6/10/06 - English Literature - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

Limits of interpretation for reader and author.

Confessions has a double narrative structure. Problems of authorship and how it should be read.

Editor - prototext. Calvanist, incomplete.
Hogg is in his own book (editor asks the meaning of the text).
Robert - the 'author' ... Too many authors!
Reread first editor's narrative. Assumes objective view. So no interpretive force? Hogg asserts that any reading of a text rewrites it.

Robert deranged, religious. Different textual forms.

1687. Doubling, twin-like, double author. Edinburgh wide acclaim in news. Fight between brothers equates to fight between the theory of authorial intention versus subjective reading.

Narrative. "To tradition I must appeal", "All I can gather from the history of the family." Thinks he is a member of universal truth, reason, language. Normative authority. Enlightenment. But where does his evidence of family history come from? 'Limitable' history of families. When history runs out, tradition prevails - registers. All historical writing is narrative text. But how does one write about something that's in the past? Symbolic, grave digging is all historians do. Registers, folklore, gossip is all narrative. Can't clarify the ultimate truth of a text, whatever it is. See page 1.

Robert murders Blanchard who believes Bible should be flexible, dependent on reader.

Stylistic - Hogg's narrative paradoxically can be subjective to more than one interpretation.

Gil-Martin provides Hogg's view that when one becomes too rigid in religion, one may become in tandem with the devil (i.e. Gil-Martin).

See #1. Robert presented with shapeshifter - like a text with infinite meanings. Robert such a bad reader that when he is confronted with the shapeshifter he believes it is Peter of Russia, even though it could interpreted as the devil. Believing Robert is a bad judge makes the reader similar to him, because we have now made a definitive form for Robert.

All narrative is context-dependent.

#3. Editor breaks down. Must make generic decision so the writing must be subjective. Universal wisdom made to make generic judgement - allegory (which every narrative has some tendency towards, e.g. Robert - Calvanism, or Robert - mental breakdown). Spiritual parable? Diary? Dilemma couched explicitly. For universal wisdom, truth must be universal. Who are the witnesses? Are they reliable? What kind of people? Biographies? Subjective!

Desperation of author - led to grave rob. Corrupt text instead of objective truth. Hogg tells people looking for Robert's grave that they're looking in the wrong place. The point is, the meaning of the text is made by what the reader brings to bear. You can't ask the author how to read! (I.e. don't grave rob.)

There are better or worse interpretations depending on what you bring to bear on the text.

Paradox - book at first shunned then later thought genius, sophisticated. But then people thought Hogg was too colloquial to have written a masterpiece. Attributed to his friend J. Lockhart. Appears in book as graverobber.