I'm not `versus' anyone!/ Jim

Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Sat, 12 Sep 1998 14:39:11 +1000 

As you can see by my subject line, I'd rather this be seen as a discussion
than some sparring match. Flamewars are one thing I have absolutely no
interest in getting involved in and if anyone sees this turning in to one,
feel free to tell us to shut up. I'm almost to the point where I'll happily
shut up anyway, it's getting kind of dull and I've come to realise in
situations like this that one side is never going to get the other side to
understand anyway.

Before we start I'd like to slip in Matt's reply to this thread:

> > Ok.  Let's suppose the writer intended to achieve a specific
> > effect--horror, for example.  He wants us to be scared poopless when we
> > read his works.  This can be conscious or unconscious, to me it makes
no
> > difference.  This doesn't mean he actually acheived his intent.  

No ... but he tried to. Just because a person doesn't get blown up when
they cross a field doesn't mean there's no land mines planted in that
field. It's the intent, and intent - unlike communication - is a one sided
thing, a signal going outwards that may or may not reach its target.

> By way of atonement then:  remember my crackpot theory about
> Salinger wanting readers to think that Seymour is going to shoot Muriel
> just before he shoots himself?  If I'm right--and I am--and if readers
> don't generally think that Seymour was going to shoot Muriel--and they
> don't--then the above point is spectacularly vindicated.  

..... what we have here is the incoming signal : Interpretation. We could
equate Matt's theory to the concept of seeing a frisbee in the same field
carefully stepping around it because he thinks it's a land mine. No matter
if everyone says `Can't you see it's just a frisbee' he still steps around
it. 

Ever played that annoying little Windows game `Minesweeper'? It's a lot
like that - except when we land on a mine we don't get given all the little
locations where the writer has set his explosions to go off. We can just
observe the ripples and rents in the land and get a fair idea.

That pretty much sums up my position. Intention is part of the mechanics
behind a story. Are you familiar with HTML language? Because it occured to
me that in some ways the little tags you have to use in HTML are very
similar to this concept. When you write a web page, there's these little
comments you put in sort of cybernetic parentheses - who wrote the page,
some keywords on its content, etc. They're never a tangible `part' of the
webpage per se, but they're an ever present part of its mechanics and they
allow it to function correctly. Because when we get down to it, language is
machinery to produce evocations. That's all it can be. When we say a woman
is ravishing or sweet or cute or pretty, we've got four different women in
our heads. A writer's job is to choose which of these women he or she wants
to be in our heads. Likewise, a mystery writer wants us to keep turning
pages so he or she puts in cliffhangers, etc. What I'm proposing (do we
remember at all?) is that Salinger has placed an involuntary cliffhanger in
his Glass stories ; that we are all carefully avoiding the `land mine'
which is in fact one of the bolts on which the next of the Glass stories
was to be connected to. This is what I mean when I say:


> > So the question with the Glasses is, when it comes 
> > down
> > to it : did he mean them to be a mystery or not?  


> UGH.  Yes, language is ambigious, especially when we're talking about the
> reading process :)  I don't see a qualitative difference between "getting
> to" the author and his or her "intentions."  

There's an enormous difference; literally chalk and cheese. It's the
difference between the spanner and the bolt. `getting to' the author is, if
we accept the metaphor of the landmines I made, part of the process of
interpretation, which is on the complete opposite arm of the equation.

> Either way, you infer
> something about the author's character, personality, or thinking through
> their text.  What I've been trying to say is that:
> 
> 1.  These inferences tell us nothing about the meaning of the text.

