Re: what the author meant

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

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?

Yes, exactly.

ah well, then... we're just gonna have to agree to disagree... i can't even begin to fathom this...

The implied author

ok... my mistake... i didn't recognize you were using a techie term from lit-crit here... i was talking about the inferred author to whom you grant reality...


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...

I said that the *idea* of "letting the text speak for itself" is
slippery and misleading. Get it? Your concept itself, not any
application of it.

as the gerundesque "letting the text speak for itself" says quite clearly, this is an "application"... no concept referred to...

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...

Wasn't trying to.

reducing my "your version of the world" to an "etc." and letting "the test itself" stand, and therefore appear bereft and lonely, sure seems like trying to...

I'm just saying you can get more, sometimes, if you
want it. Along with all the historical setting, you can get some
uncertain knowledge about authorial intent.

sounds suspiciously like ID supplementing Darwin to me...

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...

What's wrong with inferring it from some other text? Other writings,
interviews, etc.?

where's the benefit?... you read texts, construct an author from them, and then reapply that author to the texts as a strategy for reading the texts, why do it again?... now let's see a run on talking heads fragments...

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...

That seems awfully close to what I was saying.

agreed... just no unknowable "intention" evoked or required...

It seems strange that
you'd see support for your reading in other books by the author, but
none in a statement by the author, "michael's reading is very faithful
to what I've been trying to write in this and other books, and the
readings of The Other and Silke are crap, Yours Truly, J M Coetzee".
But I guess that goes back to the privilege thing.

yes... i'd go to the boards over what is in a text like Disgrace and echoes in others by him, but Coetzee talking like that would get a harrumph and little else...


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...

No, I see room for lots of levels of distinction between determining
something, and being irrelevant to it; authorial intention is
somewhere there in the middle.

probably... in a sense... its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere kind of thing... but seriously, because i just can't see how you can talk in any way about what i see as unknowable... forty years later and drunk, some guy gets arrested for murder, i'm not about to argue for his not being the author of his crime... but law ain't literature...

I was just saying that since using
authorial intention would always be iffy even if it could be known
with certainty, the fact that it's not known with certainty isn't that
big a deal.

but what is, really, when you get right down to it?

michael
.

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