Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

From: L. Manning Vines <lmanningvines@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 02:08:07 EST

John said:
"[quotations cut] And herein lies the logical problem."

You misunderstood. I think I wasn't being clear enough. I do not think
that there's a logical error here. See below.

You said: "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?"

When I said that my fundamental disagreement is not in saying that we can
see intent, I did not mean to be asserting that we cannot; I merely meant to
get closer to what I take to be he heart of the disagreement.

How much does Prince Hal really care about Falstaff? Depending on how you
look at different lines, I think that one can reasonably argue that he
doesn't care a flip about Falstaff or that he does truly think of him as a
friend. Which did Shakespeare intend? Both and neither, I think.

I believe that Descartes says somewhere or other (The Geometry? Discourse
on Method?) something to the effect that proof means to make all
alternatives inconceivable. That is a damn good definition, it seems to me.

This level of certainty is seldom found in literature. But it seems to me
that Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, could well have made us have no doubt
about Hal's feeling for Falstaff. He could have made it plain. But he
didn't. I do not believe that some degree of historical or cultural
research (whatever we mean by that) can make it more clear than just reading
the play over and over again, being very sensitive to the words. And
ultimately, Shakespeare leaves it unclear.

One can construct an interpretation of the play that leaves Hal's feeling
somewhat to either side of the middle, and both can be valid
interpretations. I am not contending that one can say with certainty that
Shakespeare intended for Hal to be on the same side of indifference as my
favored interpretation has him. But it does seem plainly evident to me that
the ambiguity is deliberate.

It seems that we can never be CERTAIN of the validity of any reading of a
text (or that e=mc^2, though Einstein is damn convincing). But if the text
seems to back it up (or the experimental data), then until some clever
person in a moment of insight finds something in the text (or contrives a
new manner of more precise experimentation) that undermines the idea, we
must treat it as a valid reading (or a valid physical theory).

The text itself is the ultimate authority, of course. The only disagreement
I'm having in this discussion, it seems, is that I presume that all
substantial meaning is brought to the text by the author. I believe that
this is so because of the complexity of language. It seems to me that
nothing of substance can be in an expression of language unless it was put
there deliberately. Now, it might be that one writes a piece of fiction
exploring, say, madness -- and finds later that involved in this is some
serious ideas about man's relationship to society, because upon reflection
one's own thoughts about madness are tied up in man's relationship to
society. This could be an example of an author realizing something about
his own work (or even never realizing it), and I'm sure we have all
experienced something like this when trying to write even simple essays and
learn in the process what we think, and develop our thoughts further.

But even in this case, man's relationship to society was involved in the
process of composition, even if it were only sneaking in with the author's
thoughts on madness.

If one uses language to express x and z, it seems reasonable that one might
involve y in the process, whether or not one even pays attention to it.
(although I would argue that the greatest authors are too damn good not to
have known EXACTLY what they were doing with y) It is inconceivable to me,
however, that when expressing x, y, and z the text will also contain
something of beta. Or even b. It seems to me that whatever one sees in the
text must necessarily be either a personal projection (which can be proved
to be such through more careful reading and discussion), or else somehow
fundamentally tied to what the constructor of the language meant to be
saying with it. It is just too damn improbable that meaningful ideas can be
expressed without deliberate construction. Leaving aside infinities, how
many monkeys on typewriters would it take to compose one sensible sentence?
Say we used computer software to construct grammatically valid sentences,
how many utterly empty attempts before we stumble across a meaningful
paragraph? My point in this is that if meaning is not intended, it is not
expressed. I do see some wiggle room for valid readings, but they are
sharply limited by the text, and thus by the intent of whoever wrote it. If
there are two equally valid and directly contradictory readings of Sophocles
or Shakespeare, it seems to me that the author must have intended BOTH to be
apparent, or else that the author intended ambiguity and two readers are
favoring different sides of the ambiguous.

And "I prefer to celebrate the various moments that happen when 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."

In less certain ways? I consistently see this springing up, and take it to
be a manifestation of the misunderstanding. I get the sense that people are
objecting largely because they take my suggestions to be of supposed paths
to certainty, whereby I can confidently tell you that you're wrong, because
I'm certain. This isn't so. There's nothing certain about this.

I am merely suggesting the validity of preserving the author as the sole
source of a text. The text is still the final word, and we can only be as
certain of the author as we can be of the text (which means we can't be
certain at all).

As I said to Jim, I think we're reading books in fundamentally similar ways.
But where you encounter something puzzling and ask "How can I understand
this?" while the author is utterly absent, I encounter it and ask "What's he
up
to?" The question comes in the same place, effectively means the same
thing, and is answered (or not answered) in mostly the same manner with the
same degree of certainty (very little). The difference is in how we THINK
of it. It seems that you think of authors as dead and their books as
remnants that we can think about in their absence. I think of authors as
living in their books. Reading their books engages me in conversation with
them. There is very little certainty of meaning involved (there seldom is),
but reading is very alive to me, so alive to me that I cannot by any effort
remove from my head the real human being so profoundly RELEVANT to the
structure and content of the words. I don't think that it helps my reading
to do it this way rather than your way, it just seems more true and honest
to me.

-robbie

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Received on Wed Oct 30 02:13:03 2002

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