The harm of author commentary

[cheerskep]

Chris asks:
bWouldn't it be nice if
Shakespear could have done the same thing, with a line-by-line commentary
when
Lear or the Tempest were finally released on   DVD?b

Readers should be helped by a writer to "think about" or "understand"
what's he's written when the piece is non-fiction. When I say bto understand
non-fictionb the notion I want to convey is this: bto replicate in your
mind
the notion the writer had in mindb. (I used to say the first requirement in
a
non-fiction editor is the ability to see when something is not clear.)

But to Chris's query I'd say no, emphatically. We're lucky that Shakespeare
was never subjected to media interviewers attempting to get him to
bexplainb
 his plays.

I have a playwright's website that I've just finished revising, and good
part of it tries to address the core of Chris's assumption:

bWhen 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.

bWhen I was working on the original play-descriptions for this 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.

bIf 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

In other words, it's not only unwise for the writer to try to bexplainb
his works; it entails a falsehood by assuming that what the creator had in
mind is somehow bTHE meaningb. The most fundamental error that has
prevailed
in philosophy of language was first put forth by Gottlob Frege when he
started the whole sub-division of philosophy back in 1892.

The excerpt below is from Wikipedia. As you read it, notice how it
obliviously takes for granted the existence of two entities - a phrase's
'sense' and
its 'referent' - and two activities -- 'to mean' and 'to refer to'.

My position is that a word/phrase does not DO anything. It does not
bhaveb
, it does not bmeanb, it does not breferb. Words are the occasion for
an
activity - but the activity is by the contemplating mind; the word is inert.
The activity is that of associating. None of the words in this sentence
would be said to bmeanb anything to an Andean shepherd. The alleged
explanation
for that is that the shepherd has never been btaughtb the bmeaningb.

But at base, that last sentence is asserting that it isn't that the word b
hasb a bmeaningb; it's simply that the shepherd has never seen the word
juxtaposed to a notion (feeling, image, bideab) so that he thereafter
associates the word and the notion.

So, though I'm sure anything Shakespeare might say about what was on his
mind as he wrote 'Lear' or 'he Tempest' would be extremely interesting, the
ultimate effect would, on balance, be diminishing. It would fall on the ears
of the masses of intellectuals who unquestioningly and mistakenly are
dedicated to uncovering THE bmeaning/sense/referentb that the likes of
'The
Tempest' allegedly bmeans/refers tob. Many such people are on the hunt for
bThe
correct interpretationb - i.e. the correct statement of its bmeaningb -
and
they will seize on an author's revelation of what he had in mind as ne
cessarily being identical to the work's meaning - and say all other reactions
are
wrong.

(Literati are especially fond of absolute statements - which inevitably
entail erroneous reifications. Perhaps the most memorable opening line of any
book of literary criticism is this one from F.R. Leavis's THE GREAT
TRADITION: bThe great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry
James,
and Joseph Conrad.b)

But then, because Shakespeare strikes me as having been as intelligent as
any playwright who ever lived, I suspect he'd have avoided all talk of bTHE
meaning ofb any of his plays.

bThe distinction between b& sense and reference was an innovation of the
German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in his 1892 paper Cber
Sinn
und Bedeutung (On Sense and Reference), which is still widely read today.
According to Frege, sense and reference are two different aspects of the
meaning of at least some kinds of terms b&. Roughly, a term's reference is
the
object it refers to and its sense is the way in which it refers to that
object.

Frege's distinction rejects a view put forward by John Stuart Mill,
according to which a proper name has no meaning above and beyond the object to
which it refers (its referent or reference). That is, the word "Aristotle"
just
means Aristotle, that person, and no more. It does not mean "The writer of
De Anima."