SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[Fergus Ginsberg]

Subject: Re: SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication" 

Dave Monroe, 

"Okay, definitely, Vineland next, Rorty and Farber
have me interested again in precisely "the" American
political history Pynchon draws upon therein ..."

 
I enjoy intertextual web building... historical,
political, philosophical, poetical, musical...etc....


 the acts of reading and writing are  interwoven and 
are inexplicable imaginative web building processes. 

but why are we so focused on the political threads? 

That is not to say that a pluralistic list should try
to silence the political web builders. 
Not at all. But we are stuck on this sticky politics. 


We are stuck on questions about the politics of the
spiders (Pynchon and readers of Pynchon) and I'm not
sure this a very constructive way to talk about
literature. 

In any event, I'm convinced that the focus on politics
is not a constructive thing for the list,  at least at
the moments. 

In trying to snatch the Pynchon-spider from his web so
that we can dissect him and determine his politics, we
have quashed the poetic, the writer-reader
relationship. In doing so, we aborted all talk of the
delicately beautiful, charmingly exquisite traps the
Pynchon-spider makes. 

The webs he spins are imaginative. 

Moreover,  the Pynchon-spider dances away, maturing
and evolving, spinning more beautiful webs as he goes.


The fictional worlds of the Pynchon spider are his
creation. 

While the real world goes on all around him, he spins.


We should not confuse the two. While the spider is
influenced by the environment around him, by other
webs and web builders, his web is his creation. 

Even if we are able to take his abandoned webs whole
and undisturbed into our studies and open a hundred
books we would only spin our own webs into his. 

And anyways, from what I'm reading it seems that Dave
Monroe and Robert are pretty much in agreement here. 

Why are we so focused on James Wait (Conrad's _NN_)? 


…minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a
pleasing disguise.

The study of the sociological or political impact of
literature has to devised mainly for those who are by
temperament or education immune to the aesthetic
vibrancy of authentic literature, for those that do
not experience the telltale tingle between the
shoulder blades. (I repeat again and again it is no
use reading a book at all if you do not read it with
your back). 

	--Nabokov


            It seems, for example, that the manner in
which literary criticism once defined the author-or,
rather, constructed the figure of the author
beginning with existing texts and discourses-is
directly derived from the manner in which Christian
tradition authenticated (or rejected) the
texts at its disposal. In order to "rediscover" an
author in a work, modern criticism uses methods
similar to those that Christian exegesis employed when
trying to prove the value of a text by its author's
saintliness. In De viris illustribus, Saint Jerome
explains that homonymy is not sufficient to identify
legitimately authors of more than one work:
different individuals could have had the same name, or
one man could have, illegitimately, borrowed another's
patronymic. The name as an individual trademark is not
enough when one works within a textual
tradition.

How, then, can one attribute several discourses to one
and the same author? How can one use the author
function to determine if one is dealing with one or
several individuals? Saint Jerome proposes four
criteria: (1) if among several books attributed to an
author one is inferior to the others, it must be
withdrawn from the list of the author's works
(the author is therefore defined as a constant level
of value); (2) the same should be done if certain
texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the
author's other works (the author is thus defined as a
field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); (3) one
must also exclude works that are written in a
different style, containing words and expressions not
ordinarily found in the writer's production (the
author is here conceived as a stylistic unity); (4)
finally, passages quoting statements that were made or
mentioning events that occurred after the author's
death must
be regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here
seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a
certain number of events).

Modern literary criticism, even when-as is now
customary-it is not concerned with questions of
authentication, still defines the author the
same way: the author provides the basis for explaining
not only the presence of certain events in a work, but
also their transformations, distortions, and diverse
modifications (through his biography, the
determination of his individual perspective, the
analysis of his social position, and the revelation of
his basic design). The author is also the principle of
a certain unity of writing-all differences having to
be
resolved, at least in part, by the principles of
evolution, maturation, or influence. The author also
serves to neutralize the contradictions that
may emerge in a series of texts: there must be-at a
certain level of his thought or desire, of his
consciousness or unconscious-a point where
contradictions are resolved, where incompatible
elements are at last tied together or organized around
a fundamental or originating contradiction.
   Finally, the author is a particular source of
expression that, in more or less completed forms, is
manifested equally well, and with similar validity,
in works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on.
Clearly, Saint Jerome's four criteria of authenticity
(criteria which seem totally insufficient for
today's exegetes) do define the four modalities
according to which modern criticism brings the author
function into play.       

http://www.eiu.edu/~literary/4950/foucault.htm



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