Jim said: ""Thank you, thank you for the full reply."
You're welcome. I've said it before, but I must say it again: I'm on the
digest, so I'm sometimes bound to be out-of-synch. I sometimes find that
somebody has already said what I said, but I didn't know since I didn't get
the digest yet, or that somebody had already responded to me before I sent
something with further explanation. You'll need to be patient with this. I
didn't mean to be slow in delivering the full reply, but was behind by as
many messages as are in a digest.
I'm also slowed because I'm finishing a big paper on Milton, due Monday.
I'm also excited because Monday marks the beginning of my preceptorial on
the Gospel of John (in Greek), which will be eight weeks of intensive study.
I'm trying to catch up in this message by responding to several of your
messages.
You said: "If you want to know the meaning of Achilles' Shield in Homer's
writing, do you ask Homer, or do you study his writing?"
By doing the latter, I understand myself to be doing to former. "Homer" is
a historical figure we know virtually nothing about, but he is also the
source of sensibility and meaning in the poems ascribed to him. By
addressing meaning in the Iliad, I understand myself to be addressing Homer.
And: "But with your training you should know better than to assume that a
reader living thousands of years after Homer would read Homer's text the
same way Homer did."
I will trust that you are less perfect a writer than Homer, and that your
intent is obfuscated by this sentence, which otherwise would appear rather
presumptuous.
Actually, by my "training" (or whatever we'll call it) I know better than to
buy what you're selling. Readers of Homer's poetry (or more probably,
listeners to Homer and Homeric rhapsodes) in his day would most certainly
have understood subtlety of time and place that are lost now in the
proverbial sands of time. But I am pretty damn sure that they understood
Achilles' rage in a way fundamentally similar to how I understand it.
Knowing things specific to their time and culture probably injected subtler
meaning into the Catalogue of Ships, but I trust that the very fundament of
human existence has not changed appreciably in these measly millennia.
Aristophanes' dirty jokes about dicks and farts are still a riot, and the
funeral of Patroklus can still bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the
eye.
For all of our boastful and dismissive bullshit, for all of our
condescension to those who lived before the Enlightenment, we really haven't
changed much.
And: "You surely have seen yourself the problem readings created by people
reading Homer with Christian ethics and values in mind. I don't think we
can read him properly without trying to purge our minds of 2000 years of
history, if you want a reading that's even remotely faithful to Homer."
I do every day see people who cannot read Homer (or Aristotle, or Chaucer,
or Spinoza, or. . .) in his own terms, who are confrontational and
aggressive to books, who are dismissive of ideas that they don't already
agree with, who project things onto books which plainly are not there.
Sometimes a person has a very hard time not adding words where there aren't
any, or seeing something challenging and puzzling and outside of his or her
beliefs without dismissing it and the author behind it. I must admit that
I've been reminded of this to the degree of cringing every time you've
spoken so dismissively of Freud (although I haven't read him yet, so must
wait a while before saying anything more).
But this isn't the only way to read a book. I have not only read Homer
sympathetically, but I have read Ptolemy sympathetically -- Ptolemy who
wrote a mathematical system of astronomy, using a construction of the
universe with the motionless earth at the center. And I understood Ptolemy
and loved him. I don't want you to take my meaning of "understood" too
comprehensively, as I certainly expect to see and understand even more when
I return to him. But we DO have the power to read sympathetically, in the
terms that the author gives to us.
And: "The liberal arts education you describe is alive and well and thriving
only in universities where the humanities are still respected."
The humanities people have it just as wrong. Taking a math class means
memorizing rules and theorems and solving problems on tests. Taking a
physics class means accepting whatever dogma the teacher ascribes to,
without considering the very philosophical principles it all rests upon.
Taking an introduction to philosophy class means listening to some Ph.D.
candidate talk about Kant, perhaps reading a little bit of Kant, and
thinking about it enough to write a decent paper demonstrating an
understanding of what the Ph.D. candidate was talking about. If the teacher
is particularly good, there might be some worthwhile discussion.
But this, it seems to me, cannot compare to sitting down with KANT by
carefully and thoughtfully and sensitively reading The Critique of Pure
Reason, and gathering with a group of people in a similar situation, and
opening a conversation with a question like, "So what the Hell is Kant
saying?" This works especially well if we've already spent some time going
through this process with Plato and Aristotle and Machiavelli and Descartes
and Hobbes and Rousseau and Spinoza and Hume.
Most of the colleges that care about the humanities, just like most of the
colleges of science and technology, nurture the split between the Two
Cultures. This, I believe, is ultimately destructive. It is my opinion
that we ought to treat science and literature similarly, our study of both
being primarily by reading and discussing original books -- literary or
mathematical or scientific -- undigested by Prof. Knowitall. We can benefit
from his input, but his ideas about Kant are not as helpful to us as Kant's
own ideas, which, luckily for us, he wrote down.
And: "One problem with grounding meaning in authorial intent is that it
demands a stable, set, pretty much single meaning. The question, then,
isn't whether or not we can whittle down 25 interpretations to 4 or 5 or
even 2 or 3. The question is, rather, how mutually exclusive these two or
three meanings are. Sometimes they complement one another. Other times
they are flatly contradictory. Most of the time, the range of accepted
readings of any given literary work have elements of both.
"The point is, though, that when you say that a work means what its author
intended it to mean (and this is what authorial intent requires), then you
immediately reduce the range of possible, legitimate readings to One -- the
author's. "
If a book can mean several things, even several mutually contradictory
things, why then cannot an author intend the book to mean them?
It does seem to me that meaning is such a substantive thing that it cannot
be accidental. If a thinking mind did not intend it to be in the book, it
most probably isn't there.
And: "And that's really what I'm saying about authorial intent.
