Getting the Text on its Terms: Close-reading the Hermeneutic Code
Whenever we encounter a text that does not immediately coincide with our customary rhetorical stance, we are faced with the challenge of "getting the text" on its terms rather than on the terms we project. The practice of close-reading--attending to the juxtaposed units in a text in order to generate a reading that can then be tested against other textual units--helps us to get the text by challenging our projections, and in the process we begin to play a readerly role that favors the text, an ethical role that lets the text "be" in its own complex and sophisticated light.
The methods we are learning to practice in this course are meant to help navigate the recursive process of moving beyond our initial point of view to get the text, and to then bring alternative critical stances into dialogue with a given text. However, we cannot leap over the first two steps (questioning our rhetorical stance and getting the text on its terms) to explore critical possibilities. The Value Graph is one important method to let the text be revealed in its own light, and in the process of graphing out the structured details of the text, previously undisclosed patterns or forms become visible. As an instance of this, the following will take one particular pattern the Value Graph revealed in The Matrix.
The example I have in mind will also help illustrate what Barthes terms the "hermeneutic" code--setting up, maintaining, and then resolving an enigma. I have in mind the set of units wherein Trinity intends to tell Neo what the Oracle told her, but during each occasion, some circumstance stops her, with the exception of the last instance. An example such as this may emerge during the process of graphing the values of the text.
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Trinity: Neo, Morpheus sacrificed himself so that we could get you out. There's no way that you're going back in.
Neo: Morpheus did what he did because he believed I am something I'm not. Trinity: What? Neo: I'm not the one, Trinity. The Oracle hit me with that too. Trinity: No. You have to be. Neo: Sorry, I'm not. I'm just another guy. Trinity: No, Neo. That's not true. It can't be true. Neo: Why? Tank: Neo, this is loco. They've got Morpheus in a military controlled building. Even if you somehow got inside, those are agents holding him. Three of them. I want Morpheus back too, but what you're talking about is suicide. Neo: I know that's what it looks like, but it's not. I can't explain to you why it's not. Morpheus believed something and he was ready to give his life for what he believed. I understand that now. But that's why I have to go. Tank: Why? Neo: Because I believe in something.
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Each repetition of the motif reflects the others, adding significance to this withheld piece of information, this enigma that becomes resolved through the logic of the narrative itself, and thereby multiplying the impact of that moment where she does finally tell Neo, despite his apparent “death.” What seemed to be a negligible event early in a narrative reoccurs with greater and greater significance later in the narrative, even ramifying to other related units.
Why does the Oracle equivocate, letting Neo say he is not “the one," and so believing it? And why does Trinity not tell Neo what the Oracle told her at the moment Neo reveals that even the Oracle said he wasn’t the one? Precisely because Neo needed that particular negative (negative in the sense of "absent") motivation for him to risk his now “worthless” life—worthless because he apparently is not the precious and worthy “one”—to save Morpheus, who is worthy of saving, despite the danger. Keep in mind that I am not working to do a full reading of this portion of the text. Rather, I am merely working to comprehend what is actually going on in the text. Basic comprehension at the level of the language and units of the text--how they relate to each other in the reader's interpretive space--is a crucial step to take before venturing into critical interpretations of the various codes at work in the text, that is, engaging in a dialogic plurality of interpretations given by alternative perspectives. Having worked through this close-reading of generic expectations using the hermeneutic code (blog 2), now we can venture further into an intertextual reading of the symbolic and cultural codes (blog 3). Symbolic antitheses (oppositions) include: unbelief and belief, worthless and worthy, ignorance and knowledge, withholding and disclosure, lying and truth telling, captivity and rescue, etc. Cultural codes (controlling values) that might emerge here include: when you lack faith, you are powerless, but with belief, anything is possible; or if you overvalue your life, you will fail to take the sacrificial risks necessary to accomplish what is needed, but if you sacrifice yourself for a greater good, miracles happen, etc. These cultural codes provide us with numerous intersecting networks of controlling values: enter the matrix... Conclusion
Thus, in the first stage of reading we work to bring into a single horizon of consciousness the scattered fragments of the text to be read. In later stages, the reader may enter the text from any number of locations, perhaps revisiting a particular unit not examined closely before, the examination of which forces a new revision of the unified conceptual picture the reader has of the text. This is the meaning of recursivity.
Yet, no matter how unified our vision of a text is, even after numerous recursive returns, there will always be aspects of the text that disturb the conceptual representation, the "memory" we have of the text. Consequently, reading is an endless project; any reading is always and already provisional. From time to time we merely rest, temporarily satisfied with the fragmentary “snapshot” of our view, of our reading of a text. Our provisional view of a text is the distinguished overarching idea that we feel controls and organizes all the units of the text to fulfill its purpose, which includes bringing an audience to adopt and/or come into some relationship with the controlling value. These textual units (lexias) could be at the level of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in works of fiction and non-fiction, or images, dialogue, music, actions, scenes, sequences, and acts in films, plays or even songs. I would even extend this to “real life” events, both at large in society and plain everyday occurrences. |