Manifesto?

[nrenka]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "Barry Arrowsmith" 
<arrowsmithbt at b...> wrote:

I'll play devil's advocate a bit here because you undercut yourself 
so nicely here.

> An author can't describe everything in sufficient detail for every
> reader to form the same mental image of what is being portrayed.
> IMO much of what we get out of a book depends on what we bring
> to it - experiences, memories, beliefs, moods. We use these to
> colour what the author presents to us. Since no two of us are
> exactly the same there'll be differences of detail and of emphasis
> in the images the book conjures up. Mostly there'll be a broad
> agreement, but there'll never be total unanimity.

You may find it too fancy, but I like the lit crit term 
of "intersubjective details", which adds up to much the same thing--
which features of a text can be agreed upon by a fairly wide 
community.

> To say that "the text takes on a life of its own" is not a valid
> description of the varying perceptions that readers construct; IMO
> it would be more accurate to say the reader has failed to fully
> comprehend the author, aided and abetted by their own inclinations.

Here's the problem; you seem to be advancing the proposition that 
there is One Thing which the author has put in to be comprehended, 
the 'meaning' of the text, as it were.  However, you've already noted 
that an author can't define everything, but requires the active 
participation of the reader to make a text work.  We fill in any 
number of gaps of various kinds when we read.
 
That seems to be what you're saying with the analogy; the idea that 
the image is 'aberrant' could be taken as stating that there is 
indeed an exact image.
 
> So it is with readers. The text, the story, will not change, but the
> perceptions derived from it will. And their validity is 
> questionable. Authorial intention supercedes reader comprehension, 
> just as grass is green and not grey.

The text as in the printed words upon the page may not change, but 
the story itself is not so fixed a thing as that--unless you want to 
argue that all the different readings of 'the story', all the 
different possible patterns that we as readers pick up on are all 
simply projections and we're all missing the point.  What I can read 
and justify as 'the story' is not the same as what you read as 'the 
story', I suspect.

Authorial intention must be manifested through the text, but the 
supportable possibilities (text-adequate readings) are not 
necessarily limited to the one which has the imprimitur of authorial 
intention.  That one is usually quite well-supported and worth taking 
into consideration, but it's very, very rarely the only one that's 
supported.

On the level of plain fact and events, there is, in a sense, one 
story--X happened and Y did not.  On the level of everything else, 
it's considerably more complex.  I'm frankly a little surprised that 
you elide the reader out to such an extent.  Works of literature are, 
these days, thought of more as things which engage the activity of a 
reader rather than being lectures from author to reader that can be 
reduced down to indisputable meaning.

> Mind you, that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't interpret 
> authorial intention according to our every whim. 

Maybe then I am misreading you, but it seems to me that your 
differentiation between the projections that readers make (naughty 
foolish readers) and (the position you like) interpreting authorial 
intention by our whims is a distinction without a difference.  It's 
not like interpretation isn't a personal thing too.  It can involve 
just as much projection as the above; responsibly relegated, perhaps, 
but the nature of interpretation is that it's not reducable to 
truth.  Don't you resist the idea that there's one true way, after 
all?

-Nora gets back to playing with the Hours