SHAKSPER 2001: Re: Subtext

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 12/27/01 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.2900  Thursday, 27 December 2001

From:           W. L. Godshalk <godshawl@email.uc.edu>
Date:           Sunday, 23 Dec 2001 18:32:29 -0500
Subject: 12.2884 Re: Subtext
Comment:        Re: SHK 12.2884 Re: Subtext

Both Martin Steward and Clifford Stetner respond to my comments from a
Derridian position.  Some years ago, Walker Percy suggested that when
Jaques Derrida orders pizza for dinner, he expects to get pizza for
dinner, not infinite deferral of meaning or a plate with a black hole in
the middle. (Actually I made most of that up, though Percy did comment
similarly on deconstruction.)

Martin suggests that the word “overlook” in Henry V, 2.4.90, is a “gap”
in the text because it can mean two different things: look over or
ignore.  I think the metaphor -- gap -- is misleading.  The fact that
Martin finds the word “overlook” ambiguous does not indicate that there
is “something missing,” i.e., a gap, in the text. The ambiguity is
Martin’s interpretation, not inherent in the text.  Were it inherent in
the text, he would not have to use the OED to check available meanings
of “overlook.”

Clifford writes, “An example of a gap in text identified by Derrida is
the absence of various terms for spirit in Heidegger. It amounts to a
gap because spirit, according to Derrida, is Heidegger’s theme, and he
is merely attempting to raise it to a valorized and unassailable
position by placing it under erasure. It is in replacing what the author
has intentionally erased, by showing that what is intentionally unsaid
is in fact said on another level, that we move to interpretation beyond
intentionality.”

I would argue that Derrida’s interpretation does not prove in any way
that there is a “gap in the text.”  Derrida infers that there is a gap.
There are many things that Heidegger does not mention in his
philosophical writing.  One might argue that Heidegger does not mention
spirit because this is precisely what does not interest him.  But if
Heidegger intentionally does not mention or allude to spirit, how can
Derrida move to “interpretation beyond intentionality” by inferring that
“what is intentionally unsaid is in fact said on another level”?  This
interpretation is all about authorial intention and the traces of that
intention that Derrida finds in the text. Is this present absence or
absent presence?

Regarding interpretation and misinterpretation, Clifford writes,

>If we think we detect signs
>of allegory in a Renaissance text, reading it as an allegory of the
>French Revolution is necessarily a misinterpretation because the
>producer(s) of the text (even unconsciously) could not have intended it.
>A careful study of historical and artistic context limits the range of
>valid interpretations which may be multiple, but are not infinite and
>which reside only in the minds of author and reader, not “in the text.”

“Valid interpretation” is defined by one’s discourse community or even
by one’s self.  I can imagine a discourse community, one founded on
radical reader-response and presentist ideas, that would allow such an
allegorical reading. I might call it the Pierre Menard reading of the
text.  Stanley Fish might call it an Eskimo reading.

Regarding authorial "intention" allow me the following fantasy:

The moving wave does write,
And having writ, rolls on.

Let’s put case that I am walking along a beach and find a wave writing
this lines.  As I recall, the wave is writing usually a poem by
Wordsworth, but this wave is parodying Fitzgerald.  Allow me to further
assume that waves do not have intention.  The question is: how do I read
an unintentional poem, a truly found poem?  I would read it -- I assert
-- the same way I read a poem written by a poet with agency and
intention. After all, I can never be sure what intentions were in
Shakespeare’s conscious and unconscious mind as he wrote Hamlet.  I have
to deal with what’s there, not with what Shakespeare thought about as he
wrote and rewrote the script.

My questions about the “universal book” seem to have been red herrings.
My point is that we humans interpret the cosmos with the same equipment
that we use to interpret Hamlet, and we find ambiguities in both.  I
would not call these ambiguities “gaps.”  Or if they are “gaps,” they
are gaps in our brains, not in the text or the fabric of the universe.

Yours, Bill Godshalk

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