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The implication here is that what was in the rough draft is somehow "true", when in fact it was cut and therefore the writer thought it was "false". Everyone w

The implication here is that what was in the rough draft is somehow "true", when in fact it was cut and therefore the writer thought it was "false". Everyone writes garbage, all the time, including the greatest writers. Indeed, when you do much serious literary criticism, one of the first things you learn is the (perhaps surprising) extent to which great writers can write terrible junk in their rough drafts. Sometimes terrible passages almost make it into print, as, for instance, the first chapter of Hemmingway's book "The Sun Also Rises", which had already been sent to the printing plant when Hemmingway, on advice from Scott Fitzgerald, sent a telegram asking that the first chapter be cut. You can find that cut chapter online, and everyone whose ever read it agrees that it is terrible -- cutting it was a very good idea. Likewise, there are some famous cuts from Tolkien that would have been awful if they were included. If the author decides to cut a passage, the author is saying "This isn't really true for this story, this is garbage." You would be unwise to read deep meaning into passages that get cut.

mariodiana 12y ago
I read the book a few years ago, and have since read the excerpt. I think she was right to cut it, but only because it breaks up the flow of the story and seems rather heavy handed. In this sense it's "garbage." But I think it is completely consonant with the themes of the book. It's obvious that the dystopia in the book promises safety and security at the expense of a totalitarian society, so I don't know how one could read too much into it.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Exactly. "Writing is re-writing". The final draft, not the first, should be presumed to represent the author's best intentions. And authors actually do exist, and do have intentions, and can communicate those intentions, however imperfectly and incompletely. Cutting something from the final draft of a work signals the author's intentions pretty clearly: they believed for whatever reason and by whatever standard mattered to them, that the work was better off without it. That may have been for artistic or commerical or political considerations, but whatever they were, they were the author's and it behooves us to honour them. People who claim that authors do not have intentions or that those intentions cannot ever be known to any interesting degree seem to feel that they themselves are able to author works whose intentionality is fully decipherable. This is odd, not least because if communication between author and reader was not possible, it would follow that encryption is not possible, because encryption does nothing but interrupt the communication of the author's intentionality to the reader. An encrypted message can still be read as a string of random charcters, but none of the author's intentionality can be inferred. If the process of reading didn't involve inferring the author's intentionality, this would not be a problem, and an encrypted version of "A Wrinkle in Time" would be functionally identical to a plain-text one.

mariodiana 12y ago

I read the book a few years ago, and have since read the excerpt. I think she was right to cut it, but only because it breaks up the flow of the story and seems rather heavy handed. In this sense it's "garbage." But I think it is completely consonant with the themes of the book. It's obvious that the dystopia in the book promises safety and security at the expense of a totalitarian society, so I don't know how one could read too much into it.

tjradcliffe 12y ago

Exactly. "Writing is re-writing". The final draft, not the first, should be presumed to represent the author's best intentions. And authors actually do exist, and do have intentions, and can communicate those intentions, however imperfectly and incompletely. Cutting something from the final draft of a work signals the author's intentions pretty clearly: they believed for whatever reason and by whatever standard mattered to them, that the work was better off without it. That may have been for artistic or commerical or political considerations, but whatever they were, they were the author's and it behooves us to honour them. People who claim that authors do not have intentions or that those intentions cannot ever be known to any interesting degree seem to feel that they themselves are able to author works whose intentionality is fully decipherable. This is odd, not least because if communication between author and reader was not possible, it would follow that encryption is not possible, because encryption does nothing but interrupt the communication of the author's intentionality to the reader. An encrypted message can still be read as a string of random charcters, but none of the author's intentionality can be inferred. If the process of reading didn't involve inferring the author's intentionality, this would not be a problem, and an encrypted version of "A Wrinkle in Time" would be functionally identical to a plain-text one.