Similar Opposites

Prescribe and proscribe - they are antonyms but differ only by one letter. Are there any others?

Local flavour

I reread Alan Garner's The Moon of Gomrath yesterday. It is a fine book and a personal childhood favourite. However rereading it after such a length of time and a mass of intervening fiction led me to realise for the first time a common factor in many of the books I read as a child: The protagonists (usually implicitly or explicity middle class English children) going to visit/stay with a suitably 'interesting' local/regional types. This first stage of strangeness is usually followed by more fantastical (of the either the strictly fantasy kind or the purely improbable) happenings but this first initial dislocation opens up this possibility but putting the children into another 'holiday' world.

The Death of the Author

Or, in other words, how should we read?

Should we always seek to recover the author's intention in a text? Or is there a an abstract 'absolute' meaning contained in any text waiting to be recovered.

The author's intention sounds plausible when used as a phrase but in practice either the author has mastered their art and said (largely) what they intended (to which any paraphrase, even that of the author can only be a reduction or approximation) or they have failed, in which case knowing their intention may be instructive in teaching us why or how they have failed but it does not tell us the 'meaning' of the text. Otherwise intention and achievement would be identical in literature and William McGonagall would be one of Scotland's greatest (as opposed to best known) literary figures.

I believe that the 'search' for meaning in some didactic and reductive sense is damaging in all the arts but it is worst in literature because it temptations are so plausible. Translation from the visual or musical into the verbal so clearly loses information but the transformation of one text into it's 'meaning' - another text, seems so much safer. Not so. If it had such a simple 'meaning' that it can be reduced to a bundle of prose, it is not a work of art. It is a lecture and long winded one at that.

How then do we read a text? ( I do not say study; a text may be studied profitably in many ways, orthographically, economically, sociologically, psychologically but these studies have only a tangential relevance to our experience of literature at its purest and most naive level - the act of reading, the confrontation of individual and text.)

Any text is made of language. I submit that to undestand a text we must not only understand that specific language but language itself. What then is language?

Language is a tool for communication between people. It relies on a community to agree its meaning. It's interpretation is subject to this agreement (intersubjectivity) and is not absolute, when the language is alive. From the point of view of the contemporary user of a language - a member of the society that determines it - the meaning and use of language is subject to constant unknowing negotiation between members of the community. This involves the introduction of neologisms and altering the meaning of words as well as how these words affect and reflect the social organisation of this linguistic culture (and its many subcultures).

Of course there are authorities in language as in life. They negotiate from uniquely strong positions but they cannot control language nor prevent its constant reinvention much to the dismay of many of their adherents.

Language then has 'meaning' or rather utility only within a social context. This meaning is not consciously controlled by any one person or group nor is it absolute. It is a function of linguistic community. Of course within any one language there will be manifold linguistic subgroups, none more so perhaps than within English

Thus to understand a text we must understand it's linguistic (and therefore social) context. This is why that in order to understand texts from outwith our own culture, language and era we must study the language and the society which produced the text in order to best read it. For texts produced in our own context we do not and should not.

On the Naming of Blogs

The name of a blog like the name of a small press magazine or an indie album should sound good but more importantly should contain esoteric references that the initiated can unpick and feel smug about. I have done my best.

For the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with the Molesworth canon, little Basil Fotherington-Thomas was Nigel Molesworth's nature loving, hard swotting curly haired classmate. He would usually enter the scene skipping and saying 'hullo trees hullo sky'. He would usually exit discussing contemporary literature or tied to a chair or both.

I fear that for all my admiration of Nigel I was more of a Fotherington-Thomas at school. A dirtier, uglier Fotherington Thomas without a clean rubber or neat handwriting. And I do like sport though I am no good at it. Nonetheless I was one of those children who attend school under the misapprehension that it is for learning (rather than keeping children off the street and out of sweatshops). I even liked Maths (chiz).

I hope you enjoy your visits here but more importantly I hope that you don't end up wishing I was tied to a chair being subjected the three billion volts of the nuclear torturer at the hands of 'dere littel Nigel Molesworth' (sic) or one his many soulmates.