Joshua Wilner. Feeding on Infinity: Readings in the Romantic Rhetoric of Internalization.(Book Review)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Boston University

Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. 154. $36.95.

At the heart of this elegant study (or perhaps the mysterious navel, in Freud's sense of dreams having one) occurs the question of how best to approach the following conundrum:

The peculiar complexity and power of internalizing allegorical readings derives from their functioning both as interpretations of a text and as metacritical statements regulating the text's interpretation. Such a reading thus effectively confounds the question of its own interpretive validity (its truth as representation of the meaning of the text) with the question of the text's referential authority (its truth as a representation of the world). It is as though the authority of the text was such that the rules governing its reading had themselves to be derived from a reading of the text, a reading that would be possible only insofar as it was already guided by the rules it was seeking to enunciate. (20)

Wilner recognizes that this hermeneutic circle is "to some extent implicit in all interpretation" (is not any interpretation "internalized" from the point of view of the interpreter?), so he adds: "What distinguishes self-reflexive internalizing readings is the way they systematically condense a pervasive hermeneutic condition in a single moment of interpretative crisis" (20). This crisis, further defined as "the interference of functions that block access to the meaning of the text thus becomes contained within a narrative that moves from an 'understanding' of the text--which is in fact a misunderstanding--via a pivotal moment of inscrutability to its own negative understanding of that inscrutability" (21). Though propounded this way, the question is theoretical, i.e. trans-historical, Wilner means to attach to the term "interference" above, and to its correlative, "its [that is, the narrative's, and therefore of course also "the narrator's"] own negative understanding of that inscrutability" a highly problematic "historical" significance as well: the idea that "Romanticism's increasing explication" of this crisis "participates in the long and continuing story of patriarchy's decline in the West." In his local interpretive procedures almost obsessively chaste, this author has little fear about large disseminating implications.

Perhaps the simplest way to begin is with what Wilner probably means by "its own negative understanding of that inscrutability." Though by the end of his first full (and usually brilliant) first chapter of textual analysis this idea is fulfilled as the anxious "experience of time," Wilner's more usual practice in his theoretical argument, rather than characterize experience simply tries to substitute it for, or insert it within, the more familiar logical disjunction inherent in expressions of the hermeneutic circle. Wilner wants to "graft" (as...

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