, in the context of the present discussion, essential
to a historical and reader-oriented understanding of the vocalization of
possible voices in the text. What it enables is a notion of voice that goes
beyond both the text-immanent limitations of Bakhtinian polyphony
and the endless undecidability of Derridean différance. I should like now
to return to Bakhtin, whose concept of voice I discussed in more detail
in “Hearing Voices,” and to identify in his later work some further
resources for the historically situated, reader-oriented approach to over-
hearing that I am attempting to develop here.
Bakhtin had shown that voice, as heteroglossia, is itself always already
permeated with difference and deferral, but tended to delimit the play
of differences to an authorial intentionality and to identify a system-
atized configuration of voices as an immanent presence in the text. For
Bakhtin, the novel remains “a diversity of social speech types . . . and a
diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” by the author into a
“structured artistic system” and “subordinated to the higher stylistic
unity of the work as a whole.”13 “What is present in the novel,” Bakhtin
argues in concluding “Discourse in the Novel,” “is an artistic system of
languages . . . and the real task of stylistic analysis consists in uncovering
all the available orchestrating languages in the composition of the
novel” (DI 416). But available to whom? This question clearly begins to
worry Bakhtin in the closing pages of his essay. The accents of the
diverse voices “integrated” into the novel can change over the course of
history: the radically new or alterior can become canonical and familiar,
the parodic can be “re-accentuated” as nonparodic and vice versa. “For
the word is, after all, not a dead material object in the hands of an artist
equipped with it . . . [a]nd under changed conditions [its] meaning may
emit bright new rays, burning away the reified crust that had grown up
around it” (DI 419). If this is, implicitly, to recognize the role of the
understanding as over-hearing 605

reader as crucially involved in the “orchestration” of voices in the novel,

Bakhtin moves more explicitly towards a recognition of the role of
reception in the dialogic process of literary understanding in his
concluding remarks to “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the
Novel” (1937–38), added in 1973. The subtitle of this essay, “Notes
Towards a Historical Poetics,” itself embodies a prospective rapproche-
ment of reception- and production-oriented approaches to literature,
which anticipates the concern to integrate hermeneutics and poetics of
the Constance School.14 Here Bakhtin takes up the point he made in
“Discourse in the Novel” about the word not being “a dead material
object” and relates this directly to the issue of voice. The “material of the
work,” he argues, “is not dead, it is speaking, signifying (it involves
signs); we not only see and perceive it but in it we can always hear voices
(even while reading silently to ourselves)” (DI 252). This hearing is no
longer simply an “uncovering” of the systematic configuration of voices
unproblematically “present” in the text as structure, but a creative,
emergent, and historically situated event. The “real, unitary and as yet
incomplete historical world” of both author and reader is:

the world that actually creates the text, for all its aspects—the reality reflected in
the text, the authors creating the text, the performers of the text (if they exist)
and finally the listeners or readers who recreate and in so doing renew the
text—participate equally in the creation of the world represented in the text. . . .
The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it, and
the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation,
as well as part of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through
the creative perception of listeners and readers. (DI 253–54)

Here the hermeneutic aspect of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue is clearly

foregrounded over a poetics of dialogue as a configuration of text-
immanent voices. If the voices of the text are renewed and recreated by
listeners and readers throughout history, accents, emphases, and
significances of intonation will vary according to the echoes already in
the ear of the historical hearer. In this way, over-hearing becomes a
properly overdetermined articulation between the (projected) dialogic
polyphony of the text and the dialogic situatedness of the reader. At the
same time this over-hearing is also historically situated as a hearing over
again in which prior over-hearings are already part of the dialogue.

