L. Timmel Duchamp wrote:
>
> Nicola, when you talking about your "bloody learning experience,"
> & Mike, when you talk about Butler's authorial unreliability,
> you may be both talking about how arbitrary a reader's relationship
> is to any fiction text. Readers often make mistakes of "fact"
> (i.e., missing material in the text that makes explicit a certain
> interpretation-- as in the case of Lauren's "hyperempathy"-- which
> I did pick up on in my reading, as a very telling detail that
> stuck in my mind-- or even changing the details in their memory,
> to accord with their own preconceptions & on-going [rather than
> after-the-fact] interpretation), & authors-- in an act of reading
> their own work, not writing it, though obviously "reading" is
> a necessary part of the total process of "writing"-- often insist
> on a simplicity of a single level-- the one they consciously intended--
> to their work, denying that anything could be in the text but
> what they consciously intended. (Eudora Welty sticks in my mind
> as an author who becomes enraged at readers seeing anything but
> the surface of her stories.) I seriously wonder if anyone reads
> the same piece of fiction in the same way anyone else does. I'd
> be willing to bet any issue of _Locus_ you might pick up would
> manifest such errors in its reviews. (I catch such errors there
> constantly: & of course this holds true for other publications,
> & not just _Locus_.) It's not necessarily carelessness (though
> if the reviewer took the time to re-read the piece being reviewed,
> at least some of the mistakes might be caught-- often in deep
> puzzlement, that s/he could have been so grossly in error). It's
> just that all sorts of things-- from previous reading experiences,
> previous conceptions of the author's work, & all sorts of personal
> experiences in the life of the reader-- kick in when we read,
> sometimes even from the very first sentence. (Which is why I
> don't think the author has the responsibility to hit the reader
> over the head with a fact: showing, not telling, is always appropriate,
> except in political tracts.) In my experience, even when three
> people who are socially close and share the same political attitudes
> read the same book, they discover when they talk to one another
> about it that they've read three different books. [I don't say
> "completely" different books, but *substantially* different books.
> They almost never remember all of the same details. They weight
> themes differently. They are disappointed or excited for different
> reasons.] & then, in the process of discussion, the person who
> has the most forceful & structured articulations of what s/he
> read ends up shaping the other two readers' memories of what *they*
> read.) I myself have been through this process-- with the same
> two other people-- with many, many books.
>
> It might not be totally off-the-wall to hypothesize that people
> develop a consensus about what any given piece of fiction is about
> strictly through public discussion (meant broadly). If so, public
> discussion then becomes the lens through which a particular work
> is read.
>
> And "public discussion," of course, includes lists like this one.
>
> Timmi Duchamp
People a book is to be enjoyed, have fun. When I read a book buy
Margerat Weis I don't sit there thinking about why she wrote about
something. Or with Robert Johnson's book one of the Lightbringer trilogy
who brings in the theme of vampires..OOO Gothic and vapirism. It's just
a book for crying out loud, somebodies imagination.
When I was at school one of my subjects was English, of course we
studied poetry and mostly South African poets since I live in South
Africa. One day we had a interview with one of the poets Sipho Sipambla.
About 80% of the teachers interpretations of the poems made him either
laugh your sigh. Humans read too much into things.
That's all I can say. We take ourselves to seriously and must learn to
laugh at ourselves. Try it sometime it might be refreshing.
Jay
Dragonheart.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:05:59 PDT