From: sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov (Sharon Hopkins)
Subject: Re: john wesley hardin
Keywords: was a friend to the poor
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA)
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 1992 19:34:22 GMT

In article <1992Apr16.100208.29690@hemlock.cray.com> n2412@cray.com (Joe Green) writes:
>In article <22595@alice.att.com> rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin) writes:
>>
>>The stuff on Bloom came from an earlier CI article by Cavell. v15 n3
>>I put it in without enough transition, I wanted to show the sort
>>of analysis, that strikes me as very beautiful, that philosophizing
>>in Cavell's tradition is capable of; in particular that it can find
>>a silenced voice.
>
>The difference is that Cavell derives some comfort from this because
>he somehow conceives of the work as an autonomous object with these
>counter-meanings already inscribed within it.  The work gestures
>its own deconstruction.  The difference seems to be what is emphasized.
>Cavell calls attention to the metaphysical object and is comforted
>that these other meanings are THERE.  Feminism emphasizes the
>struggle necessary to engender the suspicion that the work offers
>itself up to counter-interpretation and insists on examining
>the actual effect of the work on readers, on the audience.  Who is
>it exactly that sees or feels that the work actually provides
>a way to resist its own ideology?  How did they get THERE?

I once watched my parents watching "Honeymooners" reruns.  I'd never seen
the show before, neither had my mom, though my step-dad was familiar with it.
One of those holiday all-day marathons, the tv providing background to
making potato salad and all that.  Brother and sister watching, too.

To my dad, the Gleason character was sympathetic, straight-forward; the
show comic but not satiric.  Husband struggling with uncompliant wife for
mastery of his own home.  Heroic.

To my mom, the show is satire:  she saw the wife running the show; the
husband cute, often obnoxious, basically ineffectual -- loved, therefore to
be humored.  The wife seen as protagonist.

What was the intended ideology?

-- On another tack:

>Cavell calls attention to the metaphysical object and is comforted
>that these other meanings are THERE.  Feminism emphasizes the
>struggle necessary to engender the suspicion that the work offers
>itself up to counter-interpretation and insists on examining
>the actual effect of the work on readers, on the audience.  Who is
>it exactly that sees or feels that the work actually provides
>a way to resist its own ideology?  How did they get THERE?

My question:  what can I, as writer, do to *get* them there?

Satire is tricky, or irony, producing enough suspicion to cause
counter-interpretation.  An example, first posted some longish while back:

	    Playing Rough

	    I like it when you smile that way,
	    with teeth displayed as if to say
	    it's sexy when I look at you
	    through eyes you've colored black and blue.

	    When friends say this is sick, or wrong,
	    that I'm too meek, or you're too strong,
	    I tell them loving *should* be tough:
	    I guess I'm into playing rough.

I'm fairly sure it's working in the first stanza, but the second is weak,
and reduces suspicion.  The first stanza gives a grue to like-minded folks
(with author, not narrator), the second confusion.

Perhaps this works better:

		    Two, to One:

	Is this too great a step for you to take,
	to share with two what you might grant to one,
	that we as three these new desires might slake
	and still retain what two have once begun?
	Our love burns hot; we two would have you quench
	with water sweet our swift consuming fire,
	though some will say such love would raise a stench
	to very heaven, rousing God's cold ire.
	You surely do not fear that distant wrath,
	or tremble at their god's unspoken name;
	already you have started on the path
	that leads to freedom, have renounced their flame.
	    The two of us are incomplete alone;
	    come now and join us, as our very own.

Hissing "s"s, strong consonants (c as k, hard g, b, d), over-exagerration
used in an attempt to suggest the writer mocks the narrators voice.  (This
poem an experiment, an exercise if you will, in response to the challenge
of something written by someone else -- presented here for commentary on
technique, not content.)  Possibly too obscure to succeed at anything, but
an attempt at a kind of poetic lie.

Context may be the necessary element:  people see me such and such a way,
read the writings I produce, formulate an interpretive framework.  Work not
fitting that framework is interpreted as intentionally false, as meant
to be taken as contrary to the expressed idea.

I've done some experimentation along these lines, but with only limited
success.  Are others working on this?

--Sharon Hopkins
  sharon@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov