Clarity,
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Hil,
Your last post gave me goosebumps. That's the kind of stuff I've been racking my brain over all through writing TCB.
Fact is, The nice triangle or cone that narrows, that terminates somewhere in the past with a definite text isn't like that even for fairly well behaved pieces of literature.
Strong literature always has that other cone, broadening out into the past. All books dissolve into their influences, and other books, and hearsay, and lore as you follow them into their past.
It's just that with the Zhouyi the process is so much more visible and extreme than it is with Moby Dick or even Finnegans Wake. Its hard to even say where the Text is, much less the One True Interpretation.
And yet, seeking the One True Interpretation, following the narrowing cone, is good and needful procedure, and is exactly one side of the coin of literary studies.
I deeply believe that. I deeply believe in doing it, even though it is, from a very scrupulous and legitimate point of view, a fool's errand.
Trying to do readings that are very close, and technically correct, and yet still very personal, is dangerous stuff, and can lead to authoritarian humbug when it doesn't work; handwaving that is based on an argument from authority.
But it can lead to the heights of the critic's art when it does work, and actually produce something civilians might consider readable and useful.
with affection,
FC
Your last post gave me goosebumps. That's the kind of stuff I've been racking my brain over all through writing TCB.
Fact is, The nice triangle or cone that narrows, that terminates somewhere in the past with a definite text isn't like that even for fairly well behaved pieces of literature.
Strong literature always has that other cone, broadening out into the past. All books dissolve into their influences, and other books, and hearsay, and lore as you follow them into their past.
It's just that with the Zhouyi the process is so much more visible and extreme than it is with Moby Dick or even Finnegans Wake. Its hard to even say where the Text is, much less the One True Interpretation.
And yet, seeking the One True Interpretation, following the narrowing cone, is good and needful procedure, and is exactly one side of the coin of literary studies.
I deeply believe that. I deeply believe in doing it, even though it is, from a very scrupulous and legitimate point of view, a fool's errand.
Trying to do readings that are very close, and technically correct, and yet still very personal, is dangerous stuff, and can lead to authoritarian humbug when it doesn't work; handwaving that is based on an argument from authority.
But it can lead to the heights of the critic's art when it does work, and actually produce something civilians might consider readable and useful.
with affection,
FC