Re: Intention verses Interpretation

[Grey@apple.com (Laura Grey)]

In article <8909072221.AA12741@uunet.uu.net> 
Love-Hounds-request@GAFFA.MIT.EDU writes:
> The professor often highlighted Biblical (mainly Christian)
> and Freudian interpretations of the books we studied, some of which
> were probably intended, but many of which I found very questionable.  My
> experiment was to try to apply those type of interpretations to a book
> which I saw no such interpretations, and believed the author had no such
> intentions either.
> 
> The book we were reading at the time was _Being There_, by Jerzy
> Kozinski (I may well be misspelling his name), which was also adapted
> into a great Peter Sellers movie.  First I read the book with the
> primary intention of enjoying it, and the secondary intention of
> keeping up with discussions of it in class, rather than the literature
> student's usual intention of interpreting a book.  Later I simply paged
> through it at random, and read from the point that I opened the book
> until I came across something that I could warp into either a reference
> to the Bible or Freud.

I, too, have had profs who want you to regurgitate instead of use your 
mind, and I know what it's like to have a prof who's fixated on something 
to the point where he or she sees the favorite theme being mirrored in 
every book, painting, song or thought.  (I had one who saw either the 
Virgin Mary or existentialism in everything.  Sartre and saints--what a 
combo!)

However, I do find it funny that you should feel that you had to make up 
religious symbolism in "Being There," since you and your prof aren't the 
first to find the many references to religion in it.  The most glaring 
example can be seen at the end of the movie version, when Chance literally 
walks on water.  (To make the message as clear as possible, he even 
plunges his umbrella into the water, watching it disappear below the 
surface while he stays afloat.)  The idea that the world is so hungry to 
see what it wants that it makes a messiah out of a mentally retarded man 
has appeared in many reviews of the book and of the movie.  So although 
you may have been clever enough to make up lots of connections that you 
didn't really see, Jerzy Kozinski seems to have been clever enough to 
write a novel in which many others did see the religious allusions.  Hey, 
let's drag Freud into this while we're at it:  the doctor would probably 
say that your subconscious DID see the religious significance.  Hmm, why 
don't you just lie down on this couch here and tell me about your 
childhood . . . .

-Laura Grey  : )  


_____

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Computer or anybody else--just me.