What Gives This Mess Some Grace Unless It's Fictions?

I've always said that there's something rabbinic about the way the my favorite undergraduate organization operates. In the Talmud, a verse like Ecclesiastes 10:8 (He who breaks a fence will be bitten by a snake) is sometimes deployed as honest advice about keeping safe by staying within the Law. Other times it's a punchline. (Consider my favorite use of the verse: A Christian offers to heal Rabbi Eleazar ben Damma, who has been bitten by an actual snake, but another rabbi tells him not to accept a miracle at the hands of a heretic because "he who breaks down a fence will be bitten by a snake!")

In much the same way, there are certain sayings that get passed down from generation to generation in the POR (i.e. "Justice is for strangers," which is about mercy and loyalty, the expression "pursued by furies," which denotes some combination of smart and interesting and crazy, or "wear a mask long enough and it will sink into the skin," which is just true) that serve a multitude of situations.* One of my favorites is "I have sometimes doubted that my life has meaning; I have never doubted that Hamlet has meaning."

I tried unpacking that statement a long time ago, and I bring it up again because it makes the perfect rebuttal to Freddie's rebuttal of me:

By declaring that trying to be authentic is the closest we can ever come to being authentic, conceptual art sets its own trap. It tells us that the purpose of art is to create symbols that don't signify — that the only thing we can tell each other honestly is that we're trying to tell us something.

Ah, well, here's the shame of it. I don't think the purpose of art is to create symbols that don't signify. I think the responsibility of the modern artist is to recognize the inability of symbols to signify.

"The inability of symbols to signify"—this is exactly the sentiment that bothers me so much, and exactly the sentiment that the above line about Hamlet is meant to devastate.

It might make more sense if I put it in musical rather than literary terms: To believe in "the inability of symbols to signify" is to say that a Beethoven symphony might have meaning to a given person, but has no inherent meaning. Our attitude towards a symphony is the same as an existentialist's attitude towards his life: the only meaning it has is the meaning I put there myself. Freddie's right that taking such an attitude isn't the end of art. It leaves plenty of room for strong emotional and mind-expanding reactions. But it's still wrong. The statement "There is no essential difference between 4'33" and a Bach concerto; both have no meaning but what the listener projects onto it" is more obviously false than "Life has no meaning but what a man projects onto it"—of course there's a difference between John Cage and Beethoven: one has stuff in it already!—but both statements are ultimately just as false.

I'd like to corner Freddie into endorsing the (self-evidently false) statement "A Beethoven symphony, like John Cage's 4'33", has no meaning but what the listener projects onto it," not because I don't like him personally but because I think his position requires him to, and I want him to realize it.

*There are other similarly persistent but far less illuminating bits of inherited dialogue: "You, Mr. Jeffries, are a horrible person." "And you, Mr. Wiley, are drunk, but in the morning I will still be a horrible person, and you will no longer be drunk."