Such a position is undoubtedly continuous with that of the hermeneu-

tic dialogism of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the aesthetics of reception
championed by his pupil, Hans Robert Jauss. As New Literary History was
itself partly born of preoccupations shared with German hermeneutics
and the reception theory of the Constance School, there is little need
606 new literary history

here to rehearse familiar arguments for the significance of the dialogic

approach to textual understanding. It may, however, be worth pausing to
highlight aspects of the contribution of hermeneutics to a reader-
oriented approach to the question of voice in particular, focusing above
all on the work of Gadamer and his abortive attempt at a dialogue with
Derrida.15
For Gadamer reading is “letting speak” (“Lesen ist Sprechenlassen”),
a returning of the written word to the dialogue out of which it arose.16
Naturally this dialogue, which constitutes the text’s own horizon, can
never in itself be known to the reader, can never be fixed as a final and
authoritative source of meaning. Because any act of reading or under-
standing always starts out from the “prejudices” of its own horizon,
understanding will always involve difference: “one understands differ-
ently when one understands at all” (man versteht anders, wenn man
überhaupt versteht [GW 302]). Thus, in his “encounter” with Derrida in
1981, Gadamer was prepared to accept the importance of “difference,”
but insisted in locating it in lecture rather than in écriture: “Where is the
multiplicity of meaning really located? Isn’t it to be found in the
constitution of sense that takes place in the concrete give and take of
language, and not in the factuality of the signs themselves?” (DD 115).
The play of difference does not take place in the text but in its reading.
Play, for Gadamer, is, quite crucially, not a text-immanent quality, but the
fundamental structure of understanding, and a whole section of Truth
and Method is devoted to arguing that play is “the clue to ontological
explanation.”17 Gadamer, not unlike Derrida, uses the concept of play to
decenter the subject as an originary source and agent of meaning, for
the subject of a game, Gadamer insists, is never the player, but the game
itself (TM 106). This, Gadamer argues, is also true of the play of
language: “As far as language is concerned, the actual subject of play is
obviously not the subjectivity who, among other activities, also plays but
is instead the play itself” (TM 104). For Gadamer, however, the play of
language which decenters the subject is never merely the free play of the
signifier that it remains for Derrida. The play of langauge is played out—
and is only play in being played out—at the level of, and in the active
event of, understanding, not at the material level of the signifier. Thus
the play which becomes the subject of the game is always constituted in
the act of performing, interpreting, or “reading.” For Gadamer, this play
of reading can no more be finally fixed than for Derrida the play of
différance, but the play of reading nonetheless remains determinate and
situated. The play of reading is the dialogue between prejudice and
alterity, projection and revision that takes place within the horizon of the
historically-situated reader. As Gadamer explains later in Truth and
Method in explaining Heidegger’s notion of “fore-having” (Vorhabe) and
understanding as over-hearing 607

its relation to Heidegger’s appropriation of the hermeneutic circle: “A

person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He
projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial
meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only
because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to
a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly
revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is
understanding what is there” (TM 267). When Gadamer speaks in Truth
and Method of a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) between the
historical situatedness of text and reader, he is never speaking of an
objective coming together of the horizons of past and present, but
always of a projection of the past through the present. If Gadamer’s
dialogic notion of understanding involves asking the question to which
the text is an answer, this question too is always framed within the
(dialogic) horizon of the reader.
For this very reason, Hans Robert Jauss was at least partly right to insist
on the metaphoricity of this dialogue of question and answer with the
text. As Jauss argues in the essay “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” it
is always the reader who “must himself first stage the role of the other so
that the text can speak, respond to a question, and be understood in the
end as a ‘question posed to me.’”18 The reader thus becomes a kind of
ventriloquist, intoning the voices of the text according to his or her own
historically-situated hearing. For Gadamer himself, this intoning re-
mains central to the reading and understanding of a written text. In
“Hermeneutics and Logocentrism,” an article emerging directly out of
his encounter with Derrida, Gadamer explicitly equates the understand-
ing of the written word with “making an intonation and modulation that
anticipates the sense of the whole” (DD 118). Such intoning clearly bases
itself on hearing, and Gadamer, not surprisingly, follows Heidegger in
his privileging of hearing as both a condition for dialogue and as a
belonging (Gehören, Zugehören) to the dialogue of tradition (TM 462). It
is, of course, the fundamental difference of the historically situated
reader’s horizon—from that of the text and from that of other histori-
cally situated readers—that constitutes the hearing (and letting speak)
of voices in the text as a historical over-hearing, a hearing anew, in an
overdetermined and dialogically projected encounter between self and
other.
For all Gadamer’s emphasis on the productive and finally determinate
role of the reader’s horizon in dialogically constructing the horizon of
the text through the movement of question and answer, projection and
revision, the dialogue to which overheard voices are returned remains
nonetheless a dialogue, and not a monologic reproduction of historical
prejudices. On the one hand, it is the encounter with the otherness of
608 new literary history

