Re: and another thing...

AntiUtopia (AntiUtopia@aol.com)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 22:14:59 -0500 (EST) 

LOVED your response, Scottie :)  Let me respond just briefly.

As usual, you prove a corrective to the side I present.  Course, I'm not
abandoning any sides here... :)

In a message dated 98-03-12 17:23:54 EST, you write:

<< Well now, Jim, you may call it literary theory if you like.  
 	But count me out.  I wasn't making any sort of critical point.  
 	I was simply saying I liked Salinger's stuff when he was telling 
 	me engaging stories about memorable characters.  And found 
 	him unpersuasive when he waxed windily with drugstore versions 
 	of Eastern philosophy.>>

eh, ok, won't argue your preferences for Salinger's varied types of writing.
Honestly, thinking about it, I think I share them myself.

But like it or not, you were doing Theory :)
 
 <<	I haven't the smallest inclination to defer to anyone else for 
 	advice on how I should read or understand a piece of fiction.  
 	And I've an even smaller inclination to put some academic 
 	or critic's view before whatever the writer himself may have 
 	chosen to tell me.>>

eh...ok...you put it like that, and I see your point.  What I think we need to
do here, though, and what I was trying to do, was strike a balance.  I've
argued with people on literature listserves about Authorial Intent as the
basis of meaning in literature, and I've seen some pretty radical extremes on
both the affirmation and the denial end.

On the affirmation end of Authorial Intent, at the extreme the author
completely owns his or her piece of writing.  Authors own the very language of
the text, as if they created it themselves, rather than merely participating
in something that existed before them, will exist after them, and we all have
the right to use (namely, language).  This extreme is silly, really, lacking
in common sense.  In reality, authors spin off texts, and once they've been
written and published (or posted to a listserve :) ), authors have no control
over their blessed texts whatsoever anymore.  Authors have to have some faith
in the objective ability of a text to communicate meaning apart from their
presence or intervention.

Now when you get to stories or poems, the situation gets even stickier.  I
believe many legitimate readings of a text are possible (not an infinite
number, however).  Is it impossible, in your thinking, for a text (especially
texts leaning toward the artistic end of language use) to carry meanings other
than those specifically intended by the author?
 
 <<	(Such English literary friends as I have tell me, incidentally, 
 	that this strange arrogation of the critic to a place of equal 
 	authority to that of the writer is one of those weird French 
 	conceits which have been enthusiastically embraced by 
 	the American academic establishment - I hope not for their 
 	own self-serving reasons.  I can well believe it, though, having 
 	been told on at least two other mailing lists by contributors 
 	with American .edu addresses that the critical function in 
 	literature is more or less indistinguishable from the creative. 
 	What a cheek.)>>

eh...accurate summary of the situation, sir :)  I don't accept the status
critics are arrogating to themselves either.  I think it's a development of
the more extreme forms of Reader Response theory, in which each reader
"creates" the text for themselves...

It's nonsense, to me...
 
 <<	By the way, I don't accept your analogy between first-aid & 
 	literary appreciation.  Professional criticism is really much closer 
 	to pathology than medicine.  If I had to chose between having my 
 	wounds bandaged by Sister in Casualty & some formalin-smelling 
 	lecturer in morbid histology fresh from the morgue, I know which one 
 	I'd chose.>>

Ok, Ok....now....I think that's a bit extreme in the Other direction (forgive
the gratuitous capitalization, but You wrote "chose" instead of "choose,"
nanny nanny boo boo).  I think reading a text, then saying, "This is what it
means, at least in part," is literary criticism, defined broadly.  I see an
advantage to having formal training in this area--if nothing more than being
aware of the assumptions you are using when saying, "this is what the work
means," and being further aware of the existence of different assumptions.

I'm no postmodernist myself, and have little respect for Reader Response
theories of literary interpretation centered in the individual reader.  But I
have learned from these approaches.  I'm grateful for what they've taught me,
even if I reject them as a consistently valid way to interpret a text.     
 
 <<	The one feature medicine *does* have in common with academic 
 	criticism is an enslavement to fashion.  Remember Proust's 
 	description of the discipline as `a compendium of successive & 
 	contradictory mistakes of medical practitioners..'
 
 	Scottie B.
  >>

Can't argue with that, either :)  I'm afraid the latest fashions are built on
the last, in these cases....and some of our assumptions merely mutate, but
never really go away.

I wish to God we could get away from the Great Golden Calf Marxism in our
schools and start Thinking Freely.  Marxism is one thing that keeps mutating
over and over again...like old draperies being cut up into bedsheets, shirts,
and tablecloths....  

Jim