Comments on "Poeem the First" - Faerye Net

Re: Further argument

2003-08-01T15:31:05+00:00

I do apologize for pointing out your spelling errors. It was mischievous of me. I wish you would do the same for your “ill-mannered and unnecessary” behavior, such as characterizing the field I have a degree in as “intellectual wanking”.

I think, as in most debates, we have a few fundamental disagreements that we must acknowledge. For instance:

If you hand a tourist a Powell’s walking map, and tell him that this is the definative guide to the city, then you make it less likely that he will visit locations not on the map.

Art work is not a city. Exploring art is harder. Providing a Powell’s walking map to a work of art is much more likely to create bias than to do so for a city.

How is art unlike a city? You arrive in a city with expectations - it’s an artsy city, a dangerous city, an expensive, affected, or friendly city. You try to seek enjoyment from the city in your own way - shopping, eating, drinking, dancing. You may find that the city betrays all expectations, and to you it is not artsy, not dangerous, not spendy, et cetera.

As for guidebooks, even a Michelin or Baedeker is not expected to define the city, let alone a free pamphlet. No one expects it of them. They are produced with the genteel tourist in mind, and provide suggestions for one way of experiencing the city. A “lonely planet” or eco-tourism book provides a different “map” of the city—a guide to nightlife yet another. No one expects to fully understand or experience a city, and therefore they know one book cannot show them the way to a total experience. No one should expect to fully understand or experience a good work of art. No one should expect one interpretation to bring them that experience. I don’t think people do expect that. It appears that you do.

Published criticism is formal and authoritative (or at least is used as such).

This is the other stumbling block. I would dearly like to know where you came up with this. I have never heard an English professor claim that one interpretation is correct. The Holy Grail of literary scholarship is a fruitful argument or interpretation—one that makes the obscure understandable or the obvious more meaningful, or leads to interesting readings of other works, too. It is not a “correct” argument. I just cannot understand where you are getting this. I respectfully suggest that you are tilting at windmills.

Re: Further argument

2003-08-01T13:29:34+00:00

Calling attention to my spelling mistakes is illmannered and unnecessary. Your site does not have a spell checker. If you’re that concerned about spelling, write one.

If you hand a tourist a Powell’s walking map, and tell him that this is the definative guide to the city, then you make it less likely that he will visit locations not on the map.

Art work is not a city. Exploring art is harder. Providing a Powell’s walking map to a work of art is much more likely to create bias than to do so for a city.

I would maintain that the “vector projection” here is not just the act of criticism, it’s also the act of reading. You interpret a text by reading it, so by saying “There is no way to know if criticism is an accurate representation of authorial intent” (untrue if we stick to your assertion that authors pop up and comment on and create criticism) you are acknowledging that the reader-response model we’ve debated is accurate.

But by your own admition, authors lie.

Reader-response theory (as you’ve described it) denies the existance of authorial intent, or at the very least, states that it is not important. I believe in authorial intent. I believe that attempting to understanding the author’s intent is important. It is a matter of respect.

I’m sure you understand the difference between individual thought and published criticism. I’m not willing to broach the topic of verbal discussion; I do consider it to be separate and distinct from literary criticism. Discussion is casual, unmoderated and personal. Published criticism is formal and authoritative (or at least is used as such).

Further argument

2003-08-01T11:55:45+00:00

Criticism as vector projection: Given a large, multi-dimentional [sic] vector V, and a single, two dimentional [sic] projection of that vector V’, a popular audience will ignore the V in favor of V’. (Criticism narrows a work for a popular audience, drawing attention away from the work itself and toward the critic’s particular interpretation)

This is silly. When was the last time a “popular audience” was really interested in criticism, let alone more interested in it than in entertainment, which presumably is a “popular audience”’s use for literature?

Also, you continue to have this (though you’ve dropped the word) “piratical” theory of criticism. A critic cannot “hijack” the book because she does not rewrite the book. She gives one possible set of directions for understanding it. There are many others. It is not a Bowlderization, a children’s version, Cliff’s Notes, or a movie. It does not claim to be. If I hand you a Powell’s Walking Map of downtown Portland, it is a way to enjoy and understand Portland. It is neither a substitute for the city, a definition of the city, nor a substitute for the act of walking around the city.