the text itself that makes us aware of the specificity and historicity of our
own prejudices. On the other hand, any open engagement with the
other will also reveal otherness as precisely the limitation of our
prejudices. While it is, as Gadamer argues, “impossible to make ourselves
aware of a prejudice while it is constantly operating unnoticed,” the
“encounter with a traditionary text” can provoke prejudice into aware-
ness. In an open, hearing dialogue with the other, “our own prejudice is
properly brought into play by being put at risk.” And only insofar as our
prejudice is “given full play is it able to experience the other’s claim to
truth” (TM 299). Understanding the other as other means acknowledg-
ing its difference from us. It is only insofar as it makes us aware of our
difference from it that the other becomes other. In bringing our
prejudices into play, it allows us to recognize them as specifically ours
and not universally or “naturally” given. We become at once most fully
ourselves in understanding the otherness of the other, and are also
challenged and changed by its otherness. As Gadamer puts it in Truth
and Method: “To reach an understanding in dialogue is not merely a
matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own
point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do
not remain what we were” (TM 379). To enter into a conversation or
dialogue, as Gadamer would go on to claim in the aftermath of his
encounter with Derrida, is “to be beyond oneself, to think with the other
and to come back to oneself as if to another” (DD 110).
In dialogue with a written text, understanding the other, as we have
seen, also involves speaking like, or ventriloquizing, the other. This
ventriloquism is in the first instance based in the voices one already
hears and takes to the text as registers of both its vocal familiarity and its
strangeness. The hearing we already attune to the text is the hearing of
belonging (Gehören) to the very dialogue which recommends the text to
us. But where the text resists the voices of traditionary hearing, we are
forced to hear and intone differently. The more a text challenges our
hearing, the more our voices will change in speaking it. To hear
differently is to intone in a new key, to speak in a new voice.

Again a parallel with the dialogism of Bakhtin suggests itself here, and
it is not surprising that, especially in his later years, Jauss became
increasingly interested in the Bakhtinian notion of a dialogue with the
(textual) other as a source of understanding and transformation of the
self. In “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity” Jauss’s attitude to Bakhtin,
however, reveals itself to be critically qualified. While Jauss commends
what he identifies in Bakhtin’s dialogic approach to reading as a form of
“responsive self-understanding enabled by the other of the text,” he also
insists that “Bakhtin’s theory of alterity,” which developed primarily out
understanding as over-hearing 609

of an “aesthetics of production,” remains incomplete without “herme-

neutic support with regard to the historical continuity of dialogic
understanding” (QA 216). In the light of the passages cited earlier from
Bakhtin’s “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” Jauss’s
criticism of the limited literary historical value of Bakhtin’s dialogism
may sound excessively harsh: “Bakhtin’s dialogic, however much it
exposes the difference in polyvalence between grammatical persons and
speaking voices, nonetheless . . . assumes the transparency of the poetic
word and is unable to elicit the hermeneutic difference between the
author’s intention, the meaning of the text, and the significance for a
given reader” (QA 216–17). Jauss’s own aesthetics of reception undoubt-
edly provides a crucial complement not only to Bakhtin’s dialogic, but
also to Gadamer’s insistence on the role of historical situatedness in any
act of understanding. For this situatedness itself has a history which
needs to be understood in order to understand the horizon of any
historical act of reading. Hence the value of Jauss’s shift of emphasis in
the study of literary history from the work itself to the unfolding of its
potential meanings in the history of its reception. That Jauss remains
nonetheless committed to a genuine dialogue between production and
reception is clear from the productive—and occasionally misleading—
double sense in which he uses the term “horizon of expectations”
(Erwartungshorizont) to refer both to the preconceptions of the historically
situated reader and to the expectations which give rise to the work, in
the form of the set of questions to which it is an answer. It is when, in his
earlier work, Jauss insists that the horizon of expectations of a work “in
the historical moment of its appearance” constitutes “an objectifiable
system of expectations” (TA 22) that one voice in the dialogue seems in
danger of falling silent and one wonders what has become of Gadamer’s
critique of the illusion of historical objectivity.

