Re: Try listening to the real ideas and ignore vitriolic attacks

I very much appreciate the distinction between assertion and argument.

I think the multivocity of fictional texts can be taken as a fact --
there's a certain denseness attending those who insist that every
fictional text only has one valid reading. No one who's studied
literature for very long -- or really at all -- can honestly hold to
this belief. This isn't a matter of argument -- it's more a matter of
observation. Give a roomful of people a poem with no title, no author,
just the poem. This has been done before. Depending on the poem, it's
conceivable you could get as many different, legitimate readings as you
have people in the room.

Then ask the readers to identify the characteristics of the author --
male or female? Contemporary or ancient. Married or divorced or
single. Again, you'd get a variety of responses depending on the poem.
 Each response can point to specific material in the text to justify its
assertions.

Give them the poem with title and author and time period and the range
of readings may narrow, but never to just one.

You could assert that all rival readings are wrong (even if you include
readings that take into account multivocity to some extent, as well as
ambiguity), but then I think you'd be hard pressed to develop a
convincing argument to support that assertion.

I think from here we can assert that it's literally impossible for an
author to intend every possible meaning a text can have. This staggers
the imagination. When dealing with texts of even marginal antiquity,
some meanings simply weren't available to the author.

My question is, "How can you believe otherwise?"

Possibly the most important response I can offer is that your demand
cannot be met fully by any theory of reading -- I could say that your
arguments insisting upon the dependence of textual meaning upon
authorial intent were simply assertions as well. They also tended to
have rather narrow applications (to texts that dealt with specific
"great themes"), so it's questionable how relevant that theory of
reading is given it doesn't apply to every, or even most, or even most
important, fictional texts written.

Jim

L. Manning Vines wrote:

>Jim said:
>
><< Robbie -- what happened to your other name? :). I kinda miss it. >>
>
>I accidentally sent a message from the wrong address.
>
>And then:
><< I've offered quite a few specific answers to your question, actually,
>even one recently, I think. They mostly revolve around the ideas that texts
>are multivocal and not univocal, and that insisting on authorial intent is
>to insist upon one meaning. >>
>
>You have certainly explained the assertion, or what the assertion is, but
>have not so far as I remember explained the grounds upon which we can make
>the assertion. I think such demonstration might well be too much to ask on
>a listserv, but though you have gone to considerable lengths to explain the
>assertion in detail, you haven't so far as I remember answered the question:
>"WHY should I believe this?"
>
>And:
><< Of course, and we went over this ground before, an author can intend
>multiple meanings within a text, but he/she cannot possibly intend all
>possible meanings of a text, especially since some are mutually exclusive.
>
>
>
>We have gone over that assertion before (in great detail), and it might even
>be a true assertion, but I don't think the truth of it was ever demonstrated
>or argued for entirely persuasively.
>
>You said, for instance, and very carefully elaborated, that texts are
>multivocal and not univocal, and that insisting upon authorial intent is to
>insist upon one meaning, that mutually exclusive meanings preclude the
>possibility that an author intended them. But suppose someone says, no,
>texts are univocal. Suppose one says, rather, that you right, texts ARE
>multivocal, but that's irrelevant and a governing intent allows it. Suppose
>one says that authors can very well intend mutually exclusive meanings. You
>asserted that authorial intent is unknowable on the basis of x, y, and z --
>but the basis of x, y, and z was not always clear, and sometimes the
>necessary consequence of the assertion upon x, y, and z was not clear.
>These are things that need to be very clear to constitute an answer to: "Why
>should I believe this?"
>
>I won't explain or defend any of these objections further (I am not
>presenting myself as making these objections at the moment), because I don't
>want to and currently am quite unable to get into this again. My point is
>only to maintain that no demonstration was given, no explanation of the
>basis of the assertion was given. They might be true, but they were not
>(for lack of time, for lack of capacity in the medium, for whatever)
>demonstrated to be such.
>
>-robbie
>-
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Received on Wed Mar 5 17:20:57 2003