The Hermeneutic Spiral and Interpretation in Literature and the Visual Arts

Michael O'Toole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351382403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection brings together eighteen of the author's original papers, previously published in a variety of academic journals and edited collections over the last three decades, on the process of interpretation in literature and the visual arts in one comprehensive volume. The volume highlights the centrality of artistic texts to the study of multimodality, organized into six sections each representing a different modality or semiotic system, including literature, television, film, painting, sculpture, and architecture. A new introduction lays the foundation for the theoretically based method of analysis running through each of the chapters, one that emphasizes the interplay of textual details and larger thematic purposes to create an open-ended and continuous approach to the interpretation of artistic texts, otherwise known as the "hermeneutic spiral". Showcasing Michael O'Toole's extensive contributions to the field of multimodality and in his research on interpretation in literature and the visual arts, this book is essential reading for students and scholars in multimodality, visual arts, art history, film studies, and comparative literature.

Part 1
Literary Narrative

My model for the analysis of narrative form in short fiction was derived from concepts and methods expounded by the Russian Formalists (1917–1929), the Prague School Structuralists in the 1930s and French semioticians of the 1960s, enriched at the level of text by Halliday’s systemic-functional linguistic stylistics, of which I was an early proponent. The fullest demonstration of this model at work was published in my book Structure, Style and Interpretation in the Russian Short Story (Yale University Press, 1982), which is still in print and used in university courses on Russian literature. None of the papers collected here are used in that book, and most of them involve the analysis and interpretation of English literary texts.

It also led to me founding the Neo-Formalist Circle, a group of Slavic and other international literary scholars who met twice yearly from 1970 to 2005. Other spin-offs were the series I started and ran with Dr Ann Shukman, Russian Poetics in Translation (12 vols., 1975–1982; now available on line through Amazon) and a series Essays in Poetics founded and run by Joe Andrew and Chris Pike of Keele University (1974–2006). My original paper on “The Student” was republished with a (self-)critical ‘Post-script’ in a book devoted to articles on Russian literature by colleagues using my method of analysis (1984, eds. J. Andrew & C. Pike).

1
Structure and Style in the Short Story

Chekhov’s “The Student”

(NB: The analysis below is preceded by a complete translation of the original Chekhov story.)

Introduction

The early sections of this chapter outline the approaches to the analysis of narrative structure by key scholars of the group of scholars writing in the newly established Soviet Union generally known collectively as The Russian Formalists (1916–1932). Although they have been regarded as new and revolutionary, both at home and in the West, their theories and modes of analysis were founded on classical models from Aristotle and the ancient and mediaeval rhetoricians. My claim is that Narrative Structure and Point of View are in interplay in the shape of Fable, Plot, Character and Setting. Each of these components of a well-made narrative can and should be analysed in their own right, but they work together in different ways in the course of a story. The later sections of the chapter discuss in detail the workings of Style in literary narratives and the linguistic methods for describing style in relation to all the structural categories.

I have provided an English translation of the whole story to provide a clear context for each stage of the analysis. The quotations of the text in Russian used in the original publication in a Slavonic academic journal have been preserved in English transliteration because the linguistic forms are crucial for the contextual study of style. Style and structure are inseparable, as I have claimed throughout this book—and as was established by the Russian Formalist scholars and their successors.

Translation of “The Student”

The weather at first was fine and calm. Thrushes were singing and in the marshes nearby something alive was hooting plaintively as if someone was blowing into an empty bottle. A solitary woodcock took flight and a shot in its direction rang out echoing and cheerful in the spring air. But as darkness fell in the wood a chill penetrating wind blew up from the east and silence fell. Icy needles stretched over the puddles and the wood became uncomfortable, muffled and lonely. There was a smell of winter.

Ivan Velikopol’skii, a seminary student and son of a church deacon, returning home from a shoot, made his way along a path through the water-meadows. His fingers had grown numb from the cold and his face felt hot from the wind. He felt that this sudden cold snap had upset the order and harmony in everything, that even nature was threatening and so the evening gloom had descended more quickly than it should. All around was deserted and somehow particularly gloomy. Only in the widows’ market-gardens down by the river a fire glimmered; but far around and where the village lay, some four versts away, everything was plunged in the cold evening gloom. The student recalled that when he had left home, his mother, sitting barefoot in the porch, had been cleaning the samovar, and his father lay on the stove and coughed; because of Easter Friday nothing was being cooked at home and he was dying to have something to eat. And now, hunched up from the cold, the student thought that just such a wind was blowing in the time of Prince Ryurik, of Ivan the Terrible, and of Peter the Great, and in their day there was just the same kind of terrible poverty and starvation; the same straw roofs full of holes, the same ignorance and melancholy, the same emptiness, gloom and feeling of oppression—all these horrors had been, were now and would continue, because another thousand years might pass and life would not improve. And he didn’t feel like going home.

The market gardens were known as “the widows’” because they were kept by two widows, mother and daughter. The bonfire burned warmly and crackled, lighting up the ploughed earth all around. Widow Vasilisa, a tall plump old woman, dressed in a man’s jacket, stood nearby and gazed meditatively at the fire; her daughter Luker’ya, small and pock-marked, with a rather stupid face, was seated on the ground washing the cooking-pot and spoons. Obviously they had just had some supper. Men’s voices could be heard, it was the local labourers watering their horses down by the river.

