Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

Hi Robbie,

You write:

"I think that my fundamental disagreement (which is probably just an older
agreement) is that textually reasonable interpretations necessarily follow
from that intention, traceable to the moment of composition..."

But you had just written:

"I do not think that my fundamental disagreement here is that we actually CAN
see intention, where others are asserting that we can't."

And herein lies the logical problem.

If we "can't" see intention, then how do we know if our reading is
"following" from it or not? If you are saying we "can" see it, how do we
know that is what we are seeing?

Once you assert that "If the text defends an interpretation, the author is
defending it," then you have simply conflated the author's signature, which
remains, with the "author" and it no longer becomes a question of the man or
woman's intention at the time of composition (which can only be speculated
upon after the fact and in their absence), but merely the haunting of a
nominal ghost within a series of read and interpreted textual effects. This
seems to me more an expression of your own creative desire than the truth of
any unrecoverable moment of authorial consciousness. Indeed we are, as you
yourself admit in a later post, talking only about your "presumption."

"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."

I admire your confidence in your own ability to use only the one page text of
"Before the Law" or many wonderful pages of _Glas_ to determine precisely
what was or was not happening in the mind of Franz or Jacques at the specific
moment of original composition, but I'm afraid I do not share your faith in
our ability to reconstruct such data from an act of reading which does not
come with anything that would verify for me the correctness of your answer.
Especially since both of these texts seem to me actively to resist just such
a "presumption." I prefer to celebrate the various moments that happen when I
read these enigmatic pages, which are new and different each time, and allow
the author, or what remains of the author, to haunt me in less certain ways.

All the best,

--John

PS: As regards my own poetry, for what it is worth, I have been offered many
interpretations which were "textually defendable" and which when presented to
me were most certainly "alien" to the moment of the work's composition.
Also, I have spoken to at least one of the authors mentioned in the paragraph
above and he has had the same experience.

In the case of complex literary texts, meaning, it seems to me, always
exceeds intention.

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Tue Oct 29 06:50:56 2002