Book 003 How Not What
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You'll notice that this visual metaphor places the author's original experience, from which the work is often supposed to stem from, and the interpretation, or the meaning the reader (you or me) gets from the text, all at the bottoms of the pillars, hidden, obscured, submerged in mud and water. This reflects the fact that getting at this meaning is often the aim of casual conversations about texts, novels and even movies, and getting at what the writer could have meant is quite often the topic of scholarly discussions at universities. But these ongoing conversations show that meaning and the author's experience cannot be fully uncovered, and, indeed, I argue that by the very nature of a full bridge being built on top of them, experience and meaning must stay hidden from us. By this, I mean two things. One is that it is not possible to objectively know experience and meaning, and the other is that looking for or attempting to define them in a text doesn't, ultimately, tell us anything important about the text.
Let me start with the second one. On an abstract level, it's often pretty clear what a text means, or what it is about. For example, Hamlet is pretty clearly about the inability to act, and Romeo and Juliet is, inescapably, about the individual versus society, or, the Medieval (tradition, hierarchy, family) versus the Renaissance (humanism, individualism and science). But we feel that there is a lot more going on here: Hamlet is about the inability to act, but this problem is approached by presenting a prince who is supposed to revenge the death of his father. What is the connection between the prince and inaction? How does the text approach and describe the problem of inaction? Why did the author decide to pair up a prince with this problem? These are the questions we are usually interested in when we ask what something means. It's the how, not the what.
This shift of focus reveals, I believe, that studying literature is not very different from an actual science, as what we are asking is how a certain thing works. We see a phenomenon (there is a text, and it affects people who read it), and we would like to know how it does that, why it does that. We would like to understand this phenomenon by being able to predict the effect of the text, just like we believe that we understand electromagnetic waves when we can predict what happens when they hit that coin you left in your pocket at the airport.
To me, trying to describe what the author meant, or what her state of mind was when she wrote the text, may provide interesting information, but will not, ultimately, help us understand the phenomenon of literature, or how the text works. We feel that a given text affects us, and we are naturally curious about how and why it does that. But then to say that the text is like that because the author had difficulty scribing the letter G, or was at the time attending court hearings having been falsely accused of treason by a soldier (as happened to William Blake), is creating only a semblance of explanation and understanding. It explains away the text, without really explaining what happens when we read it.
Naturally, such inquiries into the times and lives of authors are historically significant, and can very often enhance what we take away from a text. But what we don't usually consider is that objectively, we will never be able to know what is (let alone was!) in another person's mind, we merely deduce their state of mind from what we see, hear and read from the other person, and by assuming that they function similarly to us -- for example, if they cry, they are likely be shocked and/or sad. Because of this, we will abandon the impossible quest of answering, once and for all, what exactly a text means or precisely what its author was thinking of (which, by the way, was most probably the growing pile of unpaid bills on her desk), safe for talking about these in extremely abstract terms. We cannot unearth these without destroying our bridge as a whole.
As an aside, it is worth spending a bit more time on the question what it means to know the author. Pieces of information about the author's life (biographemes, to use Roland Barthes's term) that allow us to guess their state of mind will lead to us building up a model, and interpretation of the author in our minds. In this sense, we read the author in the same way as we read the text he produced, and the two, combined, will create some effect in us. In some cases, we hardly need (or have) any information about an author, like when reading a Wikipedia article. In other cases, we do need quite a bit of information to decipher archaic words or allusions to contemporary events long forgotten centuries ago. In either case, delving more in the financial situation or the gastrointestinal ailments of the author will only shift the balance between the text and the biographemes, but it will not explain their effect.
Moreover, it is important to realise that the creation of this model of the author is happening in every reader of a text, all the time. Although sometimes there is a distinction drawn between the so-called biographical author (who actually existed and wrote the text), and the constructed author, who is the model of the author in the reader's mind, the fact that we cannot objectively know another person shows that these kinds of authors are not that different after all, as the biographical author we know is just as constructed as the reader's author. We are, in fact, on the same level as our imagined reader. We both see the text, and we both have some information about its author. And this means that just like the biographical author and the constructed author are the same, what we know about the author's meaning, intention or experience, and the reader's interpretation (the meaning she sees) are also the same. This is because we guess what the author's experience was based on the same information that the reader uses to construct a meaning. There is only a limited amount of information available (the text and historical knowledge about the life and times of the author), and only so many conclusions can be drawn from it. Of course, different readers may construct slightly different meanings, but what is important to realise is that when we attempt to reconstruct the author and how she produced the work, we are, in fact, using the same information and are doing the same thing as a reader does when reading and interpreting the text. What we know of the writing is the same as what we know about the reading. Based on this observation, we will treat writing, or production, to be the exact mirror image of reading, or reception, simply because there isn't anything else we can do.
See also
- How to read a writing and write a reading
- There is only one kind of author: The one which no one knows
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Previous: Literature as a Bridge /
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