Re: A new (or possibly old) thought...
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Sun, 05 Jul 1998 15:24:07 -0400
Kidneyboy@aol.com wrote:
> J.D. Salinger always left his stories very open ended and up for
> interpretation. The different meanings and connections a person can make with
> a single story are endless. That's what I think the beauty of the stories are,
> the many ways they can be. The questions left over by his works that can
> ponder in the heads of the reader for days, if not a lifetime. When we as
> critical readers, start to breakdown and deconstruct Salinger's work we can
> find hidden messages not visible to the naive reader. Does this mean that
> these underlying, obscure messages are what the purpose of Salinger's works
> are supposed to convey, and they are only supposed to be understood by the
> highly intellectual?
No. To begin with, you cannot invoke deconstruction and authorial
intention at the same time. They are antithetical conventions.
Secondly, deconstructing a text has little to do with picking it apart,
except in a very general sense. See Will's recent posts for more
details and suggested further reading.
Poststructuralists regard the Author as a device used to fix the play of
a text by locating within it a final signified. Readers like Barthes
prefer to celebrate the bliss of the scriptible text, which has
innumerable different meanings each time it is read, rather than
acknowledge and submit to a final, single meaning; they like to leap
about and cavort in the margins, turning things on their heads and
celebrating the infinite joy of the plurality of everything.
Along these lines, you have in your post the seeds of a poststruturalist
viewpoint (open-ended, different interpretations)--though, like most of
us, the stalks of the plant itself are shorn shortly after they spring
up. You see, even poststructuralists are generally good about admitting
that they consistently invoke what Foucault calls the *Author Function*
to fill in for the missing author. Even when we successfuly remove an
author by way of preventing the final signified, we unwittingly replace
him with an Author Function, which nicely does the job of installing
stable meanings.
The French write libraries on the topic. The Americans, like Fish and
Rorty, tend to be neo-pragmatists. The English sit sublimely atop mount
Sinai, receiving instructions about the truth directly from God
himself.
Contemporary literary theory can benefit a person who is interested
contemporary thinking. Philosophy, history, science and literature have
more or less collapsed into Epistemology (philosophy seems to have kown
this for years). IN some people's minds, the end of thinking is here.
And since thinking is textual, since it only happens in texts, and since
language, which comprises/composes all texts, is essentially
metaphorical, everything seems to have collided in literature. In any
case, it's an interesting locus.
Theory will not, of course, unlock secret messages from authors. But
people who read Salinger from an educated standpoint (with some theory)
are generally better able to notice, evaluate and appreciate (and
publish about) such things as narrative techniques, intertextual
threads, the connotative dynamics of certain moments as well as the
denotative, the aesthetic and intellectual traditions that Salinger
draws on, and so forth.
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu