Damn -- William again gets off another excellent phrasing when he says: > It's not my real opinion that anything material can literally acquire > subjective attributes. > Once, at a gathering, the very articulate Whistler gave a talk and got off a good bit. Wilde, a rival at coming up with prizable phrasings, said, "Very good, James, I wish I'd said that." To which Whistler replied, "Don't worry, Oscar, you will."
William goes on: > "most folks expect the artist to embody his work with meanings, it's > assumed that artworks should be "unpacked" to find those meanings when in > fact > it's really a matter of how much of their subjectivity can be pretended to be > packed in, as if it really could." > My view is that a work (even a word) "occasions" notion, in this sense: The the mind of the contemplator , by virtue of his inventory of associations with the word, plus his receiving appartus, will, as he contemplates, summon up the notions he may call "The meaning for him". I now have a website. I recently revised it. On the "Home page" I now -- probably inadvisedly -- get very ruminative and say: "The original "About the Plays" folder on this site had three descriptions of the plays that were almost as facts-only as a police blotter. I wrote those descriptions, and they were light on asserting "meanings" or "themes", because I think pronouncements like that restrict a work's apparent scope, and hobble viewers' imaginations. Talk of its "meaning" tends to suggest the play is merely a useful ladder leading up to the real value: a non-fiction lesson. The real value of a play or novel or movie for me is in the multi-rung ladder itself, the story and its effects at each rung, just as it is in an opera or symphony. "If the rungs can evoke tensions, laughter, gasps, rills of deep assent, a playwright should leave it to the viewers to find their own meanings and themes -- and they will be as various as the viewers' histories and receiving apparatuses. There is, in the end, no "the" meaning of any work of art." When William talks of seeking "meanlessness" in his works, My reading is not that he doesn't want his audience to think/feel a thing. I presume he wants them to feel one hell of a lot. > ************** You're invited to Hollywood's biggest party: Get Oscars updates, red carpet pics and more at Moviefone. (http://movies.aol.com/oscars-academy-awards?ncid=emlcntusmovi00000001)
