Lots of nifty questions in there, Michael. And also assertions. Chris's scenario - if purloined - might have come from something earlier than Dan Brown, namely THE NAME OF THE ROSE. If I recall correctly the manuscript that turns up in a monastery is Aristotle's companion to his disquisition on tragedy: It's the long-lost Ari on comedy.
And STEVEN HERO is not the only instance of an extant earlier version of a masterpiece. Fitzgerald's TRIMALCHIO is now published; it is the version of THE GREAT GATSBY that FSF initially handed in to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner's. The facsimile edition now available shows FSF's own revisions in handwriting on the galleys. Less of a masterpiece but still estimable is John Fowles's THE MAGUS. He wrote and rewrote it for twelve years before its publication in 1966, and despite critical and commercial success, continued to rework it until its revised version, published in 1977. And, of course Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death. But such b unexplainedb rewriting of a work is different from issuing non-fiction statements of the intent/'meaning' of a work. You write: b You, Cheerskep, are concerned about: the artist's commentary on his own work in progress.b No, it doesn't have to be progress. The work could have been long finished. Concerning the rewriting of a work and publishing the revised version, you ask: b Where have we seen that in visual art? Rarely.b That doesn't seem true to me as someone who works in another genre. I've often envied visual artists who have been able to do loads of preliminary sketches, saving them, and eventually see them prized as b works of artb in their own right. b Does the development of themes and motifs as the series progresses constitute a critical commentary by the artist?b Chris drives himself deep into the woods by confused ontological questions about making b distinctionsb . Your question there should not be considered a query about an ontic category: b Is the development a member of the class of all critical commentaries?b Okay, so would I b call itb c.c., do I b think of itb as c.c.? Sometimes. There are changes prompted by a writer's conviction that he just made a mistake of one kind or another. That can be thought of as c.c. Other changes offer themselves because the writer's interests have evolved, or history has made a passage irrelevant or obscure. Revivals of fifty year old plays often change allusions to current events back then. I myself wouldn't call that critical commentary. b As for the larger question, why sequester or hide the artist's commentary? If the masses are misled, so be it. Typically, the "masses" don't understand the Riemann Hypothesis, or the difference between RNA and DNA, or why irradiating food is not harmful to people who handle or eat the food, or anything at all about Finnegan's Wake--so why withhold an artist's remarks?b Aw, shoot, Michael, I thought I took a useful shot at giving a number of reasons why I think there will be greater joy in this world if authors issued less commentary on their own works. I said: b b When a work is creative, made-up, rinsing out the ambiguities and multiple possible interpretations is often the wrong thing to do. Its effect is to dilute and to falsify.b Consider the young student who reads Othello and is told that Shakespeare stated, b Its meaning is that jealousy is bad.b b When I was working on the original play-descriptions for my playwright's website, I avoided asserting "meanings" or "themes" because 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. For me, the value of a play -- or movie, opera, symphony, dance -- is in the multi-rung ladder itself, the story and its effects at each rung, including the view from the top. b If the rungs can evoke tensions, laughter, gasps, rills of deep assent, a playwright should leave it to the viewers to conjure their own "meanings and themes". Ideally, a play will make viewers' minds throng with new notions, but the notions will be as various as the viewers' histories and receiving apparatuses. There is, in the end, no THE "meaning" of any work of art.b I repeat that I wouldn't burn a newly found Shakespeare explication of HAMLET (which, I've conveyed, I'm fairly sure he'd never write), and I know I'd find it interesting, but in the end I fear it would restrict my joy in that play. On Dec 21, 2009, at 2:33 PM, [email protected] wrote: > Yeah, it has the form of a dilemma, but there's no question in my mind: I > wouldn't burn the pages. We despise old Jock Murray for burning Byron's > memoir/diary; we're grateful that Max Brod disobeyed Kafka's dying wish that > all > he'd written should be burned. I wouldn't begin to feel I had the right to > impose my judgment on all those Shakespeare-lovers who would want WS's > explications, misguided though I myself might think they are -- misguided in > their > anticipation of happy and durable joy from reading them.
