Subject: Re: Daumier-Smith and Empathy
From: Cecilia Baader (ceciliabaader@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jul 25 2001 - 13:18:27 GMT
--- Scottie Bowman <rbowman@indigo.ie> wrote:
>
> But only to a very limited extent. A great critic may
> occasionally be able to stand back & pick out patterns
> in a man's oeuvre - relating them sometimes, perhaps,
> it to the known facts of his life. But the smart asses who
> pontificate confidently about the underlying meanings
> in a book - through the identification of a lot of clichéd
> symbols - these guys should be taken out & put up against
> a wall.
Writers and critics, writers and critics. Will it end?
Vacationing as I am in North Carolina, I had no trouble locating a copy
of a collection of Eudora Welty's short stories (as she is, without
question, one of the greatest writers of the American South), so that I
could read them in honor of her death a few days ago. In reading the
introduction to the stories, I took note of something that essayist Ruth
M. Vande Kieft quoted on symbols, something which seems to have bearing
on this discussion. Carlysle remarked that in a symbol " . . . there is
concealment and yet revelation" and there, in those spare words, is
everything.
I think that the argument that writers didn't intend everything that
critics read into their work is certainly valid, as I've come across
feminist/Marxist/Freudian interpretations of works by authors who'd
never heard of feminism, Marx, or Freud. However, to throw out all
literary study is just as insane as accepting all of it.
A lover of books, as most critics are, finds pleasure in wallowing in
something, deciding that the bird must symbolize the fear of something
for reasons a, b, and c, while someone else deems it a symbol of a love
of something lost for reasons d, e, and f. Each critic has support from
the text, and other texts that would have been known to the author, and
uses that to support his argument. Each critic examines the smallest
turn of phrase for a clue for true meaning. Each critic will find
supporters and detractors for his or her point of view, and this creates
a dialogue. A dialogue of the readers of a book who want to know if
Holden is talking to "you" the reader or "you" the shrink and each will
argue their position until they are blue and that, that is the value of
criticism.
It's the value of this list, too. There's very little I like more than
butting heads with someone who is willing to state, and support, an
opinion contrary to mine.
Regards,
Cecilia.
(I should have written this thing in green ink, I know.)
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