Bound Interpretation

Gadamer says that every thing that is to be interpreted gives rise toa plurality of interpretations. This is not a free-for-all but rather “the work’s own possibilities of being that emerge as the work explicates itself, as it were, in the variety of its aspects.” A reader of a poem can note the meter, the rhyme, the elegance of the lines, the imagery, the themes, the relation to the other works of the same poet, the relation to other works by other poets in the same language or different languages, the relation of the poem’s treatment of its subject to prose treatments of the same subject, etc etc.

Yet, the work has an “obligatoriness,” and all interpretations are “subject to the supreme criterion of ‘right’ representation.” The performance of interpretation is “bound” to the work and must be correct.

Yet again, this doesn’t mean that we can ever close out on one final performance:

“the fact hat the representation is bound to the work is not lessened by the fact that this bond can have no fixed criterion . . . . and yet we would regard the canonization of a particular interpretation . . . as a failure to appreciate the real task of interpretation . . . . which imposes itself on every interpreter immediately, in its own way, and does not allow him to make things easy for himself by simply imitating a model.”

Gadamer puts the point precisely: “In view of the finitude of our historical existence, it would seem that there is something absurd about the whole idea of a unique, correction interpretation.”