““The aspiration when reading is to understand ‘what is there’. But ‘what is there’ is known on the basis of our existing assumptions about it; we assume the text as a whole to be a certain kind of text (a comedy, for example) and we thus expect its specific parts to cohere with this assumption. Any particular passage is always read as part of a whole, but that passage may force us to revise our assumptions about the whole. A new vision of the whole would then change how we see particular passages (‘If this is a comedy, then my idea of comedy must change.’) – and so the circle of interpretation continues.””
