An Odd Connection
Austin Bay, in discussing the Nazi Nobel writer, begins by channeling Jeff Goldstein’s semiotics post-lectures.
Update: I tried to be too clever in my Goldstein link. Hit the main page and put “semiotics” in the search box; you’ll get all sorts of interesting arguments.
4 Responses to “An Odd Connection”
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August 18th, 2006 at 9:01 am
Thanks for the link–great stuff! Hope you & yours are doing well and having a great summer!
August 18th, 2006 at 1:06 pm
So if we found something obnoxious in Austin Bay’s past and he hadn’t revealed it, would that negate his criticism of Grass? I found his criticism of Grass to be incisive and trenchant….just as I have found Grass’s criticisms to which Bay refers.
Yes, we live in glass houses; no, none of us are without sin; yes, we would all be better off removing the logs from our own eyes but no cliche’ ipso facto invalidates our judgements, hypocritical they may well be.
August 19th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
John,
That’s a rather strong protest. (And I just found out by clicking that the link is broken. I’ll fix it…there. All better. Sorta.)
The precise “something obnoxious” revealed by Günter Grass is very much the same subject as the things that Grass wrote about. So your example using Bay would necessarily be a very particular “something obnoxious” that directly contradicted the significant theme in his work to make the analogy effective. I think Bay’s not wrong about an essential and calculated concealment.
Yes, of course you can have a work of truth come from the mouth of the devil. Yes, humans are human and contain the echoes of failures within their work.
But if I’m going to take the time to read a book, perhaps I might not wish to pick Grass’; conversely, if I do read something of Grass’ given this information I will think a little harder about why this guy is telling me this thing in this book.
Which is itself is an interesting caveat to meaning. If I’m going to read a work and get something from it, the author means ‘x’ and I still might not get ‘x’ because of what I bring to the reading. Seems to me that some dude who wrote “blargh” might mean something different from a Waffen-SS guy who wrote “blargh”-what was the intention of the author?
August 20th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Chap,
We’re agreed on all the fundamentals. As to the “caveat to meaning”, absolutely – -which is why the first thing I want to do with any author, policymaker, politician, et al’s statements is to run them through some sort of a an economic/marxist, Freudian, Foucaultian filter as part of my broader analysis. What master, god, ghost, or skeleton in the closet is being served?