[davem]

Originally Posted by Bethberry

I don't understand why the reader must become a tabula rasa for this to happen. What is there in this confrontation with the Artist which demands that we must prostrate ourselves and empty our minds, to be filled newly with his ideas? This is no model of communication to me but a totalitarian takeover. Why, if you are valuing the human identity in your reading so much, must readers deny themselves and wipe out their identity?

Only temporarily, until we have taken in & assimilated what the other has to say to us - the more baggage we bring with us, the harder it will be to hear what the other is saying. It is the admission of profound ignorance which enables us to learn anything new. Once we have learned we must analyse & judge. But that analysis & judgement must be made based on what the other has taught us. The more baggage we hold onto the less objective we are.

How will we know the uniqueness of this other voice if we forget the language we know? Rather than being obstacles, those features of language which I named function in a dynamic process to give contrast, identity, chiaroscuro to the new ideas. It is through the difference that I can begin to perceive the new meaning.

Of coourse, but those are the tools by which we perform our analysis, not the means by which we listen.

Perhaps it all comes down to where we place this sense of the static. You accord to the Artist a complete control of intention and will. I am more hesitant about the nature of artistic creation, othe artist's mind to know completely what goes on in the cauldron of writing. As I quoted elsewhere today, Steiner said "The heart can be manifold, even self-contradictory." For that reason, it is not that I deny intentional meaning, but rather see it as always and ever being limited by the human condition of babel, the confusion of tongues. You seem to want to include the Artist in the Art. He is there, along with many other personas, but to think that he would be knowable or discernable with absolute certainty is I think as difficult as to know intimately the minds of all those around us. When we can so easily misunderstand the living, how much greater is our possible confusion over the dead?

This is our struggle, but one worth making, to my mind. The artist exists in the work, & is therefore knowable, & if we don't make the effort to know the artist, how can we ever truly know the art? It is not in the certainty, but in the attempt - we honour the artist & validate his work by that attempt. To give up & dismiss the attempt as impossible is an aknowledgement of failure before we even begin.

Thus, for me, this place where interpretation occurs, the reader as [i]interprète[i], is the space between the text and the reader--not either one in a hierarchy over the other, but in equilibrium. It is not a static , carved in stone commandement, but the process of making meaning, and it works both ways. It is not an imposition of the reader's solipcism or egotism upon the text (althought it can be that, and when such happens, such interpretations do not stand the test of time), but a dialogue out of which new meaning occurs.

But doesn't dialogue require a clear (or as clear as possible) distinction between self & other? If we don't, as far as possible, shed our baggage, then to a great extent our 'dialogue' is only with our own past selves. It is an inner, not an outer dialogue, & we end up only talking to ourselves, & hearing our own voices, & 'learning' only what we already knew.

As to 'making meaning' - this implies that there is no 'objective' meaning, only imposed meaning. Meaning, or Truth, or Reality may simply exist - & it hasn't been disproved yet. It seems to me that its only from the point of view that there is no 'meaning' beyond what we ourselve impose that leads us to deny the 'living' presence of the artist in the art, & leads us to value our familiar baggage over the new & unknown. If we won't put aside (as far as we are able) what we've brought with us, how can we judge anything at all - we can only judge ourselves, what we think - the 'new' merely throws us back on ourselves, into self analysis. The art is glass - but is it a window, or only a mirror?