>I wonder if crypticism is
one of the hallmarks of story-telling . . . what
>one leaves out is key.
This is what some critics identify as the defining trait of "minimalism" in fiction. I've learned this by reading a bunch of criticism about Ann Beattie. At first, I didn't get the point of her stories at all. Now, .... Let's just say that I'm working on it.
No, let me say that in fact I now do sort of understand what's good in Ann Beattie's stories. And I can also see why a lot of the criticism about her completely misses the point. I found that reading a couple of interviews with her was much more enlightening to me than almost any of the criticism.
This was partly because I can relate to what she says as a writer myself, albeit one who doesn't write that much. A lot of her critics don't seem to understand anything at all about how people actually write things. And they miss what's really good about her.
Gee, I wish I had you here to talk about this with. I know that what I'm saying can't be that original, and yet when I read a lot of criticism, it seems like many academic critics just don't understand it. Last semester, I was trying to read some criticism of Wallace Stevens, and in particular I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what Harold Bloom was saying about "Dominion in Black." And while I think Bloom's insights are fascinating, I don't think they have anything to do with what Stevens actually had in mind when writing the poem.
It's like.... Some people can pick up a piece of driftwood on the beach, and look at it and find all sorts of "interpretations," and see lots of fascinating things in it. And it's really great to be able to do this, but one shouldn't get confused and think that what one sees corresponds to some sort of intentionality inherent in the driftwood.
Now some pieces of driftwood are much more meaningful than others. The best pieces lend themselves to many different interpretations, all of which seem at least in large part justified by the actual shape of the wood and the markings on it.
In the same way, a really good poem or story might justify a whole lot of different interpretations. But the real quality of the poem/story is something that is, um, anterior/more primitive/more basic than these interpretations. It's not that the poem/story is random, or that there is no author's intention. But I believe that the author's intention is on a different level than the level of interpretation.
The author him/herself may have a preferred interpretation, but this is often something that the author has discovered after the fact (just as, in life, the "intentions" behind our actions are often things we ascribe a posteriori rather than things we were consciously aware of at the time we acted). And then in some cases, the author may have gone back and further revised his work in order to support his own interpretation, but I think that a lot of the very best writers are able to restrain themselves from doing this.