Re: what the author meant

The Other wrote:
michael <mjwilson51@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

yes, of course, authors may occasionally set out to interpret their
own works or attempt to guide interpretation by commenting on others' interpretations... but mainly they don't... and when they
do they're acting as critics of their work, not as that being which
sat at the keyboard and writ it...

I'd guess that when they're ostensibly talking about they actually wrote, they're really talking pretty much about what they meant the final draft to say. Seems it would be hard to distinguish the two.

since that is what i'm doing here:

so any attempt they make to tell us what they had in mind "at the
time" has got to be an act of memory, that flawed troop of monkeys,
or some vaguely "meaning"-related statement about what they wanted to
say before they actually got into the process... not many writers
whose essays i've read talk much about this anyway; i suspect that
this is because, having been there and done that, they know better
than to pretend that a novel or a poem is as easily directed as a
honda civic...

maybe you should expand a little on how you come to think

that when they're ostensibly talking about [what] they actually
wrote, they're really talking pretty much about what they meant the final draft to say. Seems it would be hard to distinguish the two.

funny thing here is that "intend" "mean" and "say" all "mean/intend/say" the same thing sometimes and other times not... your stanza seems to exploit said shifting meanings without any attempt at acknowledging that you are doing so... maybe you didn't intend to do so... if you say that you didn't, i'll accept that; it won't, however, alter your text or my reading of it... i'll just adopt the position that whether you intended it or not, it was only that set of shifting meanings that enabled you to think you've said what you think you've said, or indeed to say it...

it also seems you're simply granting the author a privileged position when it comes to interpreting her work, which you have every right to do... it's an act of faith, though, and many don't share it...

it should also be clear that all this stuff about authorial intention and mortification issues from something called "literary criticism", rather than say pro football or monopoly... you don't avoid paying rent on someone's hotel on park place by knocking it off the board with a flick of a finger... and not all book chat is lit-crit, nor should it be...

so in attempting to determine an author's intention by making inferences from the text itself, reifying them into some notion about what was in the author's mind, and then directing that dubiously lit lamp back at the text in order to arrive at some
sense of "meaning" in the text seems, well, just plain dumb and
inelegant and unnecessary, not to say futile...letting the text
speak for itself, instead of having it ventriloquize some inferred
internal state of the author, sounds a lot simpler and just to
me...

Aren't you describing the implied author here? I was talking about the real author. The implied author is a personification inferred from the text, so obviously it's not going to tell you anything that you didn't get from the text itself.

yeah, but i must confess to not knowing what you mean by the "real" author... bradbury in a newsrag interview, possibly half-corked and definitely forty years after the fact, is the "real" author of Fahrenheit 451?

Your idea of "letting the text speak for itself" is a hell of a lot more slippery and misleading than what you're accusing me of.

no j'accuse ici... and i agree that a text, if it's a good one, is more than a might slippery... "misleading" implies that there is already somewhere to go, so you're begging the question here by simply reasserting that there is a fixed meaning and that the author knows what it is...

of course, folks who go after "intention" don't restrict themselves
to the text... they go for mothers who were cold and waffen ss uniforms hidden in closets and political faiths abandoned and resentments directed at former friends etc... biographical details and authorial interactions with historical conditions and events, whatever... all in order to build a picture of what was in the mind
of the author while writing some novel and then to "read" the
novel in the light of that constructed picture... why bother?...
you've got the text and the histories and a plethora of conflicting
notions re: cold moms and the limits of friendship... why guess
what the author was "intending" when you have all you need in the
text itself in interaction with you and your version of the world?

I thought I already answered that: because it helps you read this autonomous text of yours. But you said you already responded to that
answer and that I forgot what you said. So maybe you could repeat your reply.

the "autonomous text" is not mine, per se... this is the misleading way New Critics wanted to label texts... of course, they never actually treated them that way... let's say that if genius is 10% inspiration and 90% hard work, then a text is 10% the product of an individual author (a slippery enough idea in itself) and 90% the language it's written in, the tradition it situates itself in, shifting communities of readers over time and across cultures etc....

