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Interpreting a Pronoun in Mörike - Reply

way that claims of interpretation at a more abstract level do not. Here the author would have the last word, because—for one thing—there is a last word to be had. This does not imply or presuppose that authors are to be accorded privileged access on every question of interpretation based on the evidence of syntax. Nor does it mean that, like hand labor that later comes to be done more efficiently by machine, the discussion between Staiger, Heidegger, and Spitzer turns out now to be factitious, straining subtly toward a reading that a single word from the author might have preempted and that, however ingenious, must always await that now impossible word for confirmation. Within its own limits, however, this implication challenges the recent taboos on criticism that uses the language of intention or reference. At least sometimes, it seems, those considerations are more pertinent to the reading and translation of a text than are their denials or contradictories. Obviously, Morike dead cannot settle anything that he did not settle alive. But this is a limitation in fact, not in principle. Admittedly, the argument that thus challenges the ideal of the death of the author is invoked for an author who is only dead in reality. But perhaps translation and even interpretation may yet learn to live with that.