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C O N C E P T S
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in earths diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Hartman finds “Wordsworth’s language penetrated by an inappropriate
subliminal punning. So ‘diurnal’ divides into ‘die’ and ‘urn,’ and ‘course’
may recall the older pronunciation o f ‘corpse.’ ”'^ Certainly diurnal, as a
Latinate word, does call attention to itself in the context o f the simple dic
tion o f Wordsworth’s poem, and who is to deny a thematically appropri
ate subliminal pun?
In the second stanza, Hartman writes, we find
the euphemistic displacement of the word “grave” by an image of gravitation
(“Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course”). And though there is no agreement
on the tone of this stanza, it is clear that a subvocal word is uttered without be
ing written out. It is a word that rhymes with “fears” and “years” and “hears,” but
which is closed off by the very last syllable of the poem, “trees.” Read “tears” and
the animating, cosmic metaphor comes alive, the poet’s lament echos through na
ture, as in pastoral elegy. “Tears,” however, must give way to what is written, to a
dull yet definitive sound, the anagram “trees.
Eco points out that tears is not an anagram o f trees— it is one letter off—
and that “gravitation” does not appear in the text. The argument about
“gravitation” might be that now that Lucy is dead, without motion, the
reader expects to hear that she is in her grave, whereas what we get instead
is a strange, contradictory image (she has no motion but nevertheless is
“rolled”) that requires some sort o f explanation. That she, like the rocks,
stones, and trees, is held on the rolling earth by gravitation is perhaps as
good an explanation as any (hence the displacement o f “grave” by gravita
tion). It is these two claims o f Hartman’s that make Eco see this passage,
which treats tears as potentially evoked by the rhyming series o f fears, hears,
years, as an example o f overinterpretation.
Hartman’s substitution o f tears for trees might seem strained, espe
cially since “rocks and stones and tears” would not make much sense, but
he seems not to want to indulge in what would be regarded as overinter
pretation, acknowledging that tears “must give way to what is written.”
4. Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York; Columbia University Press,
1985), 149-50. Quoted in Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 61.
5. Waitm&n, Easy Pieces, Ц0.
Interpretation: Defending “Overinterpretation
1 7 1
His interpretive passage might rise to overinterpretation if he were to make
stronger claims— arguing, for instance, that “trees” does not belong in the
last line o f the poem because trees do not roll as rocks and stones and tears
do. Further, he might have argued, the more natural order of an earlier line
(“She neither hears nor sees”) would have been “She neither sees nor hears"
(given the usual priority o f sight), which would have demanded as the con
cluding rhyme word tears, instead o f trees. Therefore he might have con
cluded, like a good “Follower o f the Veil,” the secret meaning o f this little
poem is really the repression o f tears, for which trees has been substituted.
That might have been overinterpretation, but it also might have been more
interesting and illuminating o f the poem (even if we were finally to re
ject it) than the more moderate interpretation Hartman produced, which
seems an admirable traditional exercise o f literary sensibility to identify
suggestions lurking in and behind the language o f the poem.^
Clearer instances o f overinterpretation might be strained reflections
on the significance o f set or idiomatic phrases that have a regular social
meaning.^ I f I greet an acquaintance by saying, as we pass on the sidewalk,
“Hello, nice day, isn’t it?” I don’t expect him to walk on muttering some
thing like, “I wonder what on earth he meant by that? Is he so committed
to undecidability that he can’t tell whether it is a nice day or not and has
to seek confirmation from me? Then why didn’t he wait for an answer, or
does he think / cant tell what sort o f day it is so that he has to tell me? Is he
suggesting that today, when he passed me without stopping, is a nice day
by contrast with yesterday, when we had a long conversation? etc.” This
is what Eco would call paranoid interpretation {
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