A writer knows his work like a pig knows bacon

[MarlowBunny]

Quote a poster named jhwells:

"I once enrolled in an English 101 type class with a bunch of freshman. During one of our class discussions several of the students became quite insistent that we talk about 'what the author meant,' per their previous high school English classes.

The professor's only retort was 'A writer knows his work like a pig knows bacon.' I have never heard the field of literary analysis better summarized."

 

[Stella_Omega]

Soundbites are so much fun, aren't they!

 

[sr71plt]

I've found that when an author has written something really, really good, he/she can be very surprised at the legitimate meanings readers get out of the work that the author didn't know could be gotten out of it. Readers come to a work with their own experience and needs and agendas that are completely different from the author's. If the author is able to write something that lets readers use the work as a personal mirror, that is a good thing in terms of high-quality writing.

Also, does this phrase mean that a pig knows bacon or not? Because, well, I don't think pigs have a clue about bacon. So, was the professor saying the same thing as I posted above--and do you understand that to be his meaning?

 

[MarlowBunny]

I think it means the following:

Bacon is an internal part of the pig. The pig "is" bacon but doesn't think of itself as "only bacon" or even "part bacon." The pig knows the whole pig.

A writer "is" his story but doesn't think of himself as "only the story" or even "partly the story." The author knows the whole author.

Readers, on the other hand, only know the story and are prone to make unfounded assumptions. If you didn't know anything about a pig except that bacon comes from pigs, what unfounded assumptions would you make?

Literary analysis about meaning, themes, symbolism, etc. can be subject to unfounded assumptions due to partial information. That doesn't mean the analysis is valueless though.

Of course, all of that is my unfounded assumption. I don't know what the professor meant.

 

[vixenfurry]

I think it means the following:

Bacon is an internal part of the pig. The pig "is" bacon but doesn't think of itself as "only bacon" or even "part bacon." The pig knows the whole pig.

A writer "is" his story but doesn't think of himself as "only the story" or even "partly the story." The author knows the whole author.

Readers, on the other hand, only know the story and are prone to make unfounded assumptions. If you didn't know anything about a pig except that bacon comes from pigs, what unfounded assumptions would you make?

Literary analysis about meaning, themes, symbolism, etc. can be subject to unfounded assumptions due to partial information. That doesn't mean the analysis is valueless though.

Of course, all of that is my unfounded assumption. I don't know what the professor meant.

it is a good unfounded assumption though. lol

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I think it means the following:

Bacon is an internal part of the pig. The pig "is" bacon but doesn't think of itself as "only bacon" or even "part bacon." The pig knows the whole pig.

A writer "is" his story but doesn't think of himself as "only the story" or even "partly the story." The author knows the whole author.

Readers, on the other hand, only know the story and are prone to make unfounded assumptions. If you didn't know anything about a pig except that bacon comes from pigs, what unfounded assumptions would you make?

Literary analysis about meaning, themes, symbolism, etc. can be subject to unfounded assumptions due to partial information. That doesn't mean the analysis is valueless though.

Of course, all of that is my unfounded assumption. I don't know what the professor meant.

Actually, bacon comes from the wall of the belly of the pig, which is on the outside of the pig. Oops.

 

[sr71plt]

Actually, bacon comes from the wall of the belly of the pig, which is on the outside of the pig. Oops.

Tilt. The outside of a pig is covered with skin, not bacon. Bacon isn't pig skin.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Tilt. The outside of a pig is covered with skin, not bacon. Bacon isn't pig skin.

Although you are a dumbass, the skin is the outside of the bacon and bacon is outside in relation to say the chitterlings and liver. Therefore the bacon is not an internal part of the pig, but a covering the pig enjoys to keep his insides from becoming outsides.

And again you place meaning to a post that only you could, you contrary bastard.

 

[sr71plt]

Although you are a dumbass, the skin is the outside of the bacon and bacon is outside in relation to say the chitterlings and liver. Therefore the bacon is not an internal part of the pig, but a covering the pig enjoys to keep his insides from becoming outsides.

