Re: franny & zooey

<<I'm not sure what's at stake in this [change in authorial intent between Franny and Zooey]. You seem to pointing pretty enthusiastically at it like my suggestions are plainly inconsistent with this, but I don't see how they are.>>

Robbie -- I think you're saying this because you're not closely considering your own claims. You can choose to be insulted by this. I'm telling you now I'm quite capable of the same mistake.

Now let me go on to the substance. You say that meaning is the product of authorial intent, that all possible meanings of a work were intended by an author. But if you have an acknowledged "change" in authorial intent from one time to another with the same work, then this implies that some meanings were present, but not actually the result of authorial intent.

Follow through consistently with your own logic and you should be able to see what I mean.

<<But I am not seeing how, in any case, the substance of one is changed by
that of the other.>>

Again, as I've said, you have to retreat behind some notion of the "substance" of the work's meaning rather than accounting for every detail in a work, as you would have to in order to support your earlier claims about authorial intent -- that every word in a crafted work has meaning. You may get to this down below, though.

<<Perhaps the difficulty we're having is that you're including details of plot
in a way that I am excluding them.>>

Exactly -- because _all_ those details are **present in the story** and contribute to making up its meaning, even by your earlier claims.

Jim said:
<< You define "great ideas" so narrowly that they wind up only being the
ones you happen to, quite idiosyncratically, identify across different
cultures and their literatures. Because you assume these ideas are timeless,
you assume the author saw them in the text pretty close to the way you do
today.

What I'm looking for is a justification of these assumptions, and you point
to "the degree of sensibility" you feel with the text. What you're speaking
of, here, are your own emotional reactions to the text you're reading --
which is perfectly valid, but again, may or may not say anything about the
author. >>

Robbie responded:

<<It is slightly inflammatory and entirely false that I identify certain
"ideas" (for lack of a better word) across different cultures, as you say,
idiosyncratically.>>

Forgive me, Robbie, for assuming you were human enough to be capable of idiosyncrasies in thought :).

You get offended (considering my words slightly "inflammatory") only because of your own pretension. I don't share the pretensions about you that you hold for yourself and never will. I see you as a human being capable of the same errors in thought I am capable of committing. This part of my post is the only part, so far, that I consider something like a direct attack on your character, but you've earned it.

I also think you're remarkably gifted and a little bit of pretension is to be expected.

The fact relevant to this discussion, however, is simply that you haven't justified the universality of these assumptions -- and people more intelligent and educated than either of us argue these issues.

I would like to point out that I'm not denying the existence of universal truths, but complicating our shared belief in them. More detail below.

<<You and the majority of the people you read and the majority of your academic community might not agree with it>>

You don't really know much of anything about the majority of people I read, especially if you're a classicist :).

<< -- you and yours
might even say that there is no truth but that which is determined
arbitrarily by a culture -- >>

Many people do (and not just academics), I do not. I believe in the existence of universal truths and universal morals. But I don't make unqualified assumptions about what these truths/morals are. I already discussed this in detail, Robbie, in my previous responses.

Let me refresh your memory:

I used the specific example of "humility" -- a clearly Christian virtue and clearly not an Aristotelian (or even pre-Christian Greek) virtue -- to point out one difficulty of looking for universal truths/morals/ethics across literatures of diff. times and places. The fact that a truth/ethic is universal _still_ does not mean it is held to _in every instance_. Different cultures may have different ideas about humility even though most may value it. We need to pay _very close attention_ and not just _assume_ we hold to these universals in just the same form that writers from other cultures do. There may be significant variations on a theme, and some cultures ignore some themes altogether.

I don't see your methodology accounting for this fact at all.

<<It seems to me too damn unlikely that Homer could say something that was
profound to his original hearers that would then be profound in an entirely
different and unrelated way to me.>>

Again, that exclusive focus on "the profound," on "the substance," rather than seeing a literary work as a complex interplay of thousands of _details_, all of which were put there by the author and contribute to the meaning of a text.

When you abandon a single sentence or word as having significance, you abandon the idea that a work is the product of an author's craft -- and when you exclude details as being insignifcant to some "central" meaning, you allow for the possibility of supplemental meanings that slide in though those "meaningless" details.

<<I've pushed the above throughout this conversation, and I don't think
anybody's even lifted a finger to respond to it. If you don't think that
maintaining your side of the discussion requires that you respond to it,
then there must be some profound misunderstanding between us because I've
been thinking that you've been saying something quite different from what
you actually have been. If you for some other reason don't respond to it,
I'll politely bow out of this because it's the crux for me, it's really all
I'm saying, and I'd rather not keep repeating it. It does seem to me that
if we continue without earnestly facing these things we'll very soon be left
with very little but so much hot-air, empty assertions, and sophistry.>>

Robbie, please, if you really think this has never been addressed, it can only be because you haven't begun to understand the people you're arguing with.

I have said in the past that meaning is generated by the interaction of a reader with a text. A text without a reader is just a pile of paper. Without a text, a reader is not a reader -- h/she obviously needs something to Read to be a Reader.

I have said in the past that the author is important as the _first reader_ of a text, so that the author's reading of his/her own text generates significant meaning.

I said that this fact is important in that it locates the text within a specific historical and cultural context, and that this context is responsible for a narrow set of readings, some of which may be similar to the author's own.

I have said in the past that we will consistently have a difficult time identifying this authorial meaning with _any_ certainty (Unless the author spent a lot of time writing about his/her own work), but never denied it was there.

I have said in the past that this authorial generated meaning is _not_ the exclusive meaning of a text.

I have said in the past that readers produce meaning by "filling in the gaps" authors necessarily create when writing fiction, and they can quite possibly fill them in differently than the author (and generate other meanings).

Jim said:
<< What do you do with the Salingers, the Cheevers, the Carvers, the
Pynchons, then, when you can't read them the way you read Homer? >>

robbie said:

<<Not speaking of any of the names you specifically cite, if I can't read an
author in a way that is even remotely like the way I read Homer, I read with
glee where the author delights me (I mean very literally, where the author
delights me), but with the notion that he isn't really so great.

At your suggestions and assertions that authorial intent is inaccessible or
irrelevant, I invited you before to provide some social or cultural context
that changes profoundly Achilles' Rage. I carefully said, Not the Catalog
of Ships.>>

Robbie -- my point all along, the point you deleted in your selective cutting, the real question I am asking and have asked all through this post, is:

Do you really understand Homer if you don't understand his Catalog of Ships, and how do you know that? Perhaps, in Homer's thinking, that catalog was pretty important?

Another question:

Why are you still asking me about Achilles' rage when I already said I believed you (and I and others across time and place) know what "rage" is?

But do you really think the mere emotion of "rage" is part of this enduring, central, universal truth? Rage isn't a _truth_, Robbie, it's an emotion, an experience. It's one of the building blocks of literary meaning, but not meaning itself.

If all Homer did was talk about rage, we wouldn't be reading him now.

<<I trust from your tone here, though, that you either didn't mean it that way
and I was mislead by imprecise words, or that you did mean it that way but
only casually, and upon further reflection corrected yourself.>>

You were misled, in this case, by my imprecise words. My bad. Totally my fault.

<<In either case, I still object. I don't think it can be posited, even as a
general rule. The Poetics is not the only example I can think of. I hold
quite firmly, on the basis of quite a list of ancient and early and late
pre-modern and early-modern texts, that good criticism is good criticism is
good criticism, that it goes untainted by time, holding up better even than
the pyramids.>>

We would need to define "the good" here -- and I suspect this would relate to the "great ideas" you expect to see represented in literature.

Jim

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Received on Mon Dec 2 11:51:03 2002