Re: Jim's Problem with Authors

Jim said: "1. You're begging the question in your argument -- your responses
reaffirm authorial intent rather than establish it on grounds separate from
what's being disputed."

As is typical in conversations like this, I can say the same to you. From
this I gather that the difference is in a fundamental supposition, which I
expect will become clear later (like somewhere below).

Also: "2. I think we have a good example, in your post, of how "authorial
intent" and "textual meaning" run against one another. Re-read the following
exchange: [exchange and argument removed for space]"

I disagree. My sentence was: "But the degree of sensibility is so great
that I believe it anyway." This is a simple and ordinary English
construction. The "I believe it" is the result of "the degree of
sensibility [being] so great." It is grammatically unambiguous.

It is ordinary for two readers of the same sentence to read it differently,
usually because they intone or stress it differently. When the two readers
talk about it, though, and put their readings side-by-side, it is almost
always the case that one reading makes more sense for the construction and
one reader admits to misreading. Occasionally, both readings seem equally
valid, but this is rare and so difficult to construct that we can rather
safely assume that it is most probably the deliberate act of a very artful
writer.

Then: "Makes it difficult to always trust 'intent,' doesn't it?"

Absolutely not. It makes it difficult to trust the accuracy of my own
unexamined reading, as it is difficult to trust certainty in nearly
anything.

But my intent was in the sentence, and a careful examination reveals it
accurately. If my intent is as obscured from my sentences as you seem to
suggest that intent always is, then we will have no meaningful discussion.
Our sentences mean something to me, and they mean something to you
(remaining sensible to both of us by improbable chance or the will of God),
but we have no guarantee that they mean the same thing or even similar
things to both of us, so we might as well assume that they don't.

And: "That is exactly the point we are arguing -- how much of the author's
mind can we infer from the author's text?

"We both agree that intent resides in the author's mind, at least."

I'm not sure that I agree with your suggestion of the core of the argument,
at least in so simple a form.

I believe that language indeed bears meaning, and that meaning in language
cannot be accidental. Thus, all meaning in language is the deliberate
insertion of an artificer. If we find meaning in a text, the meaning is
either a personal projection or is actually present. If it can be
convincingly demonstrated to be defended by the text itself, it must not be
a personal projection, but a deliberate authorial insertion.

You make it sound as though I go around raving about what an author REALLY
meant, using this to trump contradictory but textually defendable
interpretations. This is not true. I read books and try to understand them
in their own terms. If an interpretation is textually defendable, I presume
on the basis described in the above paragraph that the interpretation was
not alien to the author. This I take to be so even of mutually
contradictory interpretations. I do not become very pleased that I've read
a man's mind, going on and on about the AUTHOR the AUTHOR, as you seem to
find so distasteful. I merely disagree with your assertion (shared by the
majority of modern academia, no doubt) that the author is functionally
nothing. I probably criticize literature in a way fundamentally similar to
you (though I perhaps use fewer modern scholarly sources, depending on what
you mean by "research," though I might also use far more ancient ones that I
believe the author himself would be familiar with), though the author seems
to be a moot point to you while I have resting in the back of mind all along
that he's talking to me while I read, and that I'm trying to understand him.
In this place in the back of mind, though, the text IS the author. What I
can hear being called authorial intent without cringing, you would simply
call a textually valid interpretation to which the author is irrelevant.

Also: "But I would further respond that you yourself are guilty of being
arrogant by assuming you can't possibly be guilty of this fault -- the fault
of not understanding your own words. [. . .] Excluding yourself from even
the possibility of this fault then, as a result, blaming me for not paying
enough attention is, in my view, the epitome of condescension."

I understand well that I often misspeak or fail to adequately consider my
words. Your accusation of arrogance in that regard, I thus consider
unwarranted.

The example you are referring to, though, is not applicable. You quoted one
of my sentences, and asked a question that the sentence plainly answered.
It wasn't a matter of interpreting a word or my grammar in a way that I did
not intend.

And: "It's part of the error that goes along with insisting that textual
meaning is defined by authorial intent -- it fails to
recognize that multiple readings are possible, and a single author's
intention can never cover all of them."

I DO recognize that multiple readings are possible, I only deny your
assertion that a single author's intention cannot cover them (an assertion,
I might add, that is prone to the same accusations you've flung at me).

Meanings that are so flimsily defended by the text that they might shock the
author are not meanings that I am concerned with. Everything I am saying
here relies on substantive meaning in language being necessarily deliberate.
This is not a bold assertion, and it's all you need to grant me for the rest
of what I've said to follow necessarily.

I must admit that I am quite utterly uninterested in whatever profundities
the clever can extract from fortuitous but ultimately arbitrary arrangements
of words (for to us arbitrary they must be if the forces compelling their
arranger are to us wholly invisible). I am only interested in answering
the telephone if I can expect a person to be on the other end.

If we see some meaning in Hamlet and the text itself verifies it well enough
to convince reasonable people that the meaning is indeed in the text and is
not merely a projection, then either Shakespeare put it there or the
chimpanzee-on-a-typewriter hypothesis worked with only one chimp.

If we admit that a substantive meaning IS IN the text, but we allow that
Shakespeare didn't put it there, how did it get there? If authorial intent
is unrelated to sensible literature, it seems to me that we follow a very
short a chain of necessary consequences before asserting that all literary
meaning is projected by the reader. Intelligent authors are then
unnecessary. Shakespeare was (or might as well have been) a chimp. The
qualitative distinction between authors falls away, and the quality of
literature is determined by cleverness or unimaginativeness in the reader.

-robbie

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Received on Tue Oct 29 02:10:43 2002