IV. New Voices in Narratology

The hermeneutic interest in the creative role of the reader’s precon-

ceptions and historical situatedness in the construction of the text finds
one further important parallel in a number of recent developments in
narratology. In the last ten years, narratology has been taking a decisively
historical, reader-oriented turn. I refer here, with somewhat simplified
labels, above all to the “natural” narratology of Monika Fludernik, the
“cognitive” narratology of Manfred Jahn, and the “constructivist”
narratology of Ansgar Nünning.19 All three have moved beyond the text-
immanent structuralism of “classical” narratology in their focus on the
intuitive, cognitive, and historical parameters and frames through which
610 new literary history

readers process information in the reading of narrative, and there may

well be further gains to be had from an engagement with other schools
of thought that, while coming from and going in fundamentally
different directions, have shared a considerable amount of common
ground along the way. Of particular relevance, perhaps, is the emphasis
in dialogic hermeneutics on the two-sided give and take between reader
and text which is not always in evidence in the new narratology.
This is perhaps most clearly seen in the relative rhetorical negativity of
one of the central methodological principles postclassical narratology
has adopted to describe the way intuitive and cognitive parameters are
applied to (narrative) texts. The principle is that of “naturalization,”
taken from the work of Jonathan Culler, and particularly important to
Fludernik’s concept of “narrativization” and Nünning’s constructivist
approach to the redefinition of unreliable narration. Culler defines
naturalization in the following terms: “The strange, the formal, the
fictional, must be recuperated or naturalized, brought within our ken if
we do not want to remain gaping before monumental inscriptions. . . .
‘Naturalization’ emphasises the fact that the strange or deviant is
brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem natural.”20
What is presented here is only one side of the hermeneutic dialogue: the
projection of preconceptions onto the other and the attempt to use
these preconceptions in such a way as to make the other continuous with
the self. This one-sidedness or negativity is implicit in the intellectual
genealogy of the term. For Culler appears to take “naturalization” from
the “hermeneutics of suspicion” of marxist ideology-critique. For
(Althusserian) marxism, “naturalization” describes the distortive process
whereby the dominant ideology reproduces its hegemony by insisting on
its universal naturalness, by transforming its own “deviance” or
interestedness into the illusion of natural law. For marxism, this form of
naturalization is a form of deception that has to be unveiled to reveal the
true power relations of class domination. Just as naturalization in
Althusserian ideology-critique constitutes one of the central conditions
of the subject’s subjection to the dominant ideology, so, when applied to
the cognitive understanding of texts, it runs the risk of constituting the
reading subject’s subjection to his or her own preconceptions or given
cognitive frames. What seems to be precluded is the chance of reading
for difference, reading for (a) change. Naturalization, in Culler’s
definition, is either monologic or engaged only in a dialogue with
frames it cannot transcend. This is the opposite of dialogic literary
understanding as defined by Jauss: “Literary understanding first be-
comes dialogic when the alterity of the text is sought out and acknowl-
edged before the horizon of one’s own expectations—with the result
that . . . one’s own expectations will be corrected and expanded through
understanding as over-hearing 611

