Re: A new (or possibly old) thought...

WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Sun, 05 Jul 1998 15:13:20 -0600 (MDT) 

Amen Matt! will

On Sun, 5 Jul 1998, Matt Kozusko wrote:

> 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
>