But how can that be? Take Seymour for example. Buddy describes himself and
Seymour as being fairly ugly guys in S:AI. But JDS intends us to like Buddy
and Seymour. So he makes their ugliness seem almost like a virtue. If JDS
had wanted us to hate Buddy and Seymour he would have described them in
totally different terms. The characters would have been exactly the same,
but the author's intent in portraying them for us would have been
different. It's just like the argument I always have with people about
Courtney Love. I think she's courageous, dynamic and intelligent. Other
people think she's a loud mouthed twit. We're both talking about the same
person, we just want to persuade people to interpret her in the way we see
her. And *that* is intention. We take the author's intention through
interpretation, the other half of the equation, and we run with it. And
*that* is where the idea of a character living out the confines of their
text comes along.

I reccommend you read Roland Barthes' `The Death of The Author'. Even I
don't agree with everything in it but it would give you an idea of where
I'm coming from.
 
> 2.  They're always speculative.

Depends what you mean by `speculative'. To me the word implies that there
is a right or wrong, and when we're talking about interpretation we can't
use those words. There may be `valid or less valid' or `valuable or less
valuable' interpretations but you can never say straight out `no, that's
wrong' It also implies the supremacy of the author's interpretation, which
is another thing I don't agree with. For every mine he or she plants there
is another that blows up in his/her face that they didn't even realise was
there. That might have fallen out of their pocket while they were walking
away. These are the ones that interest me the most.

> So what if he meant them to be a mystery?  That's the point.

But as you can see, this is what I'm questioning : was this the point?

>  What we
> have is a particular text and any guesses about Salinger's thoughts about
> the text are really meaningless.

Again, it's just a matter of delving into the mechanics; sorting the
frisbees from the landmines; trying to guess what's between the invisible
parentheses on the webpage. And by doing this we're contributing to the
text of a story. I'm still not sure you understand what I mean by the
`Text' so I'll explain it again. It's not only the book, but all the
collective experiences of the book; those of the author, those of the
readers and critics. 

> He meant to write about very young
> people.  How we get from there to "he intended to write 'for' very older
> people" is a real mystery to me.  

I didn't say/mean that. I meant `young people and slightly older people'.
Just in the same way that romance novels are written mainly for
fortysomething housewives and so forth. It's arbitrary, sure. But no less
arbitrary than the keywords I have in the meta-text of my webpage. I've
written `poetry, prose, literature, creative writing, reading' - but of
course my webpage is much more than that. But in the interest of the
mechanics I had to be arbitrary. It's the same thing. 

> >True. But it's a lot of fun finding clues. I feel the fragmentary 
> >nature of
> >the Glass stories may indicate something larger.
> >
> 
> If all you want to do is have fun with the text and play around in it in
> your own little world, well, shoot.  Fine.  I wouldn't want to spoil
> that.  :)  

But it's *not* my own little world. That's the beauty of a Text - it's
where a book or a movie or a song becomes *everybodys*. Everything anyone
has ever said about it, thought about it, written about it - it all becomes
a part of this big matrix called the Text. And this includes the
speculation - which I add, is serious. It's no game. It's no different or
less valid than trying to imagine exactly what Shakespeare's lost play
Love's Labour's Won was about. And there's certain evidences that could at
least point us in the right direction. We *know* Salinger has written other
stories. All I'm doing is trying to search through the stories we have for
some idea of the directions his later stories may have taken. I don't see
anything bizzare or playful about that.

> >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.
> 
> HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?  Give me ONE reason to believe that.

Okay. Here's two versions of a story:

Today I went down to the shops. I saw Mr Smith there and I smiled at him.
But all the time I wanted to kill him for what he did to me. I wanted to
punch him till his teeth fell out of his head when he smiled back. Then I
went home, seething with rage.

Today I went down to the shops. I saw Mr Smith there and I smiled at him.
He smiled back. Then I went home.

The former is something that I wouldn't want publicised. No doubt Anne
Frank wouldn't want the world to hear some of her declarations. I write
things in my own diary I don't want anyone else to know. On the other hand,
say I wrote a column in the newspaper about the same experience. I would
clean up my story, omit certain details, and so on. In the case of Emily
Dickinson, she wrote most of her poems by herself and for herself. She
didn't seem to intend to publish any of them. And if she did, I'm sure a
lot of them would be a lot less private than they are.