the experience of the other” (QA 207–8). Such a view is actually very
close to Monika Fludernik’s more open reading of Culler’s “naturaliza-
tion” in Towards a Natural Narratology: “naturalization either integrates the
unfamiliar within a larger frame that explains the strange as quite
familiar within a different perspective (religious non-conformity, for
instance, is recuperated not as sanctity, which would be incomprehen-
sible from a secular viewpoint, but as sheer mental derangement), or it
proposes a more embracing frame that is able to explain inconsistencies
as functions within its own setup” (TNN 33). Fludernik’s “frames” are
not unanalogous to the hermeneutic notion of “forehaving” (Heidegger’s
Vorhabe: the orientation of understanding to the totality of what has
already been understood) and, in its literary-interpretative application,
frame theory could no doubt benefit from Heidegger’s productive
differentiation between the two further categories of “fore-sight” (Vorsicht:
an implicit interpretative direction, or looking ahead, in any act of
understanding) and “fore-conception” (Vorgriff : the specific conceptuality
always already decided upon in the act of understanding).
The analogy, however, between natural narratology and dialogical
hermeneutics would nonetheless seem to break down at two levels, one
theoretical, and one practical-rhetorical. On the one hand, Fludernik’s
either/or argument implies that there can be understanding without both
aspects of the hermeneutic dialogue taking place in the act of reading.
For the likes of Gadamer, on the other hand, no understanding has
taken place where the reader’s preconceptions or frames are left fully
intact. To understand is always to understand differently. On the other
hand, the rhetoric of natural narratology draws primarily on the
negative aspect of naturalization implicit in Culler’s own definition.
Subsequent uses of the term naturalization in Towards a Natural
Narratology—indeed all the uses of the term referenced in the index—
tend to confirm this (for example, “Naturalization processes are reading
strategies which familiarize the unfamiliar, and they therefore reduce
the unexpected to more manageable proportions” [TNN 46]). The
rhetorical implications of this are particularly apparent in Fludernik’s
discussion of postmodern or experimental narrative in chapter seven of
Natural Narratology—where the challenge to everyday-life cognitive frames
is perceived to be strongest. Here we read again and again of logical
“oddities” or “inconsistencies” in narrative that can be (or can be
rendered no longer) “worrisome,” of the referential function of lan-
guage being “at risk,” of techniques which “prove dangerous” to the
cognition of a text’s narrativity, and of the plot value of a narrative being
“endangered” by too little or too much action. Here the position of the
reader is essentially defensive and it is assumed that the reader’s
“natural” instinct is to ward off the danger of difference and to re-solve
612 new literary history

inconsistencies into the coherence of the familiar. This may or may not
be an accurate view of human nature, but it is clearly no longer
analogous with Gadamer’s view of the openness of reading as a process of
dialogic understanding in which we are “transformed into a communion
in which we do not remain what we were” (TM 379).
The source of this negativity, or one-sidedness, in the practical
rhetoric of naturalization can perhaps best be identified in the transition
natural narratology makes from naturalization to narrativization. Fludernik
uses the latter term to “describe a reading strategy that naturalizes texts
by recourse to narrative schemata,” by which are meant “natural
parameters or frames . . . which correlate with real-world knowledge”
(TNN 34, 46); narrativity is constructed by the reader “on the basis of
real-world cognitive parameters” (TNN 313). On one level such a view is
unobjectionable enough: what other cognitive parameters could readers
conceivably be thought to have? When, however, real-life or everyday-life
frames and scripts are uncritically transposed to the understanding of
literary texts, the reader is surely reduced to a natural in the
Shakespearean sense. The application of Roger Schank and Robert
Abelson’s restaurant script, for example, to the reading of a menu in an
everyday restaurant situation is one thing; to read literary texts in the
same way is quite another. When I order my food in a restaurant my
central strategy and desire (Vorsicht) is to get the right dish. When I read
an analogous scene in a novel, it is quite possible (likely even) that I am
more interested in how the scene is done, than in the food the characters
do or don’t get. If a first-person narrator tells me he or she has ordered
a steak and gets a wellington boot, I might feel that my cognitive
parameters are being threatened and naturalize my narrator in terms of
his or her unreliability. Alternatively I might laugh. In this case I would
probably be applying the aesthetic-generic frame of comedy, rather than
the real-life frame of restaurant-script expectations. Aesthetic-generic
frames surely play a crucial role in the reading of literary texts; when I
have made up my mind that I am reading a work of science fiction, a
different set of expectations will be brought into play from those
involved in my construction of a text as a comedy of manners. Moreover,
these expectations are historically and culturally specific and variable,
rather than naturally given, and one of the many factors contributing to
the way they may change during the course of history is the text itself.
The more a text challenges the range of real-life and aesthetic frames
(or prejudices) I have at my disposal, the more I will have to change my
preconceptions in order to go on listening to the specificity of the text.
Alternatively I can dismiss what I am reading as nonsense, or as a freak.
At one point in Towards a Natural Narratology, Fludernik’s preoccupation
with “natural” parameters risks bringing her precariously close to such a
understanding as over-hearing 613