However, we’re not very good at vector projection. We tend to do it all in our head, rounding things off as we go. Thus, there is error in our projection. We do not own up to this fact, merely drawing the vector on the page (freehand). (There is no way to know if criticism is an accurate representation of authorial intent)

I would maintain that the “vector projection” here is not just the act of criticism, it’s also the act of reading. You interpret a text by reading it, so by saying “There is no way to know if criticism is an accurate representation of authorial intent” (untrue if we stick to your assertion that authors pop up and comment on and create criticism) you are acknowledging that the reader-response model we’ve debated is accurate.

Given that a piece of art may have more than one intent, a work may be simulatniously [sic] intended as art and prop.

But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes art is meant to stand alone; the artist wants to say something and be heard, not be discussed. In such circumstances, I think my previous arguments apply.

I really fail to understand here what the difference is between discussion and thought. In order for the author to “be heard”, there must be a hearer. In order for hearing to be meaningful, he has to process the work—in other words, he has to think. How is more than one person thinking, attempting to hear, together, such a travesty and a crime?

In short, criticism grows from Jane and Maria reading a book and Maria saying, “This garden reminds me of Eden in the bible,” and Jane saying, “Ooh, that’s interesting—because the garden is where the female lead tries to seduce the male, so it’s a sort of Fall thingy.” They are attempting to understand the different layers on which the novel works and can be understood. They are thinking together. I really fail to see why you think it’s useless. Perhaps you think art in general is useless?

Re: lit crit

2003-08-01T09:19:08+00:00

First off, I recognize that a piece of art does not always have a single meaning. It can simultaniously be intended to mean many different things. But it is, I contend, a communication tool, a means of expression. The artist must be trying to express something (at least one thing, maybe more), or even better, to evoke an otherwise ineffable emotion in the audience. Zero meaning is unacceptable. If the artist has no particular intent in his work, I do not think it is art.

Meaning doesn’t have to be expressable as a one liner or a thesis statement. In fact, I’m quite willing to accept that a given artist cannot express the meaning of a particular work in any way but in the work itself. However, if no one else gets it (and this frustrates the artist), then he needs to express himeself more clearly. That, or give up. If no one understands his work, and this does not frustrate him, then he’s most likely a pretentious git (or his work was not intended for an audience other than himself).

If, as you assert, the meaning of a text cannot be expressed apart from the text itself, then of what use is criticism?

Criticism as vector projection: Given a large, multi-dimentional vector V, and a single, two dimentional projection of that vector V’, a popular audience will ignore the V in favor of V’. (Criticism narrows a work for a popular audience, drawing attention away from the work itself and toward the critic’s particular interpretation)

However, we’re not very good at vector projection. We tend to do it all in our head, rounding things off as we go. Thus, there is error in our projection. We do not own up to this fact, merely drawing the vector on the page (freehand). (There is no way to know if criticism is an accurate representation of authorial intent)

Of course, we can have different people take different projections of V, resulting in a huge collection of projected vectors, all of which have some unknowable error term. If we attempt to reconstruct V from our body of criticism, we are likely to come up with something very different from V.

Criticism fails to illuminate the meaning of a text.

Room analogy: So you assert that authorial intent is irrelevant; that a piece if art is just a conversation piece?

The artist made his work with some goal in mind. If that goal was to have people talk about it, then perhaps the physical artifact is not art at all, but merely a prop. The art is the discussion.

In that case, lit crit is necessary and welcome. It’s performance art.

Given that a piece of art may have more than one intent, a work may be simulatniously intended as art and prop.

But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes art is meant to stand alone; the artist wants to say something and be heard, not be discussed. In such circumstances, I think my previous arguments apply.

Given the problem of authorial intent, it’s (usually) impossible to know which is the case (is the work a prop?). The determination must needs be personal, and case-by-case.

