authors, readers and stories

[branchandroot]

So, Cathexys posted a link to a nice little free-for-all over the issue of authorial intention. See here to be entertained and, possibly, confused. My own opinion, sufficiently expressed by other people, is that Kita, or, more likely, the people she's been reading, are confusing authorial intent with explicit canon, but the whole thing made me think.



It seems to me that a whole lot of people are looking at stories (print or video) purely as commercial objects. And, to be sure, the maker/owner of a commercial object should have a great deal of control over it; when s/he doesn't, that's called unhappy things like alienation. But a story is not purely a commercial object. I would say it isn't even primarily a commercial object, though it sometimes functions as one.

Primarily, a story is an act of communication.

Communication has two ends to it--two equally participating ends. If this is not the case for a story, if the author only ever tells the story to herself, then, perhaps, it is not communication but rather psychology. But the common understanding and acting out of a story involves communication.

There is no perfectly transparent medium of communication (and this is where the authorial intent arguments usually start), so both parties in any act of communication have to put in some work. The originator chooses words/images that she feels best express her meaning; the reciever attaches the meanings that seem most congruent with those words/images. In a dialogue, this goes back and forth in turns. A conversation is an ongoing process of negotiation, of approximation, which, if everyone is lucky, will result in a workable degree of understanding. Having a common pool of symbols helps.

A recorded story, one set down on paper or tape or dvd, generally only goes one round of this process. The teller tells and the listeners say what they heard--often to each other since the teller is rarely personally available.

What I think many people, on both ends, forget is that hearing is not a passive process. Hearing is active, as active as telling. And the story takes shape in between, the exclusive property of neither. A story is a collaboration. How else could Shakespeare be regarded as timeless? He's not timeless, he's dated as all get-out; when students come into their college libraries asking if there are any copies of Shakespeare in English, they have a point no matter how we laugh about it once they're gone. But, because teachers of English continue to believe that his stories have worthwhile points to make, they demand that students put in the effort to hear, to construct, to attach. To be the collaborators who work with the author to give the story meaning.

Of course, most of Western culture seems to have the myth of the Artist, the artist as god-touched, the artist as the recipient of sufficient divine, stable Truth that he can convey it without slippage. So when the artist hears, as he does in this day of insta-news, what the audience has heard, and realizes that it isn't the same thing he tried to say, he gets his knickers in a twist and records commentaries telling the stupid readers what they were supposed to hear. This is conversation of a sort, negotiation over understanding. But I tend to think it's also cheating.

So, Lewis says that he didn't intend the Narnia books to be a thinly veiled allegory of the New Testament. Does this matter one jot to the fact that they are? I wouldn't say so.

Stories have the weight they do because they are metaphors; they employ symbols, hopefully shared ones, to convey more than everyday words do. This demands even more work on the part of the hearers/collaborators than usual. After making that kind of demand, after choosing to use more than usually obscure and ambiguous media for communication, I think it's a bit much for the authors to get pissy over what meanings the readers attach.

And video! Good grief, that has even more collaborators. In addition to the writer, quite possibly several writers, maybe animators, there's the actors with their interpretation of the characters, and, depending on the density of effects, the techies and their interpretations, and then there's the audience. This is where communication starts to show its true richness, and its true obscurity--two sides of one coin.

It gets better, though. The hearers get together in groups and compare notes; they negotiate with each other's meanings; they fill in the holes in the story this way and that way; and then they start to write their own stories illustrating what they heard; and the whole cycle starts again, teller and hearer becoming more and more blurred, meaning becoming more and more promiscuous as it's approximated and negotiated over and over again to the merry erosion of authority.

I think this is great.

But some hearers seem to think other hearers are getting too uppity, putting on the airs of tellers. And so they appeal to the One True Meaning of Authorial Intent to put a stop to it. Never mind that no one is forcing them to read the parts of the stew that make their eyes bleed, they can't tolerate the very knowledge that such parts exist. Thus, to twist Bakhtin just a bit, the centripetal and centrifugal impulses of communication balance each other out in an argument that will never be resolved and never end.

Conclusion: wank is an integral part of communication.


And the only timeless author is Aristophanes.

Comments

[cathexys.livejournal.com]

oh, i like the hearing as active process! too bad you're flocked. i'd have metafandomed you :-)

[branchandroot]

Thank you! The comments to that post really reminded me of an essay by Lois McMaster Bujold, on the reader as collaborator; she's a professional author, but remembers her days in Trek fandom clearly, and puts the two together in a really interesting way. So, whenever I read the argument of the author being the sole arbiter of meaning because s/he was the one who created the text, I immediately think... "but we create it too, doesn't that give us some stake also?"

[ladycrysiana.livejournal.com]

...wait, did CS Lewis actually say that? Because I recall distinctly when I was eight and, upon finishing the Chronicles of Narnia, turning to my mother and saying, "Aslan is Jesus."

