----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Jackson" <cqmv at pdx.edu>
"I'd say the prevailing ideology is that the Artist should be able to articulate the True Meaning of the Work. For me, this assumption reflects the capitalist concept of the person as an autonomous, personally responsible individual."
Joanna] It's a mixed bag. I don't believe the artist is expected to articulate the true meaning of the work.
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Carroo: Do you really believe there is such a thing as the "Truee Meaning" of a work of art.
(Digression: I would argue that "work of art" is itself is historical: that is, works of art onlyu exist within certain historical contexts. They begin to appear in the late 17th-c, but it is arguable that they did not yetr fully exist een for Wordsworth and Coleridge. I personally doubt the usefulness of the concept. Shakespare neer dreamt that he was producing anything remotely like a "work of art" - his works were turned into works of art in the mid-19fth-c. It's time to discard the concept)
Meaning, whatever it is,is a relation, not something that inheres in a text, a building, a painting, a sonata. Rther it i.s a relationship, under given historical condtions, between the text and the reader. And that relationship, of course, is itself social. The novel, as a genre, is defined as a personal relationship between implied narrator and implied reader, and it is that generic gesture which makes possible the convention of the undependable narrator. (I don't know what you mean whenyou refer to the "truth-value of the narration." The narration is itslf. What other "truth" value should it have?) This is the reason for considering the novel as _the_ genre of bourgeois society: its definition as a genere incorporates the core bourgeois myth of autonomous individuals, existing prior to and independently of social relations, forming such relations by an act of wil. It mimes that myth doubly: by the new society created when the rader picks up the novel, thereby forming a social relation where before there was only the novelsist and the reader - two isolated monads. And the 'inside' of the narrative, in one way or another, imitates the primordial "novel" -- the marriage of Adam & Eve in PL, to which the novel forms a magnificent seriesd of footnotes. If and when the individualized social order created by capitalism disappears, the novels of Richardson & Austen, Stendahl & Flaubert, Tolstoi & Wolfe & Faulkner will take on a radically different "true meaning" from what they have for us.
Joanna: The critics are supposed to do that.
Carrol: Only if they too believe in the bourgeois myth of the one true meaning of a person or a text.
I may come back to this post. It offers many fascinatihng points of departure.
Carrol