Nehamas’ concept of a ‘postulated
author’ clearly articulates a methodological necessity that I have always
instinctively believed to be true of reading. It is also applicable to any
field. Authors create works of art because they find there to be something fulfilling
or meaningful about doing it, but literary texts in particular cannot escape
from meaning-laden-ness simply by virtue of their use of language.
Poststructuralists argue that each reader ‘produces’ or creates their own
reading of a text as a subject, bringing to bear their own knowledge on each
text that they read. A good reading, however, does not simply ignore the
author’s intent, and in this I find Nehamas’ position slightly more optimistic
than the more realistic approach a theorist like Derrida takes, which buries
notions of ‘good reading’ deep inside of an explanation of how reading works
whether done well or poorly. Nehamas, however, advocates for a kind of reading
more aligned with understanding a
text than merely processing it and ‘producing’ it. He suggests that we should interpret
texts not simply as they could be
interpreted through the variety of connotations attached to a word, but as we
have reason to believe the author could reasonably have meant them to be interpreted. For that reason, he proposes a
postulated author, differentiating between the author as the one who gives the
work meaning in the reader’s mind, and the writer as the actual historical
figure. While information about the writer may contribute to our understanding
of the author, we are necessarily limited by not being that person—there is only so much about them and their
intentions that we can know.
However, an ideal
interpretation would encompass all the possible facets of a text—and so, while
Nehamas does not advocate making interpretations that are devoid of context
(not that I believe Derrida does, either), he does recognize that meaning may
arise based on historical developments subsequent to the writer’s initial
creation. Personal significance may be added into the reader’s experience, so
that different parts are salient because they remind the reader of some
personal event. But a work may gain meaning in other ways; some texts, for
example, may demonstrate something about feminism precisely for the ways in
which they leave it out; ancient texts may reflect conceptions of the ‘other’
that we have now problematized, and may thus teach us how we have moved on from
a certain point. Or, Sophocles, an example Nehamas uses, may have been
anticipated Freudian preoccupations in Oedipus.
But we would not say that Sophocles was a Freudian; we would say that both
Sophocles and Freud picked up on the same sorts of interests, and that Freud
elaborated on them in a different way than Sophocles, and has since become more
emblematic, in part thanks to his co-opting of Oedipus and Sophocles’ genius.
Kant introduces
genius to explain how art arises. The genius is a conduit for meaning and for
beautiful things to come into being. I think this makes a certain amount of
sense when we consider an issue like the focus both Sophocles and Freud
lavished on ‘illicit’ sexual desire. Both are considered with natural human
desires, but Sophocles manifested his concern in an artistic way that is often
considered a paragon of Greek tragedy. It is precisely because he is able to
evoke feeling and thought, because he is able to create something with some
aspect of beauty, that he is a
‘genius’; he and Freud share a similar interest, but Freud analyzes his in a
(somewhat) rational essay format. Sophocles captures something of nature in his
tragedy, as Freud does in his essay, but Sophocles’ is a kind of art. We would
be hard pressed, I think, to call Freud’s work ‘art,’ though we might call it
clever, or thought-provoking, or weird. It is fully in the realm of ideas;
Sophocles blurs the boundary and reaches that special space between thought and
feeling, the natural and the created, with which Kant seems (if I have begun to
understand him) to associate real art. The difficulty of putting that quality
into words is apparent; yet this is an important difference, for while Nehamas’
theory explains our attribution of meaning to different works and offers sound
advice for grounding our interpretations of any works, Kant requires us to
think about what distinguishes art from any work of thought—a very real
distinction that I think might escape our notice in our preoccupation with
Nehamas’—not genius, but intelligence.
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