----- Original Message ----- From: Calle Dybedahl calle@lysator.liu.se
Taking a philosophical turn here...
This is not just nastiness on the part of the litcrit crowd, there is some sense behind it. Most of that sense is that the creator of a work is much too close to it to provide any sort of unbiased commentary. When the creator looks at her work, she does not just see the work, she also remembers the Platonically ideal version of that work that she had in her head while she created, and that ideal *does* get mixed up with the actual work as seen by others.
I think your point about the authors and intent is well taken, Calle. After all, Virginia Woolf went to her grave arguing that the lighthouse was not a phallic symbol, despite the interpretations of thousands of others :).
The way we were taught, all works are supposed to stand by themselves. When evaluating a literary creation, you look only at the creation itself. You disregard when it was created, you disregard who created it, you disregard why it was created; you just look at the creation as it appears before you. No more, and no less[1].
However, this strikes me as effectively impossible to do. Whenever you read a programme or watch a book, you cannot avoid bringing in some of the surrounding context. For instance, if I watch *Casablanca,* I can try to disregard everything but the film itself... but the fact remains that I know when 1943 was, I know where Africa is, I know who the Germans are, and I know why they happened to be in Africa at that time. If I could shut all of these side points out of my mind entirely (which I can't), all I would see would be a sequence of one picture following another.
A consequence of this view is that there is no such thing as a "right" or a "wrong" interpretation. There are interpretations that can be more or less strongly argued for or against, but that is not at all the same thing. There are also no such thing as an impossible interpretation. As soon as someone has interpreted a work in a certain way, that interpretation is obviously possible, and all that remains to do is to argue for or against it (or to ignore it, of course).
This last point is certainly true, but I still think it's impossible to take anything, including interpretations, totally free from context or value judgement. People make their interpretations for a variety of reasons from a variety of backgrounds, and unless they can somehow erase their minds totally prior to the interpretive act, this will inform their interpretation thereof.
At the risk of getting into philosophical areas here, also, this viewpoint has always struck me as very similar to that of Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that "poetry is as good as pushpin [a kind of eighteeth-century children's game, as I understand it]." Basically, by this analysis a Mills and Boon romance is every bit as literarily valid as a Shakespeare play. Which is something I've never been able to accept-- and frankly, very few English departments seem to be teaching First-Year Mills and Boon, despite the litcrit movement.
In this pro/con-slash flamefest,
Ahem! I sincerely hope I haven't flamed anybody. If anybody got that impression, I do apologise.
pro-slash interpretation of Blake's 7 shouldn't be made, because it wasn't the intention of the creators of the show that it should be interpreted that way. I and, I think, several others reject this argument for pretty much all of the reasons given above.
Actually, I've also been trying to argue that when you take the images in the series independent of the series' creators' stated views, it still doesn't read. Furthermore, a lot of the justification for the pro-slash viewpoint has involved taking scenes out of the context of the work-- which to return to Eng. Lit. could be analogised to drawing conclusions about Hamlet based on the scene of Ophelia's madness, without reference to the rest of the play :).
Arguing that the slash interpretation can't be made or shouldn't be made is utterly pointless.
As I said before, IMO it's not a matter of can't or shouldn't be made. It's a matter of whether or not it does fit the canon and, in some threads of the argument, the author's intent.
[1] This is not the only way to do literary criticism, of course. Marxist critics, for example, invariably try to see works in relation to the Marxist view of historic progress.
Are there no structuralists in lit-crit anymore? Sigh...
Fiona
_________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com