Re: lit crit

2003-07-31T22:17:24+00:00

I think that you are using senses of the words ‘true’ and ‘meaning’ that are not applicable to art in general or literature in specific. A book is not necessarily written with a specific meaning that its writer could explain to a questioner, any more than a painting is necessarily painted with a specific meaning.

You are essentially arguing in your previous statement that if there isn’t a specific ‘meaning’ to a work of art that the author can explain to any reasonably intelligent person, then either the author is being a dick who won’t explain the one-line meaning his work has or an idiot who can’t even think of a thesis statement for his 500,000-word behemoth.

I think that this is absurd. A work of art that has a specific meaning of that sort—i.e. “People are nervous about their parents,” or “Nuclear war is bad,” becomes less a piece of art than crass polemics disguised as art. What you are saying may be true for scientific research, may be true for business communication, may even be true for journalism, and is
definitely true for manual-writing.

The ‘meaning’ of a text is inextricable from the text itself. If you ask a writer to ‘explain’ a book, he is perfectly justified in throwing a copy of it at you. Decent literature has meaning that is multivalent, nuanced, and sometimes contradictory. Virtually any literary criticism or interpretation merely consists of a series of drastic simplifications designed to illuminate a single aspect of that literature’s meaning; it’s sort of like taking the projection of a vector onto a single dimension. You are left with much less information, but sometimes all you need to know is just how far the goddamn flagpole sticks out into the street, not how high it sticks up or how much it bends to the left or how hot it is or how long it’s been there or exactly how reflective it is. The flagpole is, of course, a metaphor for text.

A corollary to what I just said is that the whole reason you write large texts is to explain things you can’t with small texts. (And, of course, to impress girls.)

To crack open an analogy, when you make a piece of art, you are making a room. The room has certain dimensions and certain things in it. When you make an interpretation of the art - as every reader does - you are going into the room and doing something, which is mutually exclusive of doing something else in the room at the same time. You may not be able to think of everything you could do in this room. Reading someone else’s interpretation of the piece allows you to enrich your use of the room; also, critically, it allows you to learn more about that person and people like them by reverse-engineering their thought process. How they behave and react towards objects in the room may mirror how they behave and react towards objects in the world at large. Certain rooms are better for certain purposes, but a room does not necessarily have a single correct, proper, or ideal use. In fact, the ‘best’ rooms are perhaps those which can most comfortably accommodate persons from a wide range of backgrounds doing a wide range of things, while still remaining aesthetically pleasing.
Art gives us something to talk about and understand each other through, and it’s pretty.

I could come up with a billion other justifications for theories of literary criticism involving multiple interpretations and for the utility of literature that doesn’t have a single, specific meaning.
But there is no space in this margin.

Re: Also...

2003-07-31T17:23:15+00:00

So all historical research is either literary criticism or archeology.

Re: A little more on authorial intent

2003-07-31T17:20:53+00:00

I never said that the reader achieves true knowledge of authorial intent. Gnosis is esoteric and ineffable by nature.

Re: lit crit

2003-07-31T17:13:39+00:00

When you say that there may not be one true meaning to the text, do you really mean:

There may be a finite number of different, equally true meanings which, when taken as a set, constitute the text’s true meaning

As above, but the set contains infinite meanings.

There are zero true meanings for the text.

Applying psychoanalysis to a text may be entertaining, but cannot be construed as authorative. One cannot know that the author is not deliberately lying through his subtext, possibly for artistic purposes.

Perhaps useless was too strong a term. I didn’t mean that lit crit couldn’t be entertaining. Just that interperative criticism was not useful for improving one’s own understanding of a text. I would rather be presented with contextual information (historical facts about the times of the author or the setting, etc) than conclusions.

I in my experience, academics state their opinions as facts. That they might not be correct in all things is never spoken, and only understood in academic circles. The proles don’t really understand the unspoken disclaimers, as evidenced by the popular press’s reaction to scientific studies, particularly in the fields of health, medicine and nutrition. Thankfully, the popular press doesn’t generally report on literary criticism. Imagine the havoc if they did.