And again you place meaning to a post that only you could, you contrary bastard.

You were simply wrong. We all know what "outside" means.

As for being the only one here who knows what's outside the pig as opposed to inside it, anyone else here think the bacon is on the outside of the pig?

 

[Zeb_Carter]

You were simply wrong. We all know what "outside" means.

As for being the only one here who knows what's outside the pig as opposed to inside it, anyone else here think the bacon is on the outside of the pig?

and you're still an asshole. now if you were just an ass, we might be able to fix that, but you can't fix assholes.

 

[sr71plt]

and you're still an asshole. now if you were just an ass, we might be able to fix that, but you can't fix assholes.

Let's hold off on assessing that until someone else agrees with you that the bacon is on the outside of the pig (which you made a point of asserting to another poster), shall we?

 

[Verdad]

I think this is one of those cases that call for some applied quantum hermeneutics.

 

[vrosej10]

Quote a poster named jhwells:

"I once enrolled in an English 101 type class with a bunch of freshman. During one of our class discussions several of the students became quite insistent that we talk about 'what the author meant,' per their previous high school English classes.

The professor's only retort was 'A writer knows his work like a pig knows bacon.' I have never heard the field of literary analysis better summarized."

Meaning in writing emerges from the interaction of reader and text thusly no two interpretations are going to be the same and pat definitions of what a work means are fairly useless. I don't know why they continue to teach crap literary method to high school students only to have to unteach them at college.

 

[Stella_Omega]

I think this is one of those cases that call for some applied quantum hermeneutics.

I'd like mine with lettuce and tomato, on toasted whole wheat, please.

 

[oggbashan]

I liked the Asimov short story about bringing Shakespeare to the 20th Century in a time machine, and the enrolling him in a course on Shakespeare's work.

Shakespeare failed the course saying "They (the teachers) could wring Noah's Flood from a damp clout."

Og

 

[vrosej10]

I liked the Asimov short story about bringing Shakespeare to the 20th Century in a time machine, and the enrolling him in a course on Shakespeare's work.

Shakespeare failed the course saying "They (the teachers) could wring Noah's Flood from a damp clout."

Og

Yep, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I frankly think the reader response thing makes more sense. All meaning is subjective after all.

 

[TxRad]

Bacon? Most writers I know are more ham than bacon.

 

[hottchic]

I've found that when an author has written something really, really good, he/she can be very surprised at the legitimate meanings readers get out of the work that the author didn't know could be gotten out of it. Readers come to a work with their own experience and needs and agendas that are completely different from the author's. If the author is able to write something that lets readers use the work as a personal mirror, that is a good thing in terms of high-quality writing.

Also, does this phrase mean that a pig knows bacon or not? Because, well, I don't think pigs have a clue about bacon. So, was the professor saying the same thing as I posted above--and do you understand that to be his meaning?

I think there is something in this, and also Marlow's idea.

The author knows the whole author and much more of his/her thinking than is available through the story, and yet it is likely that the author does not know him/her self completely and therefore there maybe some insight about the author through his/her work which is not necessarily picked up by the author.

The reader coming from a different background and set of experiences has enough identification to resonate with the story but has a different take than the author and possibly a take that could teach the author something about him/her self that he/she was not aware of.

An easy way to illistrate this is simply to consider that you are not aware of what your voice actually sounds like until you have heard your own voice played back to you.

In the same way a pig has no idea what it tastes like until somebody feeds it pig flesh.

 

[ishtat]

Actually, bacon comes from the wall of the belly of the pig . Oops.

Only in the USA and Canada Zeb. Everywhere else in the world it also includes the 'back' bacon in a long rasher. American Hogs are also fed much more on Corn (maize), and are killed at a heavier weight than European baconers, which are killed at about 7 to 8 months of age and are generally much leaner than their American cousins.

 

[hottchic]

PS: In my own case perhaps the main reason for writing is for what I learn about who I am.

 

[3113]

Literary analysis about meaning, themes, symbolism, etc. can be subject to unfounded assumptions due to partial information..