position: “My stance is that texts which maximally resist a realist or

mimetic process of narrativization are important but rare examples of
limit cases of experimental writing” (TNN 326).
Fludernik does not, of course, leave this statement unqualified, and
the qualification offers a productive way into the second area of
potential dialogue between the new narratology and hermeneutics:
narratology’s recent historical turn. Fludernik continues: “I would have
hesitated in such a claim ten years ago when fiction seemed in flux
towards ever more sophisticated experiments, but the recent trend in
experimental writing (Pynchon, Umberto Eco and even in Josipovici)
has been towards a return to late modernist tendencies, towards a ‘soft’
experimentalism, and in particular towards a literature that is again
engagé ” (TNN 306). Presumably, if there were to be a return to more
sophisticated experimentalism, Fludernik would feel bound to revise
her position on the equation of narrativization and experientiality.
Parameters change, be they “natural” or “conventional,” during the
course of history. The natural in “natural narratology” is not situated in
some kind of privileged beyond of history, but is itself one frame within
an ever-shifting horizon. “We always find ourselves in a situation,” as
Gadamer writes, “and throwing light on it is a task that is never finished”
(TM 301). Jauss’s notion of literary history is precisely the process of
shedding light on the unfolding of an understanding that will always of
its nature remain incomplete. In the light of Fludernik’s keen-sighted
historical qualification of her position, one might expect the historical
turn in narratology to work on similar lines. In fact narratology’s
historical turn is a turn in the opposite direction, away even from its own
cognitive and constructivist point of departure, back towards, in Jauss’s
phrase, the monological monument of the text.
A particularly instructive case of postclassical narratology’s preclassical
historical turn is in its new, diachronic approach to the phenomenon of
“unreliable narration.” Here the new narratology’s cognitive leanings
lead it, in Ansgar Nünning’s words, to “conceptualize unreliable narra-
tion in the context of frame theory as a projection of the reader who
tries to resolve ambiguities and textual inconsistencies by attributing
them to the narrator’s ‘unreliability’” (TB 54). Such a view is not
incompatible with a hermeneutic view of textual understanding, al-
though the positing of the reader as an agent naturally hostile to
ambiguity remains problematic. Readers of literary texts in particular
often read for, rather than against, ambiguity, and have not been
unknown to find ambiguity aesthetically pleasurable rather than worri-
some to their real-life frames which they may to a greater or lesser
degree be prepared to suspend in the act of reading. The new
narratology’s constructivism also seems helpfully to shift the emphasis of
614 new literary history

unreliability from text-immanent features to the preconceptions of the

reader: “The construction of an unreliable narrator can be seen as an
interpretative strategy by which the reader naturalizes textual inconsis-
tencies that might otherwise remain unassimilable” (TB 69). Again,
while the notion of “naturalization” remains questionably one sided and
mechanical, the rhetoric of construction and interpretative strategy
registers narratology’s decisive move away from the structuralism of its
classical phase towards an interest in the active, historically situated
reader. It is then surprising that the first major book-length study on
unreliable narration, edited by the author of the above statements on
the unreliable narrator as the projection of a reader strategy, should
close with a comprehensive list of primary texts containing unreliable
narrators and that Fludernik, who has fully corroborated this cognitive-
constructivist approach to the topic should have recently lamented that:
“Despite a century of protonarratological and narratological work, we
still do not know what text had the first unreliable narrator.”21 State-
ments like this and the list of primary texts at the end of Nünning’s
otherwise admirable volume on Unreliable Narration are all the more
surprising after the totally convincing case made by Vera Nünning in the
closing essay of that volume for a coherent reception-historical ap-
proach to the phenomenon of unreliability on the basis of a detailed
study of how differently historically situated readers have read the
narrator of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield as either entirely trust-
worthy or entirely unreliable. If a narrator’s unreliability is a reader
construct, the history of unreliable narration can only ever be a history
of readings, and not a chronology of texts.
Perhaps what lies behind this kind of double take are the very
aspirations which continue to inform the “ology” in narratology.
Narratology’s logos is the logos of knowledge, of science; legein in the
sense of counting and reckoning. It is a science which, in its anxieties
about inconsistency and ambiguity, seems to have grown a good deal
more inflexible than “natural” science. Its continued debt to structural-
ism inheres in its unease with its own constructivist glance towards
strategies of interpretation, the legein, in Heidegger’s fanciful etymology,
of Aus-legen (interpretation) which for Heidegger remains coterminous
and simultaneous with understanding. Understanding and knowledge
are not one and the same thing. All the things we may know about a
literary text will never in themselves amount to our understanding of it
which will change with every open act of reading and rereading, even
though our factual or scientific knowledge may stay the same.