“Well, here’s winter back for you,” said the student coming up to the bonfire. “Greetings!”

Vasilisa jumped, but recognised him at once and smiled in greeting.

“I didn’t recognise you, God be with you. May you grow rich.”

They talked for a bit. Vasilisa, a worldly wise woman who had once worked for the landowners as a wet-nurse and later as a children’s nurse-maid, expressed herself delicately and all the time a soft staid smile never left her face; while her daughter Luker’ya, a peasant wench abused by her husband, merely squinted at the student and said nothing, and her expression was strange like that of someone deaf and dumb.

“On just such a cold night as this the apostle Peter warmed himself by a bonfire,” said the student, stretching his hands out towards the fire. “So even then it was cold. Oh what a terrible night that was, granny! An extremely dismal, long night!”

He looked around at the twilight, shook his head convulsively and asked: “I don’t suppose you’ve been at the service for the twelve apostles?”

“I have,” answered Vasilisa.

“If you remember, on Good Friday Peter said to Jesus ‘I’m ready to go to prison with Thee, even unto death.’ And the Lord replied unto him: ‘I say unto thee, Peter, the rooster, that is, the cock shall not have crowed today when you deny me thrice and claim that you do not know me.’ After the Good Friday gathering Jesus grieved mortally in the garden and prayed, and poor Peter was worn out and weakened and there was no way he could fight off sleep. He slept. Then, you’ve heard, Judas that very night kissed Jesus and betrayed Him to the torturers. They led Him bound to the high priest and beat him. But Peter, worn out by anxiety and fear because he hadn’t slept, you know, sensing that any moment something terrible was about to happen on this earth, followed after … He passionately, forgetting everything, loved Jesus, and now from afar saw them beating Him….”

Luker’ya put down the spoons and stared motionless at the student.

“They came unto the high priest,” he continued. “They began to cross-examine Jesus, and meanwhile the workmen spread the fire around the courtyard, because it was cold and warmed themselves. Among them by the bonfire stood Peter and also warmed himself, like me now.

“One woman, catching sight of him, said ‘This man was also with Jesus’ that is to say, he too should be cross-examined. And all the workmen who were there around the fire must have stared suspiciously and angrily at him because he got confused and said ‘I know Him not.’ A little later someone again recognised in him one of Jesus’ pupils and said: ‘You too are one of them.’ But he again denied it. And a third time someone turned to him: ‘So wasn’t it you I saw in the garden with Him?’ A third time he denied it. And after this moment a cock crowed at once, and Peter, glancing at Jesus from afar, remembered the words that He had spoken to him on Good Friday … He remembered, came to himself, left the courtyard and cried bitterly. In the Gospel it says: ‘And going out from there, he cried bitterly.’ I can just imagine it: a quiet-quiet, ever so dark garden and in the silence you can barely hear muffled sobs….”

The student sighed and grew thoughtful. Still smiling, Vasilisa suddenly sobbed and big, gushing tears began to run down her cheeks, and she shaded her face from the fire with her sleeve, as if ashamed of her tears, while Luker’ya, gazing fixedly at the student, blushed, and her expression became heavy and tense like someone suppressing a strong pain.

The workers were returning from the river, and one of them on horseback was already nearby and the firelight flickered on him. The student wished the widows goodnight and went on his way. And again the twilight descended and his hands began to freeze. A cruel wind was blowing, winter really was coming back in earnest, and it didn’t feel as though the day after next was Easter Sunday.

Now the student thought about Vasilisa: if she burst into tears, then everything that had happened on that terrible night to Peter had some relevance to her.

He looked back. The solitary bonfire winked calmly in the darkness and there was no longer anyone to be seen nearby. The student again had the thought that if Vasilisa had burst into tears and her daughter had got embarrassed, then obviously what he had been telling them about, what had happened nineteen centuries before had some relation to the present—to both the women, and probably to this village out in the wilds, to himself and to all mankind. If the old woman had burst into tears, then it wasn’t because he could tell a touching story, but because Peter was close to her and because she was concerned in the depths of her being with what had occurred in the soul of Peter.

And joy suddenly welled up in his heart and he even halted for a moment to draw breath. The past—he thought—is joined to the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one into the next. And it seemed to him that he had just glimpsed both ends of this chain; he had simply touched one end and the other one shook.

And when he was crossing the river on the ferry and then as he climbed the hill beyond looked over towards his home village and towards the west where a cold crimson dawn shone in a narrow strip, he thought how the truth and beauty governing human life back there in the garden and in the court of the high priest had continued unbroken to this very day and evidently had constituted the main thing in human life and on earth in general; and a sense of youth, health and strength—he was only twenty-two—and the inexpressibly sweet expectation of happiness, of an unknown mysterious happiness gradually overwhelmed him, and life seemed delightful, wonderful and full of the highest meaning.

The Student: Narrative Structure

I

The aims of this chapter are twofold: to provide a framework for the structural analysis of short-story form, and to illustrate that this framework works by applying it to a short story by Chekhov.

The question of terminology is a basic problem for the student of narrative fiction. The student of poetry has recourse to a fairly precise set of descriptive terms based on a clear theory of poetry elaborate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Charts
• Introduction
• PART 1 Literary Narrative
• PART 2 TV Narrative
• PART 3 Film
• PART 4 Painting
• PART 5 Architecture and Language
• References
• Index