Re: Thinking with Jim and Robbie

Not so fast, Scottie.

Hi Robbie,

Let me just cite a few sentences.

"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."

And it is this last "I think" that is nothing more than pure, personal
speculation and even a creative act of interpretation on your part. All you
know about "Shakespeare" is his signature on a set of texts that may or may
not have all been written by the same person. You certainly have no
legitimate reason to "think" anything specifically about what this person or
persons might have had running through their head at the moment they were
placing their pen on the paper -- other than what happens to you when you
read the text, what meaning you find, and since you cannot decide precisely
how much of that is due to the influence of your own unique subject position
at the moment of reading and how much is due to the words you are reading,
you cannot decide which aspects of that reading necessarily correspond with
the deliberate intention of the (fairly unknown in this case) creator.

But you attempt to get around this by claiming simply that if we can find it
in the text the author must have meant to put it there. Again this seems to
me a leap of faith, an almost religous devotion to the power of the absent
author (a faith which, as an author, I do not share). Consquently, you
simply conflate the signature of the author and whatever you read to be a
text's meaning with the "author" himself, without any way to verify this
conflation except your own presumptions and faith.

You write:

"I presume that all substantial meaning is brought to the text by the author."

And yet I can cite a number of authors who claim this is not the case,
including Vonnegut, Sollers, Barth, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Bartheleme,
Ashberry, (the list could go on and on) and, as I've mentioned before, even
the writer of _Glas_, with whom I have discussed this a number of times.

All of them speak of experiences similar to the ones I have had with my
poetry, where readers or listeners offer me convincing and defendable and
even fascinating readings of words I have written which offer meanings that
were nowhere near my head at the moment the poem was composed. If "all
substantial meaning is brought to the text by the author," how is this
possible?

You are telling me that Shakespeare could never have had this experience?
How could you possibly know this?

You are telling me Kafka could never have had this experience? That's not
what his diaries say.

You are telling me that Melville could never have had this experience? That's
not what his letters to Hawthorne demonstrate.

"It is just too damn improbable that meaningful ideas can be expressed
without deliberate construction."

But isn't this just what Prufrock is afraid of, because it happens all the
time in his modern world? What if she should say....

Indeed, it seems to me almost a part of the definition of literary
complexity  -- a text which holds an excess of possible meanings and
interpretations and renders the question of "deliberateness" necessarily
problematic.

You say you are not arguing for certainty, and then write:

"if meaning is not intended, it is not expressed."

That sounds pretty certain to me. And I believe it is wrong. All my
personal experience and much of what I have read about the history of
literary reception and about the experience of great authors also tells me it
is wrong. At least, I would not be so sure of it. Even Eliot's experience
with Vivian (to return to that case) would suggest it's at least likely to be
more complicated than that -- that meaning does indeed often exceed
intention.

Then you write:

"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)."

Again, this is the laguage of faith. But what if the author is not the sole
source of the text? What if, when I read _The Brothers Karamazov_, or,
again, the parable "Before the Law," I become a partial source of my reading
of it -- my experiences do, my students, with whom I am reading it, do -- my
moments of reading do. What if the act or event is a creative one? And
since I can't say anything meaningful about the text independent of my having
read it, I thereby become a necessary source as well. "This door was meant
only for you, I am now going to shut it."

Why the desire for a "sole source" or origin anyway? Surely this is a desire
finally for an answer at some point -- a location which can be cited as the
place from which meaning comes. Perhaps the real difference between us,
Robbie, is that I do not share that desire.

But when you say that you "cannot by any effort remove from my head the real
human being so profoundly RELEVANT to the structure and content of the
words," you are speaking about a ghost. Yes, it is a ghost who signs and
remains in the text, yes it is a powerful ghost, one which haunts our
readings all the time, but it is a ghost, unreconstructable and irreducible,
and claiming that you know what was occuring in the consciousness of that
ghost when that ghost was present and putting pen to paper does seem to me to
be in any way a "more true and honest" way of reading.

But then, perhaps I lack your faith as well as your desire for a reliable
origin for all of my readings.

All the best,

--John

-
* Unsubscribing? Mail majordomo@roughdraft.org with the message
* UNSUBSCRIBE BANANAFISH
Received on Wed Oct 30 07:20:53 2002