And I always feel that it's very possible that the reader can understand the text, and possibly explain the text, much better than the author himself. I'm always amazed when my books are assigned to my students and how often they will interpret something that I wrote. I do not exhibit any pushback to their interpretation, because I value the response of the reader, and how the reader is internalizing what has been said. But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that [not] all interpretations are equal. And what I mean by that is that you cannot just interpret a text any way you want. And that's not being proposed by Ricoeur. One's interpretation of a text to a large degree depends on the massive knowledge and understanding of the reader. The reader who brings little or nothing to the reading of the text, seriously runs the risk of misinterpreting the text.
Hawkins: [00:34:30]
Larry Bouchard also writes in the foreword: There is another kind of reductionism that worries Harris more, namely reducing the biblical text explanations of the text. That is to say, reducing the living word to commentary. What is the danger of such reduction, James?
Harris: [00:34:49]
Well, what I've seen in my own experience, you know, is there's a hole, and I'm not sure this is exactly what Larry Bouchard meant here. But, you know, there are common commentaries on almost everything, every biblical text. They're just commentaries, volumes and volumes of commentaries. And I think that that's very risky as well, because oftentimes those commentaries, become instantiated in the consciousness of people as gospel or as lore. In other words: this is what this text means and none other. And I think that's one of the dangers. And that very well may be what Bouchard means. In other words, the text cannot be reduced to just the commentary of Harris or the commentary of Hawkins -- that is putting a limitation on the text [and] can be construed as oppressive, right? Because there is no final authority on what this text means.
Hawkins: [00:36:38]
I was thinking that recently we celebrated the hundredth 100th anniversary of T.S. Eliot's Waste Land. There was a whole controversy around the notes he left with the poem. More notes and commentary than any poem had ever been accompanied by before. And I was reading recently that he himself regarded the notes as a joke. He thought it was funny when his notes took on a a life of their own. And there were scholars out there looking at his notes, as a way "into" his poem. He said he was just joking, because he had been accused of plagiarism by critics in the past, for not indicating who the sources were for some of his previous poems. And he's getting those scholars back by overdoing it, just laying on all of these notes for them to sort of chase after and try to figure out what the poem was about.
What he was trying to do is get people to do what you're suggesting here, which is to read the poem, and not get caught up in the commentary. So, he's making fun of the idea of having an authoritative hermeneutical commentary separate from the work itself. And it took a while for people to catch up to that.
Harris: [00:37:51]
It's very critical, not just in connection with T.S. Eliot, but in general, because those in scholarship like you to document your work and it's almost like a religion. I mean, there are what I call 'footnote police' out there. They have the potential to destroy you if they want to. And the whole notion of plagiarism is raised to the level of criminality for sure. So, you know, but even some of our best scholars probably took stuff. I mean, Martin Luther King purportedly plagiarized portions of his PhD dissertation at Boston University. But I think the list goes on and on and on and on. And, you know, and if you want to really be facetious to some degree or critical, almost everything in the Bible is plagiarized, I would say.
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