Re: Before the Law and the open sky over Paris

Response below...

> You poo-poo it but I have read an author's work and later read his commentary on it and find that much
> of what I took him to mean he did mean. [. . . ] It is known more often then I think you are willing to
> admit.
>

No, it's not, Daniel. We do happen to have quite a bit of Dostoevsky's
writing about his own writing. We have none of Shakespeare's, by
contrast. We have hundreds of Joyce's letters but very little detailed
analysis by him of the "meaning" of his work. Dos. is the exception
rather than the rule.

But your experiment with Dos. can only be honest if you were to write a
detailed interpretation of his _Notes_ then compare that to his own
description of the work. On first reading, did you have any idea he was
writing invective against socialism? Was that part of what you found
out in his notes?

And to futher problematize things, how do you know that what Dos. said
in his letters was everything he was thinking, or anything at all like
what he was thinking at the moment he wrote the work? Some authors will
say one thing about their work immediately after it was written, then
something very different 20 years later, and claim it was what they
meant all along. Can you trust this?

I'm not trying to "allure" you to anything with my reference to literary
critics. What the heck do I care? :) The range of meanings you come
up with when reading Dos. are, in fact, paralleled in some detail in
literary criticism about Dos. The point is that professional criticism
isn't that foreign to what you yourself do with a text. It's more
rigorous and more completely argued, but some of it will be
substantially the same.

Readers are readers.

Jim

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Received on Thu Mar 6 19:30:15 2003