Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

This was a very useful reply, Robbie, I think we can work from here.

I'd like to focus on two specific things, since our disagreement in other areas
seem to be a matter of degree:

First:

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> 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.
>

What exactly do you mean by "the very substance"? See, I think part of our
disagreement has to do with what we mean by "interpreting" a text. Again, I
believe you can understand Achilles' rage, but does that mean you understand the
entire Iliad? I believe we can both understand, say, Hamlet's distrust of
Rosencranz and Guildenstern, but does that mean we understand "Hamlet"?

What is this "very substance" what you're talking about?

> 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.

How are we defining "significant and sensible" here?

> 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.

In a very real, very practical sense, it always is just all up to the reader, in
that the reader is generally left alone with the text when he/she is reading it
-- the author isn't sitting at his/her shoulder saying, "this is what I meant by
that."

If you counter, of course the author is, through the text -- you'd just be
begging the question again.

So because the reader is alone with his/her knowledge of language, history,
culture, and all the quirky conventions going along with that, there's no
telling, exactly, what the reader is going to do with a text.

But you'll still say there are "bad" readings (as you do below). This means you
have to appeal to something _outside the text itself_ in order to mediate
between contradictory readings.

> 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.

See, this is an oversimplification. The text supports this idea very well. It
also supports the idea that Othello was the victim of Iago. It also supports
the idea that Desdemona was the complete opposite of Iago, and was a pure saint
to his sinner.

These judgments exist outside the text -- a society that believes it's always
wrong for a young girl to go against the will of her father will produce this
kind of reading. And legitimately. A society that doesn't take that for
granted will produce other readings. I suspect Shakespeare was more on
Desdemona's side than Iago's or Othello's. I can't begin to prove it. But,
again, these contradictory readings are all equally in there -- depending on
what you bring to the text to begin with.

The idea that we read in a complete vacuum is a bit of a myth. We fill in
subtext, we readers, every time we read. We fill in the blanks left by the
author (left quite deliberately, actually, and necessarily). But we don't fill
them in the same way every time. Good, enduring works, in fact, tend to be
those with the most interesting blanks, so to speak, that people can keep
filling in again and again with different stuff.

The point is that the text defends multiple and often contradictory
interpretations, many of which the author would not have conceived. So how does
reference to the author help us?

Jim

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Received on Tue Oct 29 11:22:55 2002