Re: Before the Law

Daniel --

If I want to describe _your_ ideas -- thoughts or beliefs that I ascribe to _you
personally_, then your _intent_ is all important. No question there.

The more relevant thing to point out is that you're ascribing ideas to the
"anti-intentional" people that they don't have, never had, and never argued for.

More to the point, though, if I want to understand the meaning of Kafka's story,
I can't go to Kafka as a source. He's dead. He's absent. He didn't tell us
the meaning of his story. You can say he had a _specific_ intent, but if we can
never know it -- what good does this knowledge do? You can say the text is
defective because no specific intent is discernable, but then you'd have to
admit the majority of published fiction and poetry is defective -- and I won't
even get into translation issues that Kim brought up. It simply gets far too
sticky there.

Now, you might be able to argue that Kafka intended to write an open ended
text. In that case, let's pick another example, Beckett's "Waiting for Godot."
Is Godot God? A general promise made by western society for affuence? Social
forces? Commentary on the Marshall Plan? All of these? None? My specific
idea about Beckett's intent for "Godot" is that he wanted the referent to remain
undefined (and there's pretty good support for this) -- that each person seeing
the play would put whatever his Godot actually was in the place of Godot and let
the play speak to it.

Wanna hear something really interesting? A group in Wash. D.C. staged a version
of Godot set in a US urban environment that left the impression Godot
represented the promises inherent in the American Dream left unfulfilled for the
black population of the US. Now get this -- Beckett's estate sued the theater
company to stop production. It's a reading they didn't want to allow, or it
represented a specific application that violated the open ended nature of the
work.

Now were they right in doing this? It could be argued that they were indeed
protecting the author's intent for his play. But the fact is, every viewer of
the play, when it's staged as Beckett originally conceived it (and he was very
much involved in the original staging of the play) does just this -- fits a
Godot in there. Is this wrong, or is this the point? Or is Beckett's play
simply "defective"? (This is too easy an out for every textual problem you ever
encounter).

Now, it's one thing to say that Beckett wrote an open ended work, and quite
another thing to say he deliberately envisioned every single conceivable
application of the work. When you say,

"so all those meanings John wrote were intended."

I feel as if you're asking me to believe something more absurd that anything I
find in a Beckett play.

Yes, Kafka probably did intend for "The Trial" to be an open ended work (I'd
like you to tell me how you'd define authorial intent in this case). No, it
doesn't follow that he deliberately envisioned every conceivable reading of it.
That's simply too much to ask of a single human mind.

Jim

Yocum Daniel GS 21 CES/CEOE wrote:

> It reminds me of that movie, _The Gods Must Be Crazy_, where a coke bottle
> is flung out the window of an airplane and a bushman finds it and they are
> confused as to what it is. The clan immediately uses it for all kinds of
> purposes and eventually it is used as a weapon so it is flung off the end of
> the earth. Yet in all its myriad uses it remained a coke bottle. It's
> only repetitive in that I am putting meaning out there and it seems as if it
> is misunderstood, (of course your ideology would have this consequence since
> my intent is irrelevant) and you repeat your reply and I see your point but
> who decides how many dimensions it has, some one with a good imagination
> could see a million dimensions, but what is really there? In John's Kafka
> example it is 'ultimately inaccessible' because either Kafka was only
> communicating mood/emotion or he just plain failed in communicating his
> intent with economy turned incomplete (I don't think so) or he was
> intentionally being vague or writing open ended, (common in Jewish mystical
> discussions) so all those meanings John wrote were intended. So is it a
> cigar box if I keep my baseball cards in it? That is the point Jim, some of
> us believe that the writer matters as much as the object. Ask a Swiss watch
> maker what he thinks of the idea of using the finest Swiss watch as a nut
> cracker. Don't you see that saying authorial intent is irrelevant has the
> same consequences as saying that they don't exist, Am I the only one who
> sees this? Jim, I want to if possible to see the three dimensions AND the
> five dimensions. The 'almost always' is a new battleground that we can meet
> upon. You didn't think that a surrendered prisoner can be so annoying. AND
> rent the picture.
> Daniel
>
> So much of this is repetition I see the point of John O. not wanting to
> waste his breath.
>
> No, denying authorial intent does _not_ mean that words are meaningless
> or that they can be made to mean whatever the reader wants them to mean.
> It just means that language is bigger than any one person using it.
>
> I never denied the existence of authorial intent either. I question
> sometimes if it really exists, but I don't think this is the case with
> most texts. I have said it was almost always inaccessible or at least
> irrelevant to the meaning of the words on the page. Many authors will
> think one dimensionally about what their texts can mean, while the texts
> themselves are three dimensional. Or they'll think three dimensionally
> about a 5 dimensional text. You get the picture.
>
> Jim
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Received on Thu Mar 6 15:19:25 2003