No author worth reading feels bad that no one understands him. When misunderstood, they either explain their works, or are derrive pleasure from obscurity because they are pretentious bastards who need to be smacked. Or they don’t know what they’re saying anyway, and should try to find real jobs.

Re: A little more on authorial intent

2003-07-31T16:44:22+00:00

Ah, but unless I misread (created a false interpretation of?) your comments, you meant that the reader achieves a gnosis of the author’s intent.

True knowledge of authorial intent is Gnosis

Which is quite different from what I said, which was that the reader hopefully achieves gnosis, but there is no way of determining whether his spiritual understanding is the same as that of the author, you, wonko, or the schizophrenic lady on the bus.

Re: Also...

2003-07-31T16:39:22+00:00

Well, I suppose you’re going to have to define “literary criticism” then. Because if it’s “interpreting a work or works of literature to mean something outside the literal meaning on the page”, I think it’s valid.

Re: A little more on authorial intent

2003-07-31T16:26:21+00:00

Yes, that’s what I said. Or at least what I meant :)

Re: Also...

2003-07-31T16:24:19+00:00

But is that really literary criticism? That sounds like Historical Research to me.

I know that acedemic boundaries are never black and white, but I think historical interrigation of texts really belongs to History. This is not to say that all literary critics are incapable of doing historical research, but rather to say that the work so produced belongs in the 900’s, not the 800’s in the library.

Re: A little more on authorial intent

2003-07-31T16:15:07+00:00

I think a simple definition might better serve the curious.

While I myself strive for something very like gnosis in my own work, I will play devil’s advocate and tell you that there is NO way to tell that someone’s gnosis of your work is “correct” or even the same as someone else’s. If there is a spiritual and emotional understanding of underlying truth that is intuitive, and therefore not verbal, then two people cannot compare it. It’s as impossible as determining whether what you and I call “green” is in fact the same visual sensation.

Also...

2003-07-31T16:02:47+00:00

Oh, and while I haven’t the time at present to think about types of literary criticism - nor, indeed, am I qualified to pronounce on the subject - you have ignored a very prevalent and valid form of criticism—historical. Using literature as postcards from the past, that, especially when read in great quantities and compared, yield interesting information about past philosophies, mores, attitudes, and assumptions.

Re: lit crit

2003-07-31T15:58:56+00:00

What I am trying to suggest by calling even the author’s stated intent into question is that there may not be one true meaning to a text. I am not entirely sure whether I believe this is true for all texts, but I certainly believe it is true for some. One situation that I did not note in giving reasons an author’s analysis may not be definitive is that an author may not consciously know everything she is writing about. I don’t think that suggesting a novel reveals a lot about the novelist’s relationship with her father is untoward, piratical, or necessarily useless. The human mind is a complex thing, and the creation of art engages it on many levels.

Secondly, third-party criticism is not useless for the same reason that a discussion of a book by two friends is not useless. Even if you adopt a reader-response theory stance, books enjoy, enrich, and inform the reader. If Reader A read the book differently than Reader B, Reader B can be enriched, informed, and even derive further enjoyment, by being exposed to Reader A’s understanding of the book. This holds true if Reader A is your friend who reads on the bus, or if Reader A is a professor of literature writing an essay based on years of research and close reading.

Yes, frankly, bad criticism can, if not ruin a book, temporarily color it for a reader. More often, bad criticism is simply laughed off—I am reminded of an essay one of my high school English teachers had once read on Huck Finn, called, “C’mon back to the boat, Huck honey”. However, I do not really believe that criticism can ever completely rewrite a book. For one thing, as your evident opinion of literary scholars as ineffectual disputants (“intellectual wankers”) comes close to showing, literary scholars will never stop arguing, analyzing, and publishing. No one is going to say, “Aha! Hamlet is about nuclear weapons!” and thereby squelch all dissenting voices forever. Academia doesn’t work that way. Secondly, somewhere, there’s a high school freshman, or a ten-year-old, picking “Hamlet” off the shelf. She doesn’t know that it’s about nuclear weapons. She reads it herself. As long as there are readers who haven’t read the criticism, and readers who haven’t seen the movie, a book still has an unbiased audience.