The question of hearing voices in written texts is always going to be a

matter of understanding rather than knowledge, and Fludernik is surely
understanding as over-hearing 615

right in her contribution to this issue to figure such hearing as “an

interpretative move.” In Towards a Natural Narratology, Fludernik prob-
ably takes the narratological notion of voice about as far as it can go,
regarding voice as “the linguistically generated illusion of a voice factor
which can be defined empirically by a complex set of interrelated
textual and contextual features and is corroborated by a mimetic
reading of the text that stimulates this projection of a speaker or
reflector function” (TNN 344). To insist on the over-hearing in written
texts of composite, overdetermined voices which do not point to a
single, originary speaker function is perhaps to posit a notion of voice
that is no longer compatible with, or simply irrelevant to, the concerns
of narratology. But the only true test of such a notion will be the type of
understanding it enables in the reading of narrative. Such a reading as
over-hearing will always be one reading among many, part of a continu-
ous historical process of hearing over again, itself situated in a dialogue
that develops and unfolds. Reading as over-hearing cannot but take this
dialogue to the text, for it is itself taken to the text by the dialogue in
which it is situated, to which it is attuned. Its understanding of the text
will be overdetermined both by the echoes it believes it hears of the
dialogue from whence it has come and by those accents it perceives to
resist a familiar intonation. It will begin understanding most keenly
where its intonation stumbles. There will always be accents it will be
unable to hear at all, which may yet be intoned by a later act of over-
hearing or have already been intoned by an earlier hearing, and are now
no longer audible in the clamor of those voices which can currently be
made to speak. Understanding is hearing differently. Part of this
difference consists in that which is no longer, or not yet, heard. It is the
difference from ourselves that we have to over-hear in order to go on
hearing the possibility of being and becoming who we are.

University of Cologne

NOTES

1 Richard Aczel, “Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts,” New Literary History, 29 (1998),
467–500.
2 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, tr.
David B. Alison (Evanston, 1973); hereafter cited in text as SP ; Roland Barthes, “The
Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, tr. Stephen Heath (London, 1977); Andrew
Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh, 1996), p. 146. Gibson further
claims that: “Narratology powerfully reaffirms voice as ‘pure spiritual intention,’ the soul
within the text as body . . . . For narratology, narrative voice is always a transcendent or
ideal entity from the start” (pp. 168–69).
3 Jacques Derrida, “Voice II,” in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elizabeth Weber
(Stanford, 1995), p. 161.
616 new literary history

