semiotics

[John Doe]

So, by YOUR reasoning, the content of your e-mail
response to me is: " Scupza was like oil, painted
upwards of my vestibular clamshell,and freezone pizza
rubric deflated tire over the right stance; pollywogs
twiddle in their polian glee, but sinks my heart as
waterfalls - the loon that laughs, the babe that
bawls, is skittering under sticky-note pads..."
etc......your argument ignores the obvious; sure,
readers will bring their own takes on certain terms,
which,due to their ambuguity, leave certain meanings
"open"...but, and your own statements betray it, there
is also the intended meaning; how would ANY
communication occur, if everyone saw EVERY item as
completely "open" to interpretations other than those
in mind of the writer? Clearly YOU must read recipes,
instructions for use on the back of products; do you
always question the intended meaning of THOSE "texts"?
...a text is not a device for generating
interpretations;there is always the
"what-the-writer-had-in-mind" just as you had "in
mind" certain things and not others when you wrote
your reply; that Theory stuff sounds all sexy in a
thesis, but try convincing yourself you DON'T have
intentions when you write or that most of your peers
won't arrive at the same gist...I didn't glean from
your e-mail that it was "about" the post Civil War
Reconstruction plans of the United States Government
for example...what interpretations can be safely
EXCLUDED (trillions at least ) far outnumber what
interpretations can  be sanely affirmed in any given
instance...the Umberto Eco example of Casanove hardly
exemplifies an absurd, wildly arbitrary guess at a
POSSIBLE, and I stress POSSIBLE, meaning;apparently no
reader thought the "meaning" was really : ' a palace
made of green Jello' and this extreme "interpretation"
only serves to show that theory aside, in PRACTICE, if
we are honest with how our minds are decoding when we
read, there is a rather limited range of sensible
meanings from any given 'text'...very
limited...occasional discoveries like the Eco example
are normal and may or may not be revealing of the
author's incorporation of subconcious associations..in
some cases yes, in others no...hermeneutics has
asserted this since post-scholastic days at
least...this trend in Theory is so much fun these days
because it allows people to feel "empowered" rather
than "under the spell" of the writer;We Don't Want the
Writer Telling Us What to Think, blah blah blah...it's
so ecumenical and socialist...Yay!....Look Folks! -
Even the Author Has No Real Control Over His
Material!!! Yeeeeee Haaaaaa!....I hope they don't feel
that way next time they read a recipe for how to cook
Sea Bass.....perhaps TheoryHeads should ask themselves
what happens mentally when a Reader interprets a
technical manuel or a set of instructions on how to
program a DVD player before they go making Grand
Unified Theories on literary "texts"....ever wonder
about that? Waht, exactly, is the difference between a
novel and a technical manuel? If Theory can't answer
or even address that problem, it has rather little
credibility trying to explicate the interpretive
process of fiction....and my final caveat concerns not
what Goes On in the interpreting mind of an
Intellectual, who presumably has a lot of associative
resources in his mind when reading a fiction work to
play with, but how about what goes on in a border-line
retarded person when he reads Moby Dick? Barthes was
so stupid he never stopped to consider that if he's
gonna make generalizations about the Human Thought
Process Engaged in the Act of Reading a Text, he'd
better not ONLY look at other educated high-I.Q. types
just like himself; he'd better account for less gifted
people, because, if you deign to generalize about the
Human mind, it includes non-intellectuals as
well..other wise you are NOT really thinking through
your premises; you're only talking about your own
"kind"....you're talking to your own fan club...when 
fiction writer sits down to write a novel he is not
deciding to contrive a "device"; ( meta-fiction
writers aside, and even Barth and Coover have Intent
)Faulkner didn't write "devices"; he expressed the
human motivations and actions of "all these characters
living in my head , clamoring for articulation"...that
perhaps may strike you as a completely foreign notion,
since you seem to feel that writers are mere
transceivers and not Creators....but the majority of
novel writers in history would find this idea of
"there is no 'I' behind the text" as psychologically
untenable...ironically the very writers we read (
again, except for post-WWII representatives ) would
find all this as horseshit;Theory just grew bored and
unhappy with the idea that writers are Directors of
Their Created Worlds, so it jumped on a new view,
that's all...in thirty years it will be something
else; meanwhile fictin writers will feel the way they
always felt when rendering the imaginary worlds in
their minds....


--- "Michael J. Hußmann" <michael at michael-hussmann.de>
wrote:

> John Doe (tristero69 at yahoo.com) wrote:
> 
> > I'm a bit confused; seems to me the
> > claim of privileged INTENTION would be easily
> > supportable by the explicit remarks of intention
> by
> > the writer himself....If I write a novel, and then
> > tell you personally that I intended, that I
> > deliberately contrived, the name Howie Surd to
> sound
> > like "how absurd!", then I have pre-determined a
> > meaning
> 
> Well, you can do that, but there is no way you could
> impose that
> interpretation on the reader -- even if you would
> bundle your novel with
> a commentary explaining its meaning, so the reader
> would even know what
> your intention was. The reader will still find his
> own interpretations.
> As Umberto Eco once remarked, the author should die
> after completing his
> work, so he cannot disturb the process of generating
> interpretations.
> Sarcasm aside, there's some truth to this. The
> authors claim to a
> privileged interpretation is quite hollow; after
> all, his subconscious
> may have been playing tricks on him, and some
> seemingly absurd
> interpretation by some reader may be nearer to the
> truth than the
> official interpretation. Not that we (or even the
> author) would ever
> know for sure. (When Pynchon did comment on his
> works, as in the
> introduction to "Slow Learner", how many even cared?
> When his comments
> supported their interpretations, readers chose to
> believe him, and if he
> contradicted their beliefs, they explained his
> comments as tongue in cheek.)
> 
> Now even Eco, who once held that there was no such
> thing as a privileged
> interpretation, added some qualifications in recent
> years -- partly
> because of his experience with his own "Il nome
> della rosa", I suppose.
> For example, someone suggested that "Hugo de
> Novocastrum" (Hugo of
> Newcastle) was an allusion to Casanova -- even
> though "castrum" (castle)
> isn't the same as "casa" (house), that Hugo of
> Newcastle is a historical
> figure, and, most importantly, that both the real
> Hugo of Newcastle and
> the one in the novel share no personality traits (or
> whatever) with
> Casanova. There will always be interpretations that
> appear natural to
> most, while there are others that most believe are
> absurd. But it is
> still true that a text -- and especially a novel --
> is (to borrow Eco's
> term) a device for generating interpretations, where
> the interpretations
> generated depend on the reader, his knowledge, his
> beliefs etc.. The
> author cannot stop this, even if he wants to. A
> novel is not a device
> for conveying specific interpretations, I'm afraid.
> 
> - Michael
> 
> 
> Michael J. Hußmann
> 
> E-mail: michael at michael-hussmann.de
> WWW (personal): http://michael-hussmann.de
> WWW (professional): http://digicam-experts.de
> 
> 
> 


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