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To give a more concrete example, I had an argument with a cousin of mine who was an English grad student at the time. It was over authorial intent and its relevance to criticism. She was arguing that the intent of the author shouldn't constrain criticism. I see this as a way, basically, to make up anything you want about what the author is writing. Any field in which such a thing is believed is somewhat suspect to me, but maybe that's just because I'm not a humanities student.

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which is part of the reason why, i gather, you had some issues with my views on hadith literature...i see....

well, alright, but it's obviously a bit problematic to make generalisations about a discipline based on what some of its members believe. certainly not all of my profs, for instance, subscribe to your cousin's idea. i haven't read a great deal on it...Tres generally has a better grasp of these things than i do...but i'm cool with messing around with the idea of authorial intent, given my world-view, or whatever you want to call it--my postmodernism, Sufism, Hinduism, terrorism, circumcision, jingoism, dublaa jism, egotism. at the end of the day, they're all facets of "an-ginnat sadiyo~ kii taariik bihiimaana tilism."

(sorry...tired.) come to think of it, didn't Tres post a link to an excellent article relating to this topic, involving hagiography and Umberto Eco?

the idea is always difficult to wrestle with when writing papers; there's always a fear of ascribing something to an author that he/she "wouldn't have agreed with," whatever this means. of course, such ascription has been the norm in certain cultures, including some of the ones on which i hope to focus my grad work, and one might argue that insisting upon the primacy of authorial intent to the exclusion of the opposite view is to some extent ethnocentricist.

however i deal with it pragmatically in my studies, when i'm writing for myself it simply becomes an inescapable fact that contributes a great deal to the way in which i approach and react to my own writing. i haven't put out any serious English poetry for three years now...i've written things and thrown them away, and i've written in Urdu and Punjabi for my girlfriend's eyes only--in other words i've written, but never shared my writing, much less tried to have it published. what happened was that three years ago, somewhat to my surprise, i did get published. having more than four or five people reading my work awakened certain feelings that i'd had all along, as did the experience of giving poetry readings. on the one hand, it was a good experience--i don't function well in terms of speaking, yet somehow i managed to get through the readings successfully. on the other hand, it forced me to think about the impact of my words; for the first time i had to swallow the idea that a lot of people were going to be reading or hearing my words. for that reason, on the very rare occasions when i've written something in the past few years, i've destroyed it soon afterwards.

my girlfriend and i have a great deal of trust in one another, and i've never been jealous of other guys who've tried to pick her up, etc. but in terms of my poetry, well, i'm a jealous lover, jealous enough to kill the beloved--and i've done that again and again. i destroy my poems out of love, then, and it's a rather narcissistic sort of affection, i suppose, but i feel it acutely nonetheless. i tell people that i do it out of hatred because i lack confidence in my ability to write, but this is a lie i tell for the sake of simplicity. it's not so much the words that i'm in love with as their meanings, and this is the problem: i can't bear the thought of other people--readers--ogling, flirting, mounting the ratty mattresses of their views and violating, reshaping, re-comprehending my meanings...re-reading my words. at the moment of the murder, i tell myself in a sort of rage that these words and the meanings behind them belong to me, the author, and by destroying my work, i'm ensuring that the one i love...the one i love...belongs to me alone.

so if i just want to assert my authorial intent, and to be sure that others don't fuck around with what i really meant, why do i have to destroy it? for me, it's because of the impossibility of retrieving the moment of writing. that poem that was published was, in retrospect, quite politically tendentious, full of teen angst (i was 18 when i wrote it) and "asian rage," and perhaps a dose of cultural authenticism. a friend of mine asked me last year about a particular verse that seemed particularly hostile. i don't think i blush, but perhaps i blanched, and wished that i'd ripped the damn thing to shreds before it became such a whore/gigolo. i essentially threw up my hands and said, "i dunno" in response. later i wondered why i'd done that, why i hadn't explained and defended my intent, and i quickly remembered in detail my original meaning, my authorial intent--yet a second later, i wasn't so sure. this is the tragedy of inscription... in his poem "idhaa kaana lii 'an u`iidu al-bidaaya" ("If I Were to Start From the Beginning"), Palestinian writer Mahmuud Darwiish says,

a`uudu, idhaa kaana lii 'an a`uuda, 'ila wardatii nafsi-haa wa 'ila khuTwatii nafsi-haa
wa laakinna-nii laa a`uudu 'ila qurTuba.

i will return, if i must return, to my roses themselves, to my steps themselves,
but i will never return to Cordoba.

he will never return to Andalusia because he cannot re-turn. as he says elsewhere of a visit to Palestine, "je ne reviens pas, je viens" ("i don't come back--i come.") of the Odyssey, he says (if i'm translating correctly):

"Is that which has gone that which has come back? When Ulysses came back, he wasn’t the same man. The sea transformed him. The sea and the years. He did not find the same home, the same Penelope. You don’t find yourself yourself twice. Every day you are another."

what i realised, as Darwiish articulates, was that i was reconstructing my own intent, reconstructing myself as an author--if this is true of my own authorial intent...well, you see where i'm going. that reconstruction of intent is, i suppose, crucial to any sort of discourse between two different positions, but ultimately my feeling based on my own writing is that it's a sham, a sort of ipseal authenticism, an authenticism of the Self.

it's no coincidence that i'm currently writing a maddening (and quite possibly mad) paper on South Asian reconstructions of Andalusia and ipseal authenticism.

sorry if any of this is incoherent. it's so past my bedtime.

[ November 04, 2002: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

I will come back and say something pedantic about the history of this discussion among C20 academic critics, but I don't want to spoil the mood MK has set just yet. One further thought: I think that most critical writers I admire are doing something like this too when they write:

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however i deal with it pragmatically in my studies, when i'm writing for myself it simply becomes an inescapable fact that contributes a great deal to the way in which i approach and react to my own writing.

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Though I'm behind in my dues for the Mutual Admiration Society, I love the ... generosity, or something, implicit in

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a wonderful book even if it is wrong.

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... from the invisible inside , where I could neither see nor want the very thing that I have always been scared to have revealed on the scanner, by analysis - radiology, echography, endocrinology, hematology - a crural vein expelled my blood outside that I thought beautiful once stored in that bottle under a label that I doubted could avoid confusion or misappropriation of the vintage, leaving me nothing more to do, the inside of my life exhibiting itself outside, expressing itself before my eyes, absolved without a gesture, dare I say of writing if I compare the pen to a syringe, and I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard weapon with which one must inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink before filtering the inscribable, playing the keyboard on the screen, whereas here, once the vein has been found, no more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the inside gives itself up and you can do as you like with it, it's me but I'm no longer there, for nothing, for nobody, diagnose the worst...

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I think that a narrator, as well as a poet, should never provide interpretations of his own work. A text is a machine conceived for eliciting interpretations. When one has a text to question, it is irrelevant to ask the author.

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Here's a good essay by Umberto Eco

skdadl, i'm waiting for further details on this intentional fallacy business....

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i haven't yet been initiated into the Mysteries of the Dissertation...how do you "semi-abandon" one?

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It's a bit like a child, MK. No matter how wayward and impossible they become -- even if they turn on you and utterly reject you -- it's difficult ever to completely let go, emotionally.