After Friday's class,
I could not stop thinking about an essay we read in my philosophy class by
Monroe C. Beardsley, titled The Authority of the Text. The piece is a
response and rebuttal of E.D. Hirsch's essay, In Defense of the Author, but
that is neither here nor there for the moment. The essay comments on literary
interpretation, and if we, the audience/critics, need to discover the authorial
or textual meaning behind a text. Is the author necessary to form a true
interpretation of a text? Towards the end of his piece, Beardsley says,
"...they [readings] do not bring out of the work something that lies
momentarily in it; they are rather ways of using the work to illustrate
a pre-existent system of thought. Though they are sometimes called
'interpretations'...they merit a distinct label, like superimpositions."
Some works are "superimpositions" of others. In Vonnegut's Cat's
Cradle, is the Book of Bokonon created by the pre-existing ideas of Jonah,
or even, Vonnegut? Does Vonnegut matter? Beardsley would argue that neither
Vonnegut, nor his background, are necessary to find meaning—"correct" meaning—in Cat's
Cradle. Beardsley claims, “The proper task of the literary interpreter
is to interpret textual meaning.” And I think Vonnegut would give an "amen" or a "vin-dit" to that statement. At the end of Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut laughs at the reader, as pointed out in the blog post Cat's Cradle: A mockery of the reader, for trying to find some complex, authorial, deep meaning behind his novel. Sometimes there is no hidden meaning? I'm an English/Philosophy student....I don't (can't) except this!
Couple of things I'd like to share my thoughts on.
ReplyDelete1. The term 'superimposition'. I take this process to further extend the nature of "pre-existent system of thought" beyond the psyche of the author himself. I don't disagree Beardsley's thought of putting the author's background in the back burner as we sit down and form our textual analyses. I do think, however, that "superimposition" can also come from the readers' respective "pre-existent systems of thought." Also I like this term over "bias" or "prejudice" because it neutralizes, to a degree, the sense of non-constructive hostility the latter two may bear. Regardless, looking at "superimpositions" this way further constrains the scope through which we read the text. First we can't read the text for authoritative meaning, now our analyses, in order to be vindictive, have to be impersonal and detached from our individuality to an appropriate degree. This can either lead to a completely high-brow/ i'm-an-textual-expert-analyst interpretation, or to nothing. This brings me to my second point.
2. So within the analytical framework proposed by Beardsley, I suggested that we can only have two ways of reading Vonnegut's CC as mentioned above (feel free to disagree by the way). The first route, albeit with the required point of departure (i.e.,detachment from pre-existent system(s) of thought), is what you have suggested that Vonnegut is doing at the end of the book. I agree. So this leaves us with the alternative - the "nothingness" interpretation. I take this interpretation to mean that we've become no wiser by the end of the text than when we started. True. But our awareness of such plateau can mean many things, and these many things can have their own implications. One, for instance, can be found in "The Things They Carried", particularly in the mentality of the character Mitchell Sanders. Take a look at this character and let me know what you think.
By the way you have typo.