Re: JCO: Re: Black Water

>
>When writers like JCO create, do you think they have these greater themes and deep symbolisms in mind, or are they simply writing a good story? Is it we the readers who find meaning in the story?
>

I have no doubt that JCO carefully plans the symbolic and thematic elements of her novels, but it is possible to go overboard in extracting them. JCO once wrote, in regards to a seminar on her work:

"Criticism ... is more an expression of the critic's mind than it is a description of the work of art itself. Even when allusions are playful and obvious, as in one of my novels--in which Alice in Wonderland, one of the novels of my childhood, figured heavily and deliberately--it is possible for the narrow, grimly rigid critic to overlook them, and snatch up other "allusions" which, in fact, do not exist. I was also amused and disturbed to see, in the same paper, dogged tracings of proper names back to their OE and IE roots, where of course they "mean" something--as what word does not?--when I had, deliberately, chosen names from a Detroit telephone directory in order not to choose symbolic, meaning-laden names. "

Randy

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