RE: Before the Law and the open sky.

Thanks for the clarifying reply, the open ended intent in Kafka is just
that, a piece of work that does not fill in the details that he expected
from his audience, sure he may not have anticipated every possible candidate
meaning but the door was open for reader participation that is what is meant
by open ended. Some may use the material closer than others and he may have
objected to some 'immoral' 'meaning' some potential audience may ascribe but
his intent was open ended-ness. Like classic haiku where the 7 syllable
response could be quite surprising but a response was expected. Like these
emails, I do not know how you will exactly reply or even if you will but as
in all conversations I expect your reply to be connected to what I said, and
that is what open ended writing is like, some respond 'better' than others.

Your Godot play example breaks down a little bit because it appears that
what was performed was not Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." but a
revised/modified version hence a mutated or morphed performance. Now if
they performed it as written then, I would say that it was expressing the
author's intent. I am not saying that we can't take a 'text' and make it
our own, I am saying we shouldn't only do that. Hell, I am saying you can
do what ever the hell you choose to do but I won't do that. Sometimes I
can't know or decide, ok, its like missing issue #32 in your Batman comic
collection, Ok you can get something out of it but there is something
missing, that I know I am missing.

Kafka didn't give enough data to draw a single conclusion, as demonstrated
by John O. and Kafka is a polished writer thus it is unlikely that he did
not fail in communicating his intent therefore it must be open ended. Can I
be wrong? Sure, I am Human even though I am an Engineer.

Daniel

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

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Received on Thu Mar 6 16:31:37 2003