1. That it's irrelevant so far as solving disputes between contradictory
readings.
2. That it's inaccessible most of the time."
I'm only saying that a book exists by authorial intent, and every last ounce
of its substance IS authorial intent. If the authorial intent is
inaccessible, then so is the book.
And: "No, I think you don't really understand the meaning of your own
language.
'Authorial intent' takes place in the mind of the author and nowhere else.
It
exists Solely in the author's gray matter. When we read texts trying to
determine authorial intent, we are trying to read the author's mind, not the
author's text -- we are trying to make inferences about the author's mind
from
the author's text."
Where before I allowed that you weren't being rude, I'm having a harder time
here. Telling a reasonable and coherent person that he doesn't really
understand the meaning of his own language sounds strikingly presumptuous
and condescending.
Authorial intent does NOT exist only in the author's mind, by virtue of the
fact that his intent relates directly to the writing of a book. If his
intent does not get written into his words, he is a poor writer and is
producing a poor book.
I am not trying to read the author's mind by reading his book -- he puts
something of his mind into his book, and if he's any damn good it will be
sensible to me. If he's Great, it will be not only sensible, but difficult
and profound and will open in new ways to me as I return to it.
And: "This isn't a matter of absolute knowledge. It isn't a matter of even
probable knowledge. It's a matter of having _any knowledge at all_. Isn't
it remotely possible that Lao Tzu got something different out of his text
(written in his native language centuries ago) that you get out of it now,
reading it either in English, or even in an original language that is
certainly not your own?"
It is certainly possible (probably certain, it seems to me) that his
contemporaries saw more clarity in detail than I see; but, frankly, no, it
does not seem even remotely possible that the contemporaries of Lao Tzu or
Homer or whomever saw something so absolutely and fundamentally different.
If men had changed so much, if the circumstances were so different, the book
would be bafflingly and utterly empty to me. It is not conceivable that
what I see in Achilles' rage and pity and so on is anything but a matter of
deliberate authorial intent, which was seen in a fundamentally similar way
thousands of years ago. If Homer meant something utterly different than I
sense when he spoke of passions and conflict and even the enigma of
Achilles' shield, then it seems that my being so stricken by them is an
extraordinarily unlikely thing.
I read Oidipous Turannos (or Oedipus the King, or Oedipus Rex) and discussed
it quite endlessly with many of my peers. Months later, I read Aristotle's
Poetics, perhaps the first formal piece of literary theory and criticism.
For what it's worth, Aristotle was roughly contemporary with Sophocles (he
lived something like 50 or 100 years later, compared to my 2,400), and what
he said seemed right on to me. What he said was certainly more polished and
sophisticated, but he shared quite exactly my sentiment and the sentiment of
other modern readers who at the time were quite utterly ignorant of
Aristotle's critique and method.
That feels like pretty strong evidence to me.
And: "Aren't you assuming a great deal of similarity between yourself and
Lao Tzu? [. . .] You can claim a common humanity [. . . .] I share a common
humanity with Hitler, but can't even begin to really understand his
reasoning. I share a common humanity with a great number of people I barely
understand. "
You don't need to agree with them to understand them. If you truly cannot
even come near to an understanding of another person, whether you agree with
him or find him abhorrent, you are either missing some fundamental
sympathetic piece of man, you aren't trying, you don't have enough
information, or the person is actually some extreme sort of raving lunatic
entirely void of human quality.
And you said, including a quotation of myself:
"Read what you just said, then tell me if it doesn't contradict the
following
statement:
> But the degree of sensibility is so great that I believe
> it anyway.
>
For what reason?"
It does not contradict. To see the reason, I refer you back to the very
sentence you quoted -- specifically to the first clause.
"The degree of sensibility is so great that. . ."
The grammar of the sentence is simple: if you pay attention (very little is
actually necessary), it answers your question.
I said more about this above. If Chaucer's historical and cultural context
made his situation so damned different from mine, he should be much less
sensible to me. Some of his comments DO indeed go over my head unless I
refer to footnotes or do some reading of his contemporaries, but most of
these comments are pretty inconsequential compared to the rest of him.
Also: "I honestly shouldn't concede this now -- many times authors don't
even know what they mean, but for argument's sake let's say they usually
do."
As an unabashed, almost fist-shaking classicist; as one who believes that,
since men first committed their thoughts to scratched symbols, few centuries
have seen the creation of more than a very small handful of Great books;
indeed, as one who believes the most centuries have seen the creation of few
or none, I boldly assert that no author worth reading is unsure of what he
means.
Literature is never an accident.
And: "Where do you go to get to "authorial intent" if it exists at all? The
text. So shouldn't the text, and not the author, be the real focus of this
discussion?"
Yes. But the text IS the intent of the author.
You act as though "author" were a dirty word.
And Finally: "The difference between these two forms of communication
[interpersonal and literary] is, of course, the presence of the
speaker/author. Presence. That thing we try to reconstruct through
historical and biographical research, but never really can very well."
If you're being honest with yourself here, then reading books must be a
dreary, dreary thing for you. I can't see how you do it.
Me? When I read, "Sing Rage, goddess, the Rage of Peleus' son Achilles,"
when I read these words, Homer is present. He's right in the room with me,
singing to me, singing Rage. Perhaps it is his goddess, the muse of epic
poetry, Kalliope, who sings through him. But there's singing, and it can
move me to sweat and tears. And I'm damn sure the Rage is the same to me as
it was to him. Damn sure.
I'm interested and curious enough in the details to learn the language and
study the culture and read about pottery that other interested and curious
people have dug up in Turkey. But that's not why I read books. I read them
because after thousands of years Homer can sing Rage to me.
If reading were as you describe it, I'd count my losses and go be a farmer.
-robbie
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Received on Sat Oct 26 07:10:50 2002
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