Deffered Meaning as a Symbol of Overflow – not of Limitation

(Thoughts from Iser’ commentary on Henry James’s The Figure on the Carpet)

While it is only natural to find the idea of endless deferment and displacement of symbols, texts, and meaning as an impetus to despair (the isolation of floating in a Kuhnian scheme surrounded on all sides by an incontrovertible mana), Iser presents a different take borrowed from James that is enlightening to a theology of reading and deferment. If meaning is a thing to be grasped along with an exterior view of its conditioning and a critical analysis of authorial strategies, then meaning is limited. Once meaning has been “grasped” and critically repackaged as an abstraction, meaning is finished as an extraction. If, however, following Derrida and Aquinas, symbol is a process of endless deferment, then meaning is inexhaustible. The attitude of the hierophants is then properly construed as the recipient of a tangible and endless gifting process. Textuality doesn’t inspire dead-ends – the end of a hermeneutical exercise is the expansion of horizons – even of the most “closed” text and interpretation.

Writing is an externality to speech, and there is certainly a “corruption” to the transmission (if that is how it ought to be phrased, which I doubt), but externality is not necessarily excrescence, or if it is excrescence, then it at least contains the possibility of being a happy one. Birthday parties are an “excrescence” to solar rhythms, traditions are an “excrescence” to memory, gold is an “excrescence” to the mental posture of worship, and texts are an “excrescence” to speech.

Texts make texts – they are, as Eco describes it, “lazy machines designed to elicit interpretations” – which is to say, more texts.

The endless progressions of symbols is a sign itself that symbolic activity is tied to an overwhelming and impressing source – the difficulty of circumnavigating our situational reality is not simply a process of finitude and duration, but something in the heart of things that seem to be endless in the source of their being.

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