Frankly, I don’t buy your “piracy” argument, largely because the forum of literary interpretation is a forum of argument. I don’t believe any interpretation - except strictly literalist ones, perhaps, such as “Hamlet is about a Danish prince who is angry cuz his uncle killed his dad” - can maintain a large following indefinitely. Especially because many literary theorists believe no reading is the author’s reading, so they’re not going to claim their own is. Lastly, if an author wishes his meaning to be understood (as opposed to writing for herself only, or a few friends) and neither makes it clear in his own work, analysis, or letters, I don’t think he can really whine if no one understands him. And, of course, that might have been his intent.

Re: A little more on authorial intent

2003-07-31T13:36:34+00:00

If true meaning is impossible, then we might as well go back to grunting and pointing, as it gets the job done.

Except that language does seem to have better expressive power than grunting and pointing. Thus, reading a text does at least give the reader some idea about authorial intent, even if that idea of meaning cannot be articulated separate from the text.

Perhaps the text is it’s own best criticism. True knowledge of authorial intent is Gnosis.

Re: lit crit

2003-07-31T13:25:53+00:00

If there is no clearly defined “purpose of criticism” then perhaps it is not actually a distinct field of endevor, but rather a convienent term that is applied to two or three different fields of endevor.

First, let us consider analysis of intent. If, as you argue, the work must speak for itself - we cannot even trust the author’s criticism of her own work - then of what use is third party criticism? It obviously cannot be trusted for the same reasons we cannot trust the author’s criticism, with the additional problem that there is no way for anyone (critic included) to know for certain whether what they write is indeed a reflection of the true intent.

In fact, we might go so far as to say that to publish criticism (as distinct from merely writing it) is a harmful act. Ones enjoyment of a book may be marred by a film interpretation of that book. Could one’s understanding of literature not also be clouded by faulty criticism? Could this criticism not, if well argued, go so far as to eradicate the author’s original intent and replace it with that of the critic? Thus analysis of intent is a type of intellectual piracy, wherein the critic hijacks the work and twists it to his own purposes. The critic might not intend harm, but only harm can come of his analysis.

The author, of course, is exempt from the charge of piracy. The work is hers to twist as she will. In addition, she might publish a critique that accurately illuminates her original intent, which might serve to counter the effects of other, faulty or malicious, analyses.

Other types of criticism: philosophical wanking (as described in my previous post), satire, hype. Did I miss any? Of these, I think satire alone has any real merit. And of course, it is impossible to know the critic’s intent. What we take for satire may in fact have been written in malice and intended as piracy.

Of course, all of this assumes a “protestant” approach to literature. If you’re a “literature-catholic” (you believe that interpretation can by acomplished by the Priesthood of the ivory tower, and only by the Priesthood), then criticism is of great utility, as it is either your only hope of understanding, or it is your means of herding a population of sheep (depending on whether you’re a layman or a priest).

Re: Peom the frist

2003-07-31T12:59:26+00:00

That’s some sophisticated riffing you have goin’ there in line 3.

Re: deliberate misunderstanding

2003-07-31T12:58:51+00:00

But…but…
A) If people think it sucks, I can laugh it off!
B) I will never try to publish this, so “prior publishing on the web” can’t be an issue…
C) It’s done, really and completely.

A little more on authorial intent

2003-07-31T12:54:50+00:00

I did want to note a few more things that cloud this issue of authorial intent. For one thing, some authors may mean more than one thing at once, or write something deliberately so that it may be taken in more than one way (This multiple or “mazed” interpretation may have been James’s intent in writing The Turn of the Screw, although - hee hee! - there are multiple interpretations)

Secondly, one of the more credible lines of thought I learned about in Literary Theory was ‘reader-response theory’—the theory that a book simply does not exist without a reader. Sitting on a shelf, a book is the equivalent of a tree falling in a forest, unheard. Someone has to read it for it to have meaning, and, inevitably, two people reading the same book (while the text does provide some common ground) will experience it differently. The book is therefore not only created by the author, but by the reader in the act of reading. Thus, a definitive, “true”, unalterable reading is basically impossible.