Determinacy/Indeterminacy, Gerald Graff

Determinacy/Indeterminacy, Gerald Graff

Graff makes a convincing argument for the necessity of at least some sort of determinacy in the interpretation of literature. The very argument for indeterminacy actually rests on the assumption that some things may safely be assumed, or may be considered determinate; these aspects of language or of a specific piece of literature, serve to cast those indeterminate aspects of the language or piece of literature into relief. Even the illusion of determinacy can be sufficient to strengthen an indeterminist position: “We tend naturally to be more aware of indeterminacy than of determinacy, because only the former poses itself as a problem we have to deal with. But indeterminacy could hardly pose itself as a problem unless it could be seen against a background of partial determinacy that makes it stand out” (Critical Terms, 174). I would like to take Graff’s conception of the necessity of determinacy in the theory and practice of indeterminacy by considering the idea of history.

According to the New Critics and certain of the more contemporary deconstructionists, the multiplicity of possible interpretations, or the ambiguity of literature and the resulting indeterminacy of literary criticism, yields a new model of scholarship in which consulting the historical situation of a particular piece of literature is unnecessary, or even distracting, to interpretive work. I take issue with this idea for the very reasons that Graff suggests at the end of his chapter. We may indeed suspend certain kinds of attention to historical situation or authorial intention in order to give a “fresh” or “unstudied” reading of a piece of poetry or other work of literature, but the language of the work must be understood, and the various possibilities of meanings addressed, in order for this to happen. This process is necessarily historical. Imagine handing a Shakespeare play, bereft of all footnotes or other textual aids, to a first year college student. Even the best students would have difficulty parsing through unexplained passages of early 17^th century drama. Certain key words would be so foreign that they would not be understood, and other words which look like contemporary English words would be understood as having the contemporary meaning, when in their original context they were understood very differently. Even without giving the student any background about Shakespeare’s life, the social and political movements of the 17^th century, or any understanding of the Elizabethan stages, the play must be historicized simply in the act of making it more comprehensible to a student. This is a rather extreme example, but I think that it serves to illustrate how a certain amount of historical work is necessary to even an indeterminist interpretation of a piece of literature. Indeed, in this sense, it is necessary to historicize a line of Shakespeare in order to allow for a more full range of multiple meanings. Just as Graff writes, indeterminacy rests unequivocally on determinacy.