Re: Universitatlity

I keep running into two extremes in discussions like this:

One is (or was), to drag someone else into it, Robbie's -- I disagreed
with him about "universals" in a discussion some months back. I wasn't
arguing that universals didn't exist, but just that we need to be very
careful in our identification of them in other cultures. He said that
he understood Agamemnon's rage, and I didn't argue with that. I just
asked if he was really sure it meant the same thing to him that it did
to Agamemnon, or Homer, or whoever really wrote that scene.

The other extreme was well presented by Matt K. in his last post:

> It's exactly about culture and location, and people at a temporal, geographical, and cultural remove will read it from a proportional, ultimately unbridgeable, distance.

"Ultimately unbridgeable" is pretty strong language, don't you think?
Isn't it possible to understand, on some level, how Holden "feels"
without necessarily understanding all the nuances of place and culture
represented in the book?

If this isn't true, then we're wasting our time reading anything but
works from people who are writing from places we live or have lived, and
literature from outside these limitations would be ultimately
irrelevant.

To further complicate things, what happens when fiction writers set
their stories -in places they've never visited-? Pynchon admitted in
the introduction to _Slow Learner_ that the settings and geographic
details of some of his early stories were essentially plagiarized from
travel books. What does this mean, then? And what about science
fiction writing -- the settings are alien, the product of the author's
head? Are these works meaningless, then, incomprehensible to anyone but
the author? I've seen alien environments actually help the author
communicate his/her point by distancing it from any specific referents,
allowing the readers to grasp a prinicple or observation and apply it to
their own situations.

One extreme consists of trying to make setting and culture do too much
work, while the other consists of not letting it do any work at all.
The right way, I think, is messy and offers no easy answers -- the only
answers, in fact, are specific to specific works, not generalized to all
literature.

Jim
-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Sat Dec 6 19:15:17 2003