> I'll bet Emily would have written differently if she were born a man or
> with six arms.  But, what's the point?

You're missing my point (again). I'm not talking about `What if Emily was
an Inuit Eskimo, how would that have affected her writing'. No, I'm going
on facts : `Emily Dickinson did not *intend* for her work to be published
and I believe this is reflected in her work because it is intensely private
and intimate. If she *had* intended them for publication she would have a)
possibly chosen different topics, or b) discussed the topics she does write
about in a different way now that she's writing for a possible audience of
thousands.

>  Please.
> Something that makes sense, something substantial and
> reasoned...Anything.  Just not these claims with no support.  Something
> better than begging the question.  Anything.  I'm desperate here :)

I can't see how I can set it out any plainer! I've finally employed
metaphor to try and get it across. Is anyone else following this thread?
Does anyone else understand me?
 
> Can't you see how saying someone "would have written something
> differently" is such pure conjecture it's not worth talking about?  

*No*. Again, it's a question of intent. Salinger must be writing
differently now because he doesn't have us looking over his shoulder. If he
is or was a pedophile or was abused as a child or whatever, he'll feel free
to write about it in his stories, rather than giving us material for
speculation as we've seen happening re: Seymour and TCIR.





> 
> >
> >> 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!
> >
> 
> Then why did you disagree with me so vocally when I said so?

Because once I worked out what one was I came to the conclusion that I
wasn't one (and how can one disagree vocally on email (: ? )
 

> No, it just means that you're just as anal retentive about your e-mail as
> I am :)  When you make contradictory statements from one post to the
> next, that means you don't really understand what you're saying.  Or that
> you haven't given me a complete, or coherent, presentation of your
> thinking.

Ah. I've just realised what's happening here. You're mistaking my intent.
You're interpreting it wrongly. Now *this* is EXACTLY what my posts are
about! We're seeing it happen right before our very eyes! I haven't
contradicted myself. It's just becuase you have mistaken your
interpretation of my intent.


> >*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.
> 
> It's a change in my opinion of the text, not a change in the text itself.
>  If I write a story today about lost love that I think is great, then ten
> years later think sucks, the story is still about lost love. 

That's true, but again and as always I am discussing texts. By thinking the
story sucks you are contributing to the creation of the ultimate Text of
the book. I'm not only talking of the meaning of the book but the meaning
of the book to you the reader.

> This is kind of the crux of our disagreement here.  On one side you seem
> to be arguing that what the author thinks about his or her text should
> impact our understanding of the text itself, on the other hand you seem
> to be placing all the meaning of the text in the reader.  

I can see how you think this, but let me explain. Communication is a finite
thing. A book is a finite thing. A *seed* is a finite thing. But all of
these things are packed with potentialities. A seed could die before it
even germinates. It could grow huge or wide, it could bear fruit, it may
not. All the writer gives us is a seed. He or she packs it with what they
believe is the right information and plants it in our minds. How it grows
from there is out of his or her hands. But the `DNA' of the story is
unalterable - that is, the words we have before us and the mechanical
structures formed with these words to produce meaning.

> >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.


> That's just it, Camille.  I don't think intention "comes" along with the
> text.  All we have is text and readers.  The author doesn't exist once
> the thing is on paper.  

Yes - but his or her intentions *do*.

> We almost never know what the author thought
> about his or her text while they were writing it, and the few times we do
> know, so what?  I still have to read and decipher the thing for myself,
> based upon my knowledge of literature and language.

But what I'm talking about is the little tidbits the author inserted in the
text to assist you in doing this, and try and make your interpretation
match theirs.

Anyway, this is getting repetitious, I've said all I want to say on the
topic so I'll let whoever wants to jump in here instead.

Camille 
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
THE INVERTED FOREST
www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest