"Blow Mine to Bits: No Text Speaks for Me"

Forum235 FROM: Colbert I. Nepaulsingh, University at Albany, SUNY "Blow Mine to Bits: No Text Speaks for Me" Dear Professor Dubois: "When I disagree with learned scholars ... I may be thought to sound more like an impertinent upstart than a beginner. Let me step out of my text -in parentheses, as it were- to try to explain the difference between my own attitude to all critics cited and what is expressed in this book. As I state in chapter 4, the most important lesson I have learned in literary criticism is that all critics must be treated seriously; invalid interpretations help foster valid progress to consensus. Wherever it states disagreement, my text almost always conveniently omits the wider area of agreement upon which the apparent difference of opinion is based. This is especially true about those critics from whom I have learned most, some ofwhom I name here." (Nepaulsingh 1986, 10) "I am not interested ever in defending my texts; they will defend themselves or die ... I am interested, passionately (not objectively, but intersubjectively) , in noting changes in the reactions to texts like mine, especially when those changes help me understand the tensions between monocultural and multicultural approaches to literary criticism." (Nepaulsingh 1999, 230) "I take pleasure in dismanding my own texts." (Nepaulsingh 1995, 9) "I ... treat ... texts, as far as possible, as equals, and engage them in intersubjective dialogue in which there [are] two subjects , not a perceptive critic as subject and an antiquated petrified text as object." (Nepaulsingh 1986, 5) Z4 corónica 29.1 (Fall, 2000): 235-237 236La corónica 29. 1 , 2000 "The first requirement for breaking out ofa monocultural mode ofreading and writing, it seems to me, is the capacity to distance oneself at great length from one's own texts; authors do not become totally without responsibility for what they write, but rather accept as fact that whatever one writes speaks for itself and only to a severely limited extent for its author." (Nepaulsingh 1995, 7-8) "Readers fall along a wide spectrum ranging from those who seek to bully or torture the text like inquisitors hankering after the facts, to those who enter the text with intersubjective respect; many points along the spectrum might at once be reflected in the same reader. Three types of readers move along this spectrum : those who let the text speak for the author; ... those who let the text speak for [the narrator] who purports to be its author ; and those who let the text speak for itself. Again, countless variations ofthese three ways ofreading can be found in a single reader." (Nepaulsingh 1995, 125) "An optimum reading enters a text with respect and engages it in intersubjective dialogue, the kind of dialogue that says, 'All right, I see what you are doing, and I can do that too, but I don't have to be taken in by you or to relinquish my self, my subjectivity , entirely to your point ofview.' This relaxed engagement entices both subjects to be more self-revealing, to yield more oftheir secrets to each other than they would yield to someone or some other text that approached them with the disarming, ultimately false promise ofunbiased objectivity. The written interpretation that results from such a reading does not speak for the critic, it speaks for itself; the critic remains too complex, as a human being , to be contained by any or all of his or her texts. Critics who read like this remain significandy free, ifwe choose, to denounce those texts, ours and others, whenever they attempt to imprison us in their meaning. Solipsism, on the other hand, is more like falling in love with one's own texts, obliging oneself to defend its critical objectivity forever, for shame of having committed a minor error or major gaffe. With intersubjectivity, errors and gaffes are unembarrassingly welcome invitations to valid interpretation , significant oversights and undersights that lead to meaningful insights." (Nepaulsingh 1995, 12) Forum237 Works Cited Nepaulsingh, Colbert I. Towards a History ofLiterary Composition in Medieval Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1986. ------. Apples ofGold in Filigrees ofSilver:Jewish Writing in the Eye of the Spanish Inquisition. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1995...