Ironic that you just analyzed that phrase. Clearly literary analysis has some use or else you wouldn't have known how to discuss the phrase I'm in agreement with SR7. Writers cough up things onto the page and think they know them--but as pointed out about hearing your own voice, you don't really know it until others have a look and give you an outsider view, rather than only what you know on the inside. If we knew what we wrote so well that literary analysis was pointless, then we writers wouldn't need to write it down and have others consume it.

Communication is communication. And were I the teacher, i would happily encourage students to analyze to their hearts content. If for no other reason than that it means they read the story--really read it, rather than skimmed it. Any English teacher should be delighted if students did that. What kind of dumbass teacher doesn't want his student discussing what they read?

 

[Tio_Narratore]

Heard an interesting interview with Umberto Eco a few years ago. He was challenged about the question of an author's intentions in writing a tale. Eco agreed that the author's meanings were of import, but only if you wanted to perform what the author wrote.

For readers, Eco proposed, the story is a "pre-text," in two meanings of the word. We all, when we read, make the author's story the start or basis of our own version of it. Hence, the author's text is a pretext - an excuse - for us to write our own, and at the same time, a pre-text - the text that pcrecedes and informs our own.

As for the literary critics and analysts, they fall into the same situation. And Claude Levi-Strauss anticipated that issue back in his first essay on Structuralism, where his analysis of the Oedipus myth adressed Freud's Oedipus as one variant of the tale itself, and where Levi-Strauss concluded that his own analysis was just another version of the story, and one that would have to be addressed by a future analyst of the Oedipus tale(s).

If it is the case, as Levi-Strauss also proposed, that people do not write myths, myths write themselves out in the minds of people, then a writer likely knows his work like a pig knows bacon.

But those who take what they think a tale means as being the "truth," should read the warning of Eco's "Foucault's Pendulum:" you may just get what you think.

 

[sr71plt]

This reminds me of an example I experienced from another medium--theater. I directed and designed the sets for a production of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie in Bangkok. We had the sets constructed professionally. The set included a fire escape off to the side outside the window of the apartment, where the character Tom delivers his soliloquies about looking for more in life than his environment was delivering.

The set wasn't delivered until the dress rehearsal and the fire escape section was so out of proportion that it jutted out into the audience. Too late to do anything about it, we just made do with it.

All of the reviews on the play praised the interpretation of the fire escape as the prow of a ship propelling Tom out of his environment and into the world.

We just pretended that they'd gotten that right and I canceled an order to whittle that part of the set down when we could get the company back to fix it.

This same production demonstrated that "eye of the beholder" bit on interpretation. An elderly lady came to opening night and caught my attention because she was obviously distressed and crying through Act 1 and left in the first interval. I felt bad all night because we had upset someone that much. I had assumed that the play--and our staging of it--had brought out a grief too heavy for her to bear, and that's not what we wanted to do at all.

But she appeared the next night--and the night after that--this time staying for the whole play and each time crying through it.

So, although our goal was to put on something that would be meaningful for those who saw it, there was at least one person who saw a whole lot more in the play than we did.

 

[Stella_Omega]

In the same way a pig has no idea what it tastes like until somebody feeds it pig flesh.

I read far more than I write.

We writers have been dining on pig flesh for so long we've become pigs who knew bacon long before we ever offered it to the kitchen...

 

[MarlowBunny]

Ironic that you just analyzed that phrase. Clearly literary analysis has some use or else you wouldn't have known how to discuss the phrase I'm in agreement with SR7. Writers cough up things onto the page and think they know them--but as pointed out about hearing your own voice, you don't really know it until others have a look and give you an outsider view, rather than only what you know on the inside. If we knew what we wrote so well that literary analysis was pointless, then we writers wouldn't need to write it down and have others consume it.

Communication is communication. And were I the teacher, i would happily encourage students to analyze to their hearts content. If for no other reason than that it means they read the story--really read it, rather than skimmed it. Any English teacher should be delighted if students did that. What kind of dumbass teacher doesn't want his student discussing what they read?

Didin't I write exactly the same analysis as you?