Regarding your having "all you need" in the text itself etc., my answer is that you can get what you need, but if you try sometimes, you'll find, you can get what you want, too.

your "etc." here is what we're disagreeing about... can't make my "your version of the world" go away that easily from where i sit...

well, suggesting that it is unknowable seems to obviate arguing
that it should be ignored...

If those Intentional Fallacy guys suggested that intent is unknowable
then I disagree. I think it's often knowable, to some extent. Not often to the extent of that scene with Marshall McCluhan in _Annie Hall_, but to some extent, yeah.

wiki gives this quote from their essay: "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." ... so i guess they wanted to say it is unknowable, which i agree with and you don't... my reference to Kreskin was a question about how you think you can know it without inferring it from some text or other... it's still my question...

well, you could start by telling me how to reliably apprehend an author's intention, say, in a book like Disgrace...

You can't *reliably* apprehend it, but so what? You don't need anything close to certainty for it to be useful.

In Coetzee's case we're talking about biography. You might surmise that Coetzee may have had such-and-such in mind when he was writing the book, e.g., race relations in South Africa.

ok... sounds reasonable... say like me you've read The Life and Times of Michael K. and Waiting for the Barbarians when you sit down to read it, which isn't biography, and you know that Coetzee is south african, which is, so you might surmise that yet another book dealing with race-relations in SA is coming up... i didn't though... having been impressed that in those books he managed to write about race relations in a non-polemical way, and in a way that would likely offend many of my former fellow-travellers, i was ready for anything...

if anything, Michael K had struck me as being "about" race in the same way that a book might be "about" death or physical decay, neither of which tends to cause vegetarians and PCers to boycott or protest or ululate in morally superior tones... that is, in a remarkably unpolitical way... more "existentialist" in the sense that it offered a rendering of "this is how having this race in this place shapes and impinges upon an individual consciousness"...
You consider that
provisional hypothesis when you read, or re-read, the text itself. (This isn't reductionist, so don't go accusing me again of trying to "explain" the book or whatever.) As a result of your reading the text, or I guess I should say listening to the text since it speaks for itself, you may reject your provisional hypothesis. I think you rejected my and Silke's interpretation that _Disgrace_ had something to do with race relations in South Africa, and you also rejected my suggestion that such a connection was intended.

yes, i did... and having reread it, as well as having read Master of Petersburg, Youth, Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and others since first reading Disgrace, i still would... what i asked for in that discussion was some textual support for your surmise having led to your suggestion that the book was "about" race... it was never provided... note that "having something to do with" and being "about" are not precisely, or even remotely cognate...

On the other hand, if that putative intent is consistent with one's reading, then that's *some* support for that reading, on the face of it. (I guess this is where I'm denying the "death of the author".)

well, my reading hardly comes under the obit rubric where the author is concerned... i think even then i started bringing in cites from other books of his to suggest that the doggie euthanasia had parallels in other novels, parallels that had no taint of race, and that seemed to offer more feasible readings... i can't help it... when i discuss a book, i tend to approach it the same way i would have approached writing a paper way back when i was doing that... and that approach would seek support in other texts by the same author to show a consistency over time, regardless of any intention that might or might not be inferred... one set of dogs getting offed might be a fable of white folks leaving SA in droves, but recurring instances that invoke the christian moral measure "the least of these" puts paid to that reading in my approach... as i've said, the text is more than enough and a whole bouquet of texts interacting under the label Coetzee makes me think of rilke and "master, why this abundance" (or whatever it is)...

Hence my "intentionally fallacious" question back then about
Coetzee's emigration from South Africa in connection with the last
few paragraphs of the novel.

The intent doesn't *determine* anything, though, all the less because
it's not reliably known. This very fact, that intent wouldn't determine meaning even if intent were completely known, implies that some uncertainty about intention isn't all that important -- in the particular case of a novel like _Disgrace_.

i'm not sure what you're saying here, but it sounds just like "what the author 'intends' is irrelevant to the text"... but that's just me...


michael

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