horizons,” 16 the basic problem is the same. In some way, a chasm must be
spanned.
A point Hirsch presses is that readers have a goal: when each one reads a
text, she wants some sort of insight into, or application for, the particularity
of her own life. She wants her encounter with the text to be meaningful,
to have a payoff. She looks for some correlation between what she sees in
the text and what she sees in her own life. But the stability of an author’s
meaning is not incompatible with various readers fi nding the “signifi cance”
or the “meaningfulness” of a text in their own individual ways. 17
Thus, while Eco dismisses Hirsch’s hermeneutics as being “conserva-
tive,” 18 Hirsch himself cautions that “the stability of textual meaning is
no suffi cient anchor in the shifting currents of value.” 19 The implications
of this may be easily illustrated: In Rom. 1:24–27, 1 Cor. 6:9, and (if it
was indeed written by Paul) 1 Tim. 1:10, Paul makes clear that he consid-
ers homosexual practice to be disordered and sinful. The signifi cance of
these passages for one interpreter might be not to engage in homosexual
practice, for another interpreter to trace most contemporary homophobia
back to Paul, and for yet another interpreter to conclude that what Paul
condemns is utterly unlike modern homosexuality so Paul’s teaching on
this matter is immaterial to contemporary discussions of homosexuality. In
each of these cases, the reader might very well have found the payoff she
sought. What Hirsch’s theory would disallow as disrespectful of the author
is to “interpret” Paul himself as a supporter of homosexual practice.
H IRSCH: SIGNIFICANCE, VALUE, AND CORRELATION
Hirsch suggests that any consideration of signifi cance will inevitably
become a discussion of values. He explains:
meaning and signifi cance ... bear a close resemblance to the concepts of
knowledge and value. Meaning is the stable object of knowledge in inter-
pretation, without which wider humanistic knowledge would be impossible.
The chief interest of signifi cance, on the other hand, is in the unstable realm
of value ... A poem may have a very different value for me at age twenty
and age forty. It may possess different values for people in different cultural
contexts. 20Hirsch defi nes signifi cance with the cumbersome expression “meaning-
as- related-to-something-else.” 21 To explain this differently, the author’s
88 G.W. MENZIES