4 Martin Heidegger, “Die Sprache” in Unterwegs zur Sprache, (Stuttgart, 1959); hereafter
cited in text as US. This essay was published in English as “Language,” in Poetry, Language,
Thought, tr. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1971); hereafter cited in text as PLT.
5 All references to Derrida’s essay “Différance” cite the English translation in Speech and
Phenomena, pp. 129–60. Derrida does refer to Heidegger’s “Die Sprache” in the second
part of his much later Politiques de l’amitié (Paris, 1994), but only as a “detour” in a
discussion of a sentence on “the voice of the friend” in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (see in
particular pp. 347–53; he makes no mention here of his own concept of différance). Other
theorists to have commented on the parallel between Heidegger’s Unter-Schied and
Derrida’s différance include Rudolphe Gasché in Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.,
1994) and Marc Froment-Meurice in That is to Say: Heidegger’s Poetics (Stanford, 1998). Both
are highly inconclusive. Gasché manages to claim on a single page that it is “impossible to
establish strictly what is properly Heidegger’s or what is Derrida’s own” and that “it is
possible—up to a certain point at least—to establish what in the thought of difference
belongs to Heidegger and what does not” (p. 79). Responding to Gasché’s first claim,
Froment-Meurice first asks “What does it really matter?” then answers his own question by
pointing out that “the very word ‘différance’ was invented in order to make it differ, in a
strictly unheard-of manner, from simple difference” (p. 205).
6 The German reads: “Der Unter-Schied ist das Geheiß, aus dem jedes Heißen selber erst
gerufen ist . . . . Das Geheiß des Unter-Schiedes hat immer schon alles Heißen in sich
versammelt.” Hofstadter’s translation does not seem to me to register the crucial double
sense of Heißen as both enjoining/invitation and naming: “The dif-ference is the command
out of which every bidding itself is first called . . . The command of the dif-ference has ever
already gathered all bidding within itself” (Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 207).
7 Heidegger’s coinage of the verbal form “west” (from the noun Wesen, meaning
“essence”) is itself characteristic of his deconstruction of the subject-object opposition.
8 See also: “Are we . . . going to deny now that man is the being who speaks? Not at all.
. . . But we ask, ‘How does man speak?’ We ask, ‘What is it to speak?’” (Poetry, Language,
Thought, p. 198).
9 Hofstadter has “listen” for “hear” (Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 209). “Hören” can be
both, and as listen can also translate Heidegger’s “Hörchen” (hearken), hear is perhaps
preferable in this instance.
10 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit [1927], (Tübingen, 1993), p. 163; hereafter cited in
text as SZ. My translation.
11 My translations. Cited by Heidegger both in “Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung”
in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main, 1944); hereafter cited in text as
EHD; and in the lecture volume Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Frankfurt
am Main, 1934); hereafter cited in text as HH.
12 See Heidegger, “Das Hörenkönnen ist nicht erst eine Folge des Miteinandersprechens,
sondern eher umgekehrt die Voraussetzung dafür” (Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, p.
36). “Das Hörenkönnen ist auch gar nicht die Folge des Miteinandersprechens, sondern
eher umgekehrt die Bedingung dafür” (Hölderlins Hymnen, p. 71).
13 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981); p. 262; hereafter cited in text as DI.
14 See, on the integration—and interdependence—of hermeneutics and poetics, Paul
de Man’s introduction to Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, tr. Timothy
Bahti (Minneapolis, 1982); hereafter cited in text as TA.
15 On the meeting between Gadamer and Derrida in Paris in April 1981, see Dialogue
and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E.
Palmer (New York, 1989); hereafter cited in text as DD.
understanding as over-hearing 617

16 Hans Georg Gadamer, “Hören-Sehen-Lesen,” in Gesammelte Werke, Band 8: Ästhetik und

Poetik I (Tübingen, 1993), p. 271; my translation hereafter cited in text as GW.
17 See the section “Play as the clue to ontological understanding” in Part I of Hans
Georg-Gadamer, Truth and Method, tr. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev.
ed. (London, 1989), pp. 101–34; hereafter cited in text as TM.
18 Hans Robert Jauss, “Horizon Structure and Dialogicity,” in Question and Answer: Forms
of Dialogic Understanding, tr. Michael Hays (Minneapolis, 1989), p. 213; hereafter cited in
text as QA.
19 See in particular Monika Fludernik, Towards a “Natural” Narratology (London, 1996);
hereafter cited in text as TNN; Ansgar Nünning, “Unreliable, compared to what? Towards
a Cognitive Theory of Unreliable Narration. Prolegomena and Hypotheses,” in Transcend-
ing Boundaries: Narratology in Context, ed. Walter Grünzweig and Andreas Solbach (Tübingen,
1999); hereafter cited in text as TB; Unreliable Narration: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis
unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englischsprachigen Erzählliteratur, ed. Ansgar Nünning
(Trier, 1998); Manfred Jahn, “Windows of Focalization: Deconstructing and Reconstruct-
ing a Narratological Concept,” Style, 30 (1996), 241–67; Manfred Jahn, “Frames, Prefer-
ences, and the Reading of Third-Person Narratives: Towards a Cognitive Narratology,”
Poetics Today, 18 (1997), 441–68.
20 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature
(London, 1975), pp. 134–37.
21 Monika Fludernik, “Beyond Structuralism in Narratology: Recent Developments and
New Horizons in Narrative Theory,” Anglistik, 11 (2000), 93.