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**Wluwsdtn** · 01-11-2010, 07:02 PM

Many parts of this essay are germane to the discussion at hand
http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=6241

I don't think so. I'm only halfway through reading it, but reading parts of it and your post, it looks like we're going in many directions here. Firstly, as I see it, this is not particularly about the "the author is dead" movement. (Where I come from, not at all.) I'm not even familiar with it, nor have read Roland Barthes's related essay. (It's ironic that even some of the naysayers of the excesses of postmodernism tend to attribute many older ideas to the movement.) Why, long before Barthes, D. H. Lawrence said, "never trust the teller, trust the tale."

I think many of your concerns, if not all, are related to the 'negation' of an artist's vision/work by moving the focus on the reader and thus rendering several possible readings, many of which might not have anything at all to do with the work. But there's a lot of difference between this and what we're discussing. Just because I do "not trust the teller," it doesn't in any way mean that I'm inclined to trust the 'democracy' of readers. The best evidence is in the work itself. Of course, this means there's no central consensus on the said work, which is as it should be.

As I said before, to me, the qualities that spill on an artist's work without his/her being conscious of it are too significant to be disregarded or even treated as any less praiseworthy. In Jeyamohan-speak, the artist's nuNNuNarvu is very crucial. A good artist makes certain leaps to challenge oneself (including those purely concerned with form) without even being aware of it. If a reader asked, "why did you do it?" the writer might say, "I don't know, it just happened." But that's not reason enough to be backhanded in one's praise, or worse, take the writer's response at face value and believe that it's simply incidental.

01-11-2010, 07:02 PM	#24
Wluwsdtn Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 596 Senior Member	Many parts of this essay are germane to the discussion at hand http://www.jeyamohan.in/?p=6241 I don't think so. I'm only halfway through reading it, but reading parts of it and your post, it looks like we're going in many directions here. Firstly, as I see it, this is not particularly about the "the author is dead" movement. (Where I come from, not at all.) I'm not even familiar with it, nor have read Roland Barthes's related essay. (It's ironic that even some of the naysayers of the excesses of postmodernism tend to attribute many older ideas to the movement.) Why, long before Barthes, D. H. Lawrence said, "never trust the teller, trust the tale." I think many of your concerns, if not all, are related to the 'negation' of an artist's vision/work by moving the focus on the reader and thus rendering several possible readings, many of which might not have anything at all to do with the work. But there's a lot of difference between this and what we're discussing. Just because I do "not trust the teller," it doesn't in any way mean that I'm inclined to trust the 'democracy' of readers. The best evidence is in the work itself. Of course, this means there's no central consensus on the said work, which is as it should be. As I said before, to me, the qualities that spill on an artist's work without his/her being conscious of it are too significant to be disregarded or even treated as any less praiseworthy. In Jeyamohan-speak, the artist's nuNNuNarvu is very crucial. A good artist makes certain leaps to challenge oneself (including those purely concerned with form) without even being aware of it. If a reader asked, "why did you do it?" the writer might say, "I don't know, it just happened." But that's not reason enough to be backhanded in one's praise, or worse, take the writer's response at face value and believe that it's simply incidental.
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