The concept of the hermeneutic circle offers one of the most enduring insights into the act of literary interpretation. It holds that understanding a text involves a continual movement between its parts and the whole, where neither can be comprehended in isolation.
Readers approach a sentence through their sense of the paragraph, a character through their arc in the story, and a symbol through the broader theme it echoes. Yet each of these in turn alters one’s conception of the whole. Interpretation is never linear; it returns, revises, loops, and thickens.
This idea, though philosophical in origin, has found one of its richest applications in literature, where no passage, image, or utterance ever exists in a vacuum. To read is to participate in a recursive process, each return revealing new relations, tensions, and interpretive possibilities.
Origins and Core Concept
The term “hermeneutic” derives from hermeneuein, the Greek verb for interpreting or translating, with philosophical roots tracing back to ancient exegesis and theological inquiry. However, the hermeneutic circle gained sharper definition in the works of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Gadamer’s major contribution in Truth and Method (1960) reframed the circle not as a fallacy to escape but as the very structure by which meaning takes shape. According to him, preconceptions (or prejudices, in the older sense of the word) are not obstacles but conditions of interpretation. The process becomes a dynamic interplay between one’s historical position and the text’s own internal coherence.
Parts and Whole: The Basic Motion of Reading
At its simplest, the hermeneutic circle describes how comprehension arises through the mutual interaction of part and whole. In fiction, this interplay appears constantly: a line of dialogue may seem insignificant until later chapters clarify its emotional or thematic context. Once that happens, earlier scenes begin to shimmer with new charge.
Take, for instance, The Door (1987) by Magda Szabó. The relationship between the narrator and her housekeeper, Emerence, seems peripheral at first, even opaque in its emotional register. But as the novel gradually lays bare the unspoken power and tragedy of that bond, the meaning of previous exchanges must be re-read. The arc of their intimacy becomes retroactively legible, demanding a return to earlier moments not with new facts, but with a recalibrated understanding.
Historical Situatedness and Prejudice
One of the more difficult implications of the hermeneutic circle is the impossibility of a neutral or detached reading. Every act of interpretation is shaped by one’s context, beliefs, experiences, and expectations. This does not invalidate interpretation; it locates it.
Heidegger introduced the notion of fore-structures, the assumptions we carry unconsciously into any interpretive act. Gadamer further advanced the idea by showing how these are not barriers to overcome but interlocutors in a dialogue with the text.
In Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness (2020), a reader’s moral framework, cultural background, or even familiarity with contemporary queer fiction will inform how the protagonist’s encounters are read, whether they evoke empathy, alienation, disquiet, or some combination thereof. These fore-structures shape not only what is understood but also what becomes visible at all.
Application in Close Reading
Returning as Method
The hermeneutic circle does not imply endless relativism but calls for recursive engagement. A first reading might be superficial, insufficient, or even misguided. But with each return, the reader brings a fuller sense of the whole, which reshapes how individual elements are perceived.
In Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994), the logic of forgetting pervades every chapter, yet its implications only gain clarity as the novel progresses. The motifs, such as absences, disappearances, and erasures, gain new meaning retroactively. The reader’s second approach to the novel is never the same as the first. It is not simply re-reading; it is re-understanding.
Syntax and Semantics
Even at the micro-level of sentence construction, the hermeneutic circle holds. A metaphor cannot be interpreted without its context, yet the context gains shape from the metaphors embedded in it.
Consider the prose of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango (1985). Long, recursive sentences mirror the interpretive act they demand. One cannot grasp their force unless one submits to their rhythm. Yet that rhythm only makes sense once the scene or thought has been read in full. Part and whole co-construct meaning not in sequence; their relation emerges through tension.
Implications for Literary Theory
The hermeneutic circle complicates any framework that treats texts as static containers of interpretation. Fixed readings fall away as interpretation remains fluid, shaped by context, return, and reconsideration. Structuralism, deconstruction, and reader-response theory all inherit aspects of the circle’s logic, though they apply it differently.
Moreover, the concept has practical consequences. It suggests that criticism, far from being a final pronouncement, is itself provisional. A good reading never exhausts its subject; instead, it sharpens our ability to return with more refined questions.
Reading as a Dialogue Without Closure
To read through the hermeneutic circle is not to seek a final conclusion but to inhabit the movement through which understanding deepens and shifts. Each return, each reinterpretation, does not merely correct earlier misreadings but reveals how interpretation is inherently shaped by position, context, and provisional grasp.
The power of the hermeneutic circle lies in its refusal to let meaning settle. It affirms that no reading is ever complete, only more attuned. Literature offers no final answers—only the ongoing labor of interpretive attention, where the sentence and the story, the figure and the frame, and the question and the echo are always speaking to each other anew.
Further Reading
The hermeneutic circle: a key to critical reading by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ness Labs
Two Takes on the Hermeneutic Circle by jeffreybardzell, by Interaction Culture
What does the hermeneutic circle process describe? on Quora
The Hermeneutic Circle: Uncovering an important principle in literary theory by The Gothic Bookshelf, YouTube
