Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

Jim said: "I agree with the sentiment, but it carries a danger, too -- the
assumption that what you really have in common with past thinkers/writers is
what you think you share with them. I've found that the deeper I research
something, the more surprised I am by the places I find the similarities and
differences."

It's possible to be wrong about anything. Insofar as this is true of some
specific thing, it carries the danger you mention. But if the premise is
true that our shared humanity is as enormous as I take it to be, this
"danger" becomes small enough that we need not be so worried about it (at
least not any more than in nearly any other area of life). If the premise
of the enormity of shared humanity is false, then the great significances to
people from other cultures should not frequently correspond to great
significances in my culture, and their literature should seem overwhelmingly
uninteresting, if not outright insensible to me.

And I'm confused about what you're calling research. If you're talking
about reading historians and biographers, I agree that it can prove
illuminating under certain circumstances, but I believe that it is
nevertheless unnecessary (in the case of truly Great writers, what is
illuminated will usually be merely detail) and carries the danger of
injecting entirely new prejudices, making more complicated the reading that
research is supposed to clarify.

If by research you mean contextualizing yourself by reading other books from
and prior to the era and culture, then I agree without reservation.

Also: "But I'm not talking, or was ever talking, about the individual self.
I was always talking about _written language_. You tend to confuse the two,
robbie, and partly because you think meaning is dependent upon authorial
intent."

I don't think I'm confusing anything, here. Words do change their meanings
over time, but only rarely is such a shift profound or pivotal in the
reading of a book. Even in these cases, we only know that the shift
occurred because we read the books from before the shift and learn meanings
from contexts, allowing our understanding of the language and terminology of
an author (or period or culture) to develop naturally with his (or her, or
its) own progression.

As a deeply ardent student of language, of living and dead languages, of
language dialects and shift over time, as one who fancies myself a Classical
Philologist by nature, I think that this "danger" is overblown. I'm not
talking out my ass, here, or speaking about things I am very ignorant of.

And I believe that meaning is dependent upon authorial intent largely
BECAUSE I pay such attention to language and its peculiarities and changes.
The substance of a sentence is necessarily crafted. The artful craftsman
can construct sentences rich in meaning and subtlety and ambiguity
(sometimes even with hints of contradictory meanings). But without a
craftsman, sentences have no substance. I believe that careful and
prolonged analysis of language and grammar reveals the extraordinary
improbability of meaningful substance existing without deliberate insertion.

If my words do not reveal my intent, I am using them poorly. If you know
the language well, you can treat my text as my intent. (The number you gave
to Scottie for percentage of communication that is non-verbal -- over 50%,
you said -- seems unrealistic to me, and even if it were true, the quality
of a good writer is to overcome that percentage.)

Also:"No one ever asserted that you 'can't understand Hamlet without reading
Professor X's etc...'

"I asserted that you can't understand -- pay very careful attention --

"How Shakespeare understood Hamlet (Shakespeare's Authorial Intent) without
understanding Shakespeare's culture.

"I went a step further to argue that you can't ever get to Shakespeare's
authorial intent at all, but through historical and cultural research MAYBE
come up with a few ideas about how a person like him may have read that
text.

"Notice, again, I'm referring to the written text and not Shakespeare
himself.

"The problem is not with the claim to understand Hamlet, but to understand
what
Shakespeare was thinking, exactly, when he wrote Hamlet."

Your knowledge of Shakespeare's culture is just as tenuous as your
understanding of the intended substance of Shakespeare's words. Virtually
every bit of knowledge you can get about Shakespeare's culture comes from
the writing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, interpreted either by you
or by historians who believe that they can access the intended substance of
language.

If you believe that we cannot get at the very substance that Shakespeare
meant to give without historical research, by which you mean reading a lot
of Shakespeare and his contemporaries and influences, then I'll agree in
principle but will think that you're exaggerating a bit.

If you believe that we cannot get at the very substance that Shakespeare
meant to give without historical research, by which you mean reading the
work of historians and scholars, then I believe that you merely deferring to
the discretion of others for what you could do yourself.

I cannot know what Shakespeare was thinking, exactly, when he wrote Hamlet.
I believe that you are right about this. But if Shakespeare had some things
that were to him significant and sensible in mind, and through reading him I
see significant and sensible things, the odds that these were totally absent
from Shakespeare, that he didn't mean them to be in the poem at all, that
they are there only by chance, are extraordinarily small. The alternative
is that there is no actual substance to literature, that neither what I see
nor what Shakespeare saw is ACTUALLY there, and that it's all just up to the
reader.

If this is so, then there are no bad or good or Great books, only dull and
creative readers. Meaning in language is ultimately arbitrary.

Also: "Question:

"Some people 100 years ago thought Shakespeare's Othello was a morality play
describing what happens to a young girl who disobeys her father's orders.

"No one today would think that. Or very few.

"Further question:

"Which side is Shakespeare on, and why? And how do you know?"

How well does text defend the idea? Well enough to convince a reasonable
person that it isn't being projected, but is actually IN the play? If so,
then Shakespeare probably put it in the play. If not, Shakespeare probably
didn't.

You've used this example of what you take to be a bad interpretation of
Othello twice now, and I suppose you must think it's pretty damn convincing.
But I really don't see it. Bad interpretations exist now, and they existed
100 years ago, and long even before that. But GOOD interpretations existed
100 years ago, too. I've read literary interpretations that are thousands
of years old and still seem entirely reasonable and convincing.

It is plainly true that the bad interpretations will change with cultures.
The bad interpretations 100 years ago are easier for us to recognize as bad
than they were for people then, and our bad interpretations are harder for
us to spot than they will be for our descendents. But they were possible to
spot 100 years ago, and they're possible to spot now. But good
interpretations as old and older than this one that you don't like DO exist.

If the text defends an interpretation, the author is defending it.

-robbie
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Received on Tue Oct 29 02:10:42 2002