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Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous
I think you greatly misunderstand my interpretations. I am not pretending to know the mind of the author, rather I am giving my own reflection and feeling and interpretation of the text standing alone as a piece of art, which is always open to interpretation by the audience. I was not trying to say that the motifs and symbolism I see in the text were necessarily Garcia-Marquez's intentions or implied meanings, rather like a piece of music those are the meanings that I personally get out of it. You must admit in reading it by itself and its own interpretation, that there is some merit to my perspective. If not, eh, but I appreciate your insight with the french puns, those are the kind of literary gems that literally get lost in translation
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oh yeah ok, we can all fantasize and project whatever we want into a text, but that doesn't meant that our fantasies make a part of the text.
and regardless, it's the act of
interpretation that i'm against. interpretation assigns an external meaning to the text, it says "what the text is is not really the text, it's what i make of it", which usually tends to be some sort of normative discourse (psychoanalisis, marxism, feminism, frenchwankerianism, etc). sure, humpty dumpty could make the words mean what he wanted, but my point, ultimately, is that it is much more fun and enjoyable to read novels as novels, not as allegories that refer to some other "true" reality. i'm not against the allegories by the way, they have their place in the human mind, and góngora did wonders with them, but my contention is that 100 years of solitude is more of a self-contained world that feeds from colombian history, yes, but becomes its own reality and needs to symbolize nothing.
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Originally Posted by Glice
I think the last opinion you should consider in thinking about a book is the author's. I thought we were all Barthesians now?
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"we were all". it's that british herd instinct again isn't it? it's like a nervous tic. relax.
anyway, some were barthesians, but barthes himself was such an ever-evolving thinker that i wouldn't know to what period of his work you refer to.
if anything i'm more of a devotee of sontag's manifesto against interpretation. which is (i mean interpretation) a kind of obscene procedure taught in literature departments everywhere. can't the text exist for itself? no, it must be interpreted by every motherfucking critical school that wants to have its way with it. which would be sexy if rape wasn't so boring.
and maybe i misspoke when i said that is not what the author intended, because yes, the author puts a lot of things there completely unaware, but that doesn't mean that everything goes. like this: <<i see the blue color of this screen and i am reminded that chabib, coming from a people of the desert, must be fascinated by the ocean and wanted to give us the impression of being submerged underwater when we post in this here forum.... although this is more of a dark cerulean, which adds the vision of the "other" to this virtual batysphere where we delve into the abyss of the human mind>>
yes, this type of "interpretative" crock is what i've read even in academic papers, and it gave me such hives. the humanities are doomed because of it.
anyway, about the book i recommended, it's not to interpret anything, but because the guy is so much fucking fun to read and it makes you imagine you're getting plastered with him asking him all sorts of questions. cuz the guy who interviewed him was not just a journalist, but his friend, so the conversation had that awesome smell of a latin american bar (beer, piss, and pork sandwiches).