I know that my outlook on this debate stems from being an English Lit. student. Because the current outlook seems to be "read first, examine, then you can see what the author says he meant if you want," I tend to believe that reading a text is a highly interactive activity. Of course the author can mean to express something through a text, but if it's not there in the text in a way that people can find it, it's pointless to say elsewhere that "Oh, this is what I meant to say."

...and then there are cases like Shaw's Pygmalion. I swear the man must roll over in his grave every time there's a showing of My Fair Lady. My Modern Drama class had a very long discussion over whether different productions had a right to change the ending.

[branchandroot]

Lewis said it at one point, and then contradicted himself later. So, who wants to use authorial intent as a benchmark, again?

*snerks* Oh, man, don't get me started on movie interpretations. "Mary Shelly's Frankenstein", my ass. That one should have been titled "Sensational Myths Loosely Based on Mary Shelly's Frankenstein". They could put it at one end of the spectrum, of which LoTR is the opposite end.

[ladycrysiana.livejournal.com]

...I really want to hear what people say about literary criticism and Lewis Carroll. Just because.

[lady-readwolf.livejournal.com]

You know, when I was in public school and college, I used to argue with some of my teachers about the meanings of stories and some people's purposes for writing.... And I distinctly remember receiving a failing grade on one of my essays once because I did not interpret the [I think it was a poem] correctly---even though I left plenty of supporting details and facts, tying together details from the text and my own experiences and knowledge. It's one of the reasons I refuse to believe there's just one true interpretation of any text. There's the intention of the author... and then the millions of interpretations of the readers.

[branchandroot]

Yeah, there's a really strong prejudice against ever using personal experience in analysis, which I think is a little odd. I mean, as long as you displayed good analytical form, and showed your evidence and connections, what does it matter whether the experience is yours or someone else's?

I think it might, in part, be backlash against extreme Reader Response, which has no other requirement than "I see it". *shrugs* I happen to think that the real problem with that school is the isolation of views. I think the real true meaning is the sum of what everyone sees.

[lady-readwolf.livejournal.com]

as long as you displayed good analytical form, and showed your evidence and connections, what does it matter whether the experience is yours or someone else's?

Now, see, I'd find it odd if you *didn't* or *couldn't* make any connections between what you read and what you know/have experienced... I mean, why are you wasting time reading something in the first place if you're not making any connections? I don't understand that sort of.... imposed distance between the reader and the text. It's too... cold, and, well, *distant*.

[marmalade-girl.livejournal.com]

This is very interesting. And you're absolutely right--authorial intent is useless if the reader doesn't get what he wanted out of a story. Clearly, if the author thought he said one thing, but the audience hears another, then his intent didn't match his product.

Still, as an author, the idea that intent is the last thing figured into a textual analysis is a bit scary. I do believe that sometimes readers bring *too much* with them when they read, and that their biases color the text they read to the point of skewing its meaning. More than once I've been irritated by extremely bizzare interpretations of text with evidenciary support that relies of suppositions right off the bat. I wanted to argue against such interpretations, but never wanted to be the one bringing out the authorial intent card. It's frustrating to know that, when I offer something I've written out to the public, I'm no longer in control of what it says--because of this, I've become a very meticulous writer. I consider word choice very heavily when I write fiction, and I use my beta readers to get impressions on characterization and intent as much as or more than for grammar mistakes.

An interesting case of authorial intent verses what he actually put on the page is in Tolkien's books. He was emphatically against homosexuality, and yet, Legolas/Gimli, Merry/Pippen, and Sam/Frodo can all be read as more-than-platonic bonds without too much stretch at all. I suspect Tolkien would be alarmed at the homsexual free-for-all interpretation of hobbit society... But does that make that interpretation less valid? Officially no, but out of respect for the author, I'd have to say yes, personally. I'm totally willing to re-work my feelings about a piece of fiction to match the author's intent, once I learn it. I just don't expect everyone else to.

[branchandroot]

It is scary, isn't it? Actually, I find it a little scary, sometimes, to realize that we are all creating meaning every time we speak--that language has a very tenuous connection to stable objects, and that we're always changing, fraction by fraction, what that connection is. And a story, that relies on the common understanding of symbols, and generally similar assumptions between author and readers...

*thoughtful* Tolkein would probably be alarmed at how explicitly, exclusively, sexual the fan-discourse is. But as far as homoerotic and homosocial, I think he'd be fine with it. In a lot of ways, he seems to me rooted more in the 19th C than the 20th, rooted in the idea of romantic friendship within the same sex.

[marmalade-girl.livejournal.com]

Do you mean non-sexual romantic friendships? That I could accept. The reason I said he was against homosexuality though was because he often spoke up against it when promoting his Christianity. I suppose there's room for romantic friendships, as long as the sexual line isn't crossed. ^_^

[branchandroot]

Romantic friendship was an... interesting concept. It was seen by pretty much everyone as pure, spiritual, elevated, and at the same time encompassed physical expressions of affection that we would now consider sexual. So it isn't, within that framework, a contradiction for Tolkein to speak against 'perversion' or 'inverts' while accepting as non-perverted impassioned declarations of love, and