Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

I'm sorry if this feels like I'm dragging up a dead subject, but I couldn't
respond in a timely fashion and not responding at all feels as though I
walked out of a room in the middle of a conversation.

Too many days, several papers, and a Hell of a lot of Newton later. . .

John said:
<< All you know about "Shakespeare" is his signature on a set of texts that
may or may not have all been written by the same person. You certainly have
no legitimate reason to "think" anything specifically about what this person
or persons might have had running through their head at the moment they were
placing their pen on the paper -- other than what happens to you when you
read the text, what meaning you find, and since you cannot decide precisely
how much of that is due to the influence of your own unique subject position
at the moment of reading and how much is due to the words you are reading,
you cannot decide which aspects of that reading necessarily correspond with
the deliberate intention of the (fairly unknown in this case) creator. >>

I do not presume to know very much at all about Shakespeare the man, and
whether or not the historical figure wrote all of the texts ascribed to him
is unimportant to me. To read crafted words, it seems to me, is quite
literally to SEE something of the author of those words. I cannot think of
what it MEANS -- in however philosophical a sense we can phrase the
question -- to read Hamlet without reading what the author of Hamlet,
whoever the Hell he was, actually and explicitly wrote.

You are right that I cannot know with certainty how much of the effect of
reading is due to the words themselves and how much is merely my projection.
This is why I cannot have certainty about interpretation. And despite what
you suggest about me (or, rather, despite what you first phrase as a
hypothetical suggestion and then treat as an assertion) I'm okay with that,
and I actually don't see it very differently than innumerably many other
things in life of which I am perpetually uncertain. The desire to be SURE
that you're foisting on me is not my own. I don't know how to make that
more clear than I've made it in this conversation.

And: << But you attempt to get around this by claiming simply that if we
can find it in the text the author must have meant to put it there. Again
this seems to me a leap of faith, an almost religous devotion to the power
of the absent author (a faith which, as an author, I do not share).
Consquently, you simply conflate the signature of the author and whatever
you read to be a text's meaning with the "author" himself, without any way
to verify this conflation except your own presumptions and faith. >>

You too seem to make a leap of faith, to have an almost religious devotion
to your belief in the absence of the author. This is a faith that -- not as
an author, per se, but as a reader and writer and thinker -- I do not share.

I will try again to describe why below. The basis of my disagreement has
still not been faced directly, I think. The basis of yours -- and correct
me if I have it wrong -- seems to be experience and authorial assertions.
You say that your experience and that of authors you know of contradicts me.
I certainly can't trump that, but I can try to explain better how what I'm
saying can allow you and other authors to see it that way; and without
speaking directly to a problem with the source of my disagreement -- the
thing that I suggested earlier can amount almost to a mathematical proof
with very few steps in a path of necessary consequences -- your attempt at
trumping me with experience and the recorded beliefs of authors remains
largely ineffective to me.

I'll get to it below.

You said:
<< All of them [all of a quoted list of authors] speak of experiences
similar to the ones I have had with my poetry, where readers or listeners
offer me convincing and defendable and even fascinating readings of words I
have written which offer meanings that were nowhere near my head at the
moment the poem was composed. If "all substantial meaning is brought to the
text by the author," how is this possible? >>

Logically or philosophically (or whatever you'd rather), I would expect
there to be two possible explanations for this:

First, by chance. A grammatically valid (by which I only mean sensible to
those who know the language well) series of words can hold several equally
reasonable meanings as a matter of chance. The author might have had
nothing to do with some or all of them. A person with the right culture or
background or inclination can SEE one of the options while another will not,
but because it is sensible, all will recognize it as valid when it is shown
to them.

Second, by proximity. An author describes something with some specific
meaning for it in mind, and related meanings (perhaps related rather
distantly) that he was not aware of get into the text merely through the
author's attempt to describe what is related to them. It seems to me that
some subgroup of this category, which is perhaps one of the most common
avenues for various interpretations, is in the accurate description of human
beings. If an author accurately describes people in some situation, we
might find ways to understand these people and their responses to their
situations in valid and meaningful ways that the author did not have in
mind, just as a good shrink might tell a person something true about himself
that he did not realize until he was told. But just as the patient was
still responsible for this thing about himself -- he just wasn't thinking in
quite the right terms to see it that way-- these ways of seeing accurately-
portrayed characters are directly connected (and are a direct result of)
authorial intent. If I understand (say) men's relationships to their
mothers in a way differently than some author, I might see something in such
a relationship in his book that he didn't see, but only because he
accurately portrayed the relationship with his eye on some other details of
it. The meaning is still tied to his intent. The author can describe some
true thing, and his extra-textual expression (perhaps I should say his
description) of it might differ from mine, but both are essentially of the
same true thing.

These, it seems to me, are the possibilities. I have excluded the potential
third -- that the reader himself can create valid meanings not IN the text
in any objective way -- because I don't think anyone here has suggested that
it is true (for it would mean that it's impossible to misread, that meaning
in language is finally arbitrary).

The first option seems conceivable but extraordinarily unlikely to me.
Randomly generated but grammatically valid sentences seldom hold much
meaning, and staggeringly less frequent is a string of such sentences having
sensible cohesion. If coincidental meanings occurred often enough to
deserve consideration, this would not be so.

I do acknowledge that in cases something like the second possibility above,
a reader can see textually valid meanings that the author was not aware of.
But to abstract the author as you seem to be doing seems to me like it
results in a logical absurdity. If meaning can wholly transcend the
author -- if something utterly unrelated to what in is in the author's head
can get into a book -- where does the meaning come from? It seem to me that
it MUST either be in the text by chance, or not objectively in the text at
all, being entirely a projection of the reader. In either case, we should
not still be paying a premium for books written by people. Sophisticated
software should be able to generate volumes upon volumes of grammatically
valid but arbitrarily created language -- and it will either have meaning by
chance or else we the readers will supply it. If meaning can wholly
transcend the author, as you suggest, why is this not so?

You said:
<< Why the desire for a "sole source" or origin anyway? >>

The question doesn't follow. I don't harbor some such desire. Thinking it
through leads me to believe that what I've said is true. I'm not certain
(I'm seldom certain of anything, in fact) and I welcome reasoned discussion
to convince me of my errors. But just as I do not need a desire for the
Pythagorean theorem in order to believe that it is true upon seeing Euclid's
proof of it, neither do I need a desire for a sole source to believe what
I've been saying here.

<< Surely this is a desire finally for an answer at some point -- a
location which can be cited as the place from which meaning comes. Perhaps
the real difference between us, Robbie, is that I do not share that desire.
>>

It is not any such desire. Really.

<< But then, perhaps I lack your faith as well as your desire for a
reliable origin for all of my readings. >>

Right. Should I not read this sentence as dismissive and disrespectful?

-robbie

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Received on Sun Nov 10 19:00:06 2002