Re: Salinger and Nabokov
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Fri, 11 Sep 1998 13:46:06 +1000
> 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.
Well, it depends on what you mean by `get to'. Of course, we can never
*truly* know a writer by their writings. But `intentions' is different.
Intentions are plain mechanical, e.g. JDS said `I always write stories
about very young people', by that we can infer that he therefore writes
*for* young or slightly older people, and right there we have his intention
worked out for us. So the question with the Glasses is, when it comes down
to it : did he mean them to be a mystery or not?
> It's just that it's highly speculative to start trying to sort all that
> out -
True. But it's a lot of fun finding clues. I feel the fragmentary nature of
the Glass stories may indicate something larger.
> - and really tells us nothing about the meaning of the text.
Again, I'm not sure that's right. What about works that were never meant to
be published, like a lot of Emily Dickinson's poems, for example? Obviously
if she knew they were going to be published she would have written them
with a different intention and thus the poems themselves would have been a
lot different.
> When I said your original post had intentionalist presuppositions behind
> it--
What exactly are `intentionalist presuppositions' ? I can't tell you
whether I am an intentionalist or not until I know what one is!
>
> 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 :)
Don't you think that going to the trouble of finding quotes from e-mails I
sent several months ago means I am very firm and convinced on my stance and
totally understand what I think??
> 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?
No, not at all. By intent I just mean the overall effect the writer wished
to achieve. Obviously a writer is going to subconsciously think `In this
part I want the reader to be shit-scared' while writing a horror story, and
wants to push all the right buttons in a romance story, etc etc. What I'm
speculating on is whether JDS had `I'm going to put this really big mystery
in here and leave it hanging for good!' OR `I'm planting this big mystery
and it's going to hang until the book immediately after Hapworth 16, `THE
TRUTH ABOUT FRANNY' Now, *that* would change his approach to what he was
writing. Just the other day I was writing a short story in which an old
film is discovered with a mysterious lady on it and I changed its origin
from `The Jane Winthrop Estate' to `That auction' because I didn't want
readers to get the impression that Jane Winthrop is the mysterious woman.
This, to me, is authorial intention. Strewing little pebbles in the area
you want your reader to walk.
> Sometimes
> the author's view of the text changes over time, does that mean the
> meaning of the text changes too?
*No*, because, because because the
meaning of a text ALWAYS changes ... have you ever written a story you
thought was your absolute best, then picked it up a few years later and
thought it sucked? That's a change of meaning right there. And again,
again, again, it's because a book is a part of a larger experience called a
TEXT and blah blah blah I've been through this all before.
>
> What's really odd about your muddy brand of intentionalism is that most
> intentionalists believe texts only have one meaning, while you do not.
Well there you have it. The proof that I am not an intentionalist. Whatever
that is.
> 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.
No, this isn't really what I meant at all. When you're talking about
writing you're talkinga bout this:
WRITER ------>CREATION<------ READER
Where both parties are integral to the creation of the text. And in this
diagram, `INTENTION' would go just under that first arrow there. It hasn't
got anything to do with the reader. It's one of the few things that
actually comes with the text, part of its emotional baggage if you like, or
far more correctly, part of its mechanics.
> Now, you can say, "But see, you still need to know Salinger intended to
> express his buddhism through 'Teddy'"
You don't *need* to know necessarily. It just adds another layer of
meaning. You don't *need* to know any writer's intention. It's just helpful
sometimes, and interesting to think about.
> <<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.
*** EXACTLY ***
That's what I'm SAYING here. And you accuse me of not listening hard
enough! Obviously, as I said, a character, as I reiterated, does not, as I
followed on, exist as a flesh and blood person. BUT the fact that a) we
talk of them as if they were real and b) they take on a different `life'
outside their texts DOES mean that we reanimate them in a certain way. They
exist as part of all of us, thus they do live in a way. Back to the text
thingy.
> 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:
>
> 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,
EXACTLY. I never said it wasn't. That's why, therefore
> 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>>
> whether more has been written or not. If Salinger publishes another ten
> Glass family books after his death, will the lens be complete then?
NO. But it will have smaller gaps. And that will force us to reassess the
gaps. And inevitably they will change our perception of Seymour.
> Course not. We will always have unanswered questions. And our
> projections are ALWAYS dependent upon the lens--the text.
I never said they weren't. Of course they are. Although on the other hand,
the text can melt away leaving only the character occasionally. Hence the
Robin Hood allusion.
Goodnight everyone and I'll never speculate on anything ever again (:
adios
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
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