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Florence Margaret Paisey

Reflections on Hermeneutics and Text

Books whisper ever so subtly; old books whisper of the ages and of their

owners they whisper of their authors personas and they tell us stories or bring

us ideas and knowledge in their content. It is the whisper of books that intrigues

me. Like a calm breeze through quiet grasslands, these hermeneutic whispers

quietly transcend the present and ignite the imagination. Something beyond the

mundane and immediate comes into play.

Michael F. Suarez, director of the Rare Book School at the University of

Virginia, has referred to the hermeneutic surplus of meaning that the book

is. This hermeneutic surplus is the whisper of books. It is the essence of the

book. If stripped away, the nature of a book and its social history vanishes.

Johanna Drucker emphasizes these evidentiary values and their constituent

interrelationships in stating, "Every material artifact embodies such aesthetics in

its formal properties and history, carrying the legacy of its use and re-use."

Whispers secret the legacy, they express a presence, an attitude, a meaning.

They are visible through format, paper, watermarks, marginalia, illustrations,

bindings and the inimitable traces of use. No two artifacts or rare books voice the

same whispers each is a unique experience. Each artifact conveys meanings

representative of a culture, its practices and the individuals who created it, read

it, collected it and transmitted it.

In basic language, can you judge a book by its cover? Generally, as Suarez has

pointed out, a books cover carries social codes. Dust covers embody social

signifiers, codes and conventions. Publishers and graphic designers convey

meanings through the art of book covers or bindings, font size, margin width and

typography. Compare the material trappings of a graphic novel to those of a

gothic novel or a romance. Cover design, binding, type, illustrations and visual

space embed distinctive signifiers.

Katherine Hayles refers to this interpretive relation as the interplay of a

works physicality with its signifying practices. She views electronic media as a

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foil that can illuminate the signifying practices of both the print form and

electronic. From this perspective whispers are signifiers that characterize a

mediums materiality. They blend with content subtly and often subliminally. I

think these subtle whispers or signifiers are exquisite; they constitute the essence

of a medium. They are the substance behind readers who say, I just like books.

There is something about holding one in my hands Or, I always read an

electronic edition. That inexplicable something is the hermeneutic surplus, the

signifiers and the whispers that engage us with values or meanings.

Whispers, hermeneutic surplus, or the "interplay of physicality with signifying

practices" come out of widely different perspectives, yet all underscore the hidden

messages within the physicality or materiality of a book and potentially other

mediums. In understanding the material and expressive relationships of onemedium, the materiality and expressiveness of another medium may also emerge.

The bibliographer W. W. Greg cited Copinger's concept of bibliography as the

grammar of literary investigation. Bibliographyspeaks tothe book as a materialobject, a grammar or a formally structured artifact whose defining features can be

examined and teased out with the objective of identifying, relating, and,

ultimately, unifying all traces and variations of a books fabric, provenance,

distribution and transmission. These formal structures of a book are part of the

signifying practices, the hermeneutic surplus or whispers that augment each

medium the physical book and the electronic. Both have interpretive excess in

their materiality or physicality.