Pound vs. Eliot

[jdeirmend]

"If you need examples you can look at any words ever written and consider how the words would change if they were author less but you are clearly impatient. Start with Beowulf then. Would the poem suddenly become better if it had an author?"

Beowulf was an epic poem that was told who knows how many times before someone decided to write it. It was an oral tradition. Of course it doesn't have a single author. For this reason, it does not have identity as a work of literature in the same way that, say, anything written by a singular, modern poet does. But if you want to say that the intent of every teller of Beowulf, in whatever sense of the word, didn't play a role in determining its meaning when it was told - or even when it was finally written - you would still need to offer some reason for me to believe that.

Around the campfire, for instance, does anyone ever tell the same ghost story exactly the same way, even if it's the same person telling it twice? And yet, per your example of Beowulf, there is some sense in which it remains the same story? Don't tell me that something unique about the mind of the teller, in such a case, doesn't play into the execution of the tale. This could range from the fact that the teller's just drank a shit ton of coffee, gotten stoned, is a woman and is PMSing, broke up with his girlfriend, whatever.

Besides that: inasmuch as this thread began with my confessedly amateur psychologizing of the writings of Pound and Eliot, there is some precedent here for me to say this much. We are discussing "writing" in the modern sense of that which is written by an individual, and more particularly, the "growing inner self" of the modern individual. You seem to be lost on the context informing the word "writing" here.

"It is both perfectly phrased and true. You need to slow down and chew the words before you respond. The meaning and effect of words is determined by the reading, regardless of an author's wishes, the words need to stand alone."


But words are the production, within the context of this present discussion, of an author. And the idea that the author's intent doesn't factor into the words and their meaning is absurd, particularly in the case of modern writers, who practice the craft of writing as individuals first and foremost, workshopping etc. notwithstanding.

If that weren't the case, how can we make sense of you urging me, after all, to "slow down and chew the words before responding?" I could just sit here and tell you that my words stand on their own, and that you're committing some kind of interpretive fallacy by imputing my responsibility for them and their meaning. But that would be hogwash, because I understood you well enough, at least in this instance. Not only that: it would be hogwash because the words are mine in some sense that is hardly trivial. You and I are, after all, communicating, mind to mind, through writing. Your intent, as much as mine, certainly informs what meanings our words have, both as readers of each other's words, and as writers of our own. If the last tidbit weren't the case, misinterpretation and misunderstanding wouldn't even be possible.

Now, for writing to "stand on its own" is a tricky thing. I'm not saying that it's a meaningless idea, but you have to appreciate the paradox: to be able to appreciate timelessness in a work, a reader must be informed about many contingent, timely things. Earlier in this discussion, you conceded to this point. You more or less claimed that writing can be timeless, and that if we have to know something more than a minimum of the history and culture from which a writing originates to understand it, it fails.

But just what constitutes that minimum? Not only does it vary from work to work, but even with canonical works that allegedly "stand on their own," different readers will still pull away different meanings. This doesn't mean that timelessness is impossible. It just means that it often takes a damn well read person to recognize it, and even then, there is no guarantee that such a person will.

You seem to ascribe to the idea that all true or worthwhile literary propositions are timelessly so. While I have admiration for anyone who has the courage to venture this sort of a view, particularly in our time, the view itself cannot be true if it is made global in this way. Rather does it end up being brash, pretentious, and in the last analysis, false.

In fact, to see the timeless truth, say, in a piece of truly classical literature, the reader often has to wade through traps that the author him/herself sets, in the form of contingent distractions, which can feature as potent literary / rhetorical devices. For instance, the fact that Alcibiades is so desperately trying to get into Socrates' pants in the Symposium is funny enough to distract me from the real meat, which is timeless in comparison to the trifling, farcical elements of the dialogue. However, when viewed aright, the lesson Plato is offering with Alcibiades is profound, even if at first blush, his figure is a literary eyesore. The point is, though, Plato might have used something or someone else as a literary device.

Anyways, change the quantifier to "some," and we're good.