Re: Salinger and Nabokov / Flaubert's Parrot -Reply -Reply
J J R (jrovira@juno.com)
Mon, 07 Sep 1998 09:29:54 -0400 (EDT)
<<This is what puzzles me. I can't see at all how you managed to
interpret
what I said as my advocating the idea that Salinger draws his characters
from life.>>
Well, I didn't mean to say that--but I see why you took me that way.
When I talked about "raiding texts for real people" I meant that we can't
get to an author through his or her text, not that authors don't use real
people (even themselves), events or experiences as the basis of their
writing.
It's just that it's highly speculative to start trying to sort all that
out, and really tells us nothing about the meaning of the text.
When I said your original post had intentionalist presuppositions behind
it--That was where the emphasis was placed in all my posts to you so far.
I was being a bit unspecific with some of my paragraphs, tho, sorry.
<<Well, I don't know about that. I think any writer's intention is
crucial to
know if you're to understand certain texts - I don't see how a writer's
intention *can't* affect its meaning.>>
So, you are an intentionalist? What about all those quotes from earlier
posts?
Here's one:
<<You continue to accuse:
> .ha ha. . .and their meaning. . .ha ha. . .were actually dependent upon
> what One person thought about it, namely, the author.
NO NO NO NO NO NO !
This is NOT my position. This is the OPPOSITE of my position. As yes,
again, I have MENTIONED MANY TIMES. Try this post (4th July 1998, Re:
explanation)>>
If I appear to have a hard time understanding what you think, it may be
because You have a hard time understanding what you think :)
Now, I've argued about authorial intent a lot with a lot of different
people, and I've found that when they use the phrase "authorial intent"
they really aren't referring to something locked up in the author's head,
but to something else. See, the word "intent" means, in this dicussion,
what the author thought his text meant while he wrote it, or what he
wanted it to mean before he wrote it. Sometimes the authors themselves
don't even know this--does that mean the text is meaningless? Sometimes
the author's view of the text changes over time, does that mean the
meaning of the text changes too?
What's really odd about your muddy brand of intentionalism is that most
intentionalists believe texts only have one meaning, while you do not.
What people really mean by authorial intent is historical information, or
some kind of cultural/linguistic info, or something about other texts the
authors have read or written. See, when you talk about Camus'
existentialism (and you can get to the heart of it just by reading Myth
of Sisyphus by itself, I think, it just takes more work), or Salinger's
relationship with Buddhism, I think you're not so much talking about
intent as you are intertext. Biographical info about the authors point
us to other texts (whatever buddhist texts Salinger read, Camus' other
writing), but the meaning we are looking for is in the other texts, not
locked away in the author's head.
Now, you can say, "But see, you still need to know Salinger intended to
express his buddhism through 'Teddy'" Maybe he did intend that, but that
doesn't mean he did. We would have to read the sources, reread the
story, and ask ourselves if the author understood what he was reading at
all before we can say one is meaningful to the other. The author isn't
the final judge of this process.
<<But how can you say that ??? What else is this list than an extension
of
exactly that nature? How can you say someone like Franny does not have a
life outside Salinger's texts when we're always asking whether she was
pregnant or not?. . .all the readers of Seymour, we carry a collective
perception of him which allows him to live outside the words we found him
in.>>
That's nonsense :) Sorry. To me, a live person is a person who eats,
sleeps, and breathes independently of any other agent. A fictional
person is a person who has no existence at all apart from the perception
of readers. If no one on this list had ever heard of you, Camille, would
you cease to exist? No. If no one in the world had ever heard of
Franny, though, by your definition she would cease to exist.
Your above paragraph is really silly since you do respond to this:
> Seymour "really" exists only in the words written
> to represent him, and those words provide the fantasy of him being
real,
> living a real life outside the words, but he really doesn't. We can
only
> take what we have and project outwards to create what's not there
> explicitly, but this will be much like shining a light through a
lens.--Jim
<<Yes, and this is what I mean. With his books and his characters,
Salinger
has handed us a lens. When we shine our own particular light through it -
when hundreds of us do - in front of us on the wall is a huge illuminated
three dimensional Seymour. So what is the effect of not having all the
lenses at our disposal; what if half of them are locked away in JDS's
safe.
We see an incomplete Seymour on the wall. True, this Seymour will have
gaps
in him - any person does. But that is the fun of life - filling in the
gaps
for our selves to make My Seymour as opposed to Your Seymour or even
Salinger's Seymour --Camille>>
See, that last sentence about "filling in the gaps" is what I was talking
about in my earlier post. The lens is always incomplete, Camille,
whether more has been written or not. If Salinger publishes another ten
Glass family books after his death, will the lens be complete then?
Course not. We will always have unanswered questions. And our
projections are ALWAYS dependent upon the lens--the text. NOW that
you've caught up to what I was saying, maybe we can talk intelligently.
I don't take it for granted that the remaining Salinger texts would fill
out what we know of Seymour, Franny, etc. Remember those paragraphs
about Salinger playing a bad joke on us through his remaining texts? Go
back and reread those and then respond again.
Jim
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