Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

I think you're clinging to a pointless psychoanalysis of writers through writing that does nothing to increase the value of the /writing/ itself, actually distracting from literary discussion, diverting them to literary figure discussions.

To me, you can't really know what sort of a fruit you're dealing with, until you cast your gaze upon the tree its fallen from. Even then, it takes some familiarity with the entire orchard to really know what's going on. That is to say: the approach I advocate and attempt to embody isn't merely psychoanalytic. It is also hermeneutic.

Granted, I'm an amateur, and this thread sprung from a desire to write about poets and poetry as much as anything. My speculations on these matters, I can readily concede, are just that: speculations. That doesn't mean that they are all completely ill founded or entirely without merit.

You think this sort of behavior is a distraction from properly "literary" discussion. That this position essentially ignores the most significant developments in literary theory in the past 40 or so years is something that seems to give you absolutely zero pause.

You (and many others that need to justify a position) believe that writing /needs/ an author to exist, to have purpose or meaning.

It's just not the case. Authorial intent has no effect at all on the actual words. Meaning is determined by the /reading/ not the writing, a good author observes and reports. If an effective analysis is dependent on knowing the author (other than cultural and social issues surrounding the times) than the writing fails.

But writing does need a writing author, in the same way that speech needs a speaking subject. If you're going to assert otherwise, offer some reasons to back your position up, which seems extreme to the point of absurdity. Furthermore, I'm not sure what you mean by saying that "authorial intent has no effect at all on the actual words." That seems either carelessly phrased or downright false.

Beyond that, even if a writer isn't saying anything about his human identity apart from his writing when writing, his writing still makes a statement about him, as a human being. This is because there is a distinction to be had between (1) the immediately intelligible content of one's writing and (2) the significance of one's having written the same.

And yet, this distinction is a plastic one, because of the fact of context. My having read other writings invariably informs my reading of the one sitting in front of me at the moment, whether these are written by the same author or by another. For instance, by way of allusion, I can see meanings in the writing at hand that others cannot, and this by virtue of the familiarity that I have with the corpus of the author in question's work. Does this mean that the writing at hand "fails?" Hardly.

Granted there is writing that is accorded the status of "timelessness," and even writing that is truly timeless. Granted that this sort of writing tends to stand on its own better than most, but is still prone to being read in a context sensitive (read: timely) fashion. Still, if the reader is the only one responsible for the meaning that is produced when he or she reads a timeless work, in just what sense is the writing in question timeless? To deny any kind of authorly authority to the writer leads to the absurd result that he/she didn't even have control over what he/she communicates in writing. Clearly, this is not the case, at least not for what few works can be rightly called timeless.

Here's the rub: the exceptional writer is always and already a reader of his own work as well. That this is generally true of the best writers is incontrovertible. The practice of re-writing, with drafts sometimes numbering in the dozens, testifies to this much.