Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

44 reframing latin america
graph 2.1
literary theory. From an essentialist approach, an author is thought to write
the words of his or her novel on the page and to imbue specifi c meaning into
them. According to this model, authorial intent exists.
According to the essentialist view, the author writes the text, consciously
placing words and meaning onto the page, the reader receives
these words, and then tries to decipher the author’s inhered meaning (see
Graph 2.1). It is the job of the reader to get as close to the original intent of
the author as possible (like a scholarly Sherlock Holmes, as in our analogy).
Whoever accomplishes this task best is recognized as possessing the most
accurate interpretation of the work. Likewise, the best authors are regarded
as those who have the best or deepest meanings within their texts. They
are honored with Nobel Prizes and other literary awards. Naturally, there
is intense debate among modernist critics as to which authors are best or
which readers possess the most accurate interpretation. Some believe that
Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges was the greatest writer who ever lived;
others think his work is unnecessarily complex and insular trash. But all
such debate is done in the name of discovering ontological truth.
Semiotics contends that meaning is constantly shifting; thus, it is impossible
for the author to attach specifi c signifi eds to signifi ers. Authors
do not fi x meaning into the words they write. If they did, the meaning of
a text would remain static across distinct eras and cultures. But this is a
false assumption because some books are banned in some countries and
not in others. Consider the story “Pierre Menard: Author of The Quixote”
by Borges. The narrator of the story considers Menard’s unfi nished version
of Don Quixote (the famous novel written by Cervantes in roughly 1600)
to be better than the original, even though Menard’s is an exact, line-byline
duplicate of portions of the novel. The narrator’s justifi cation for this
seemingly ludicrous position is that Menard, a twentieth-century French
writer, immersed himself in sixteenth-century Spanish language, politics,
and culture in order to write the copy. In other words, he claims that the
Don Quixote written by Cervantes becomes “infi nitely richer” when read
through the fi lter of more than three centuries of intervening history. The
story by Borges speaks to the “Death of the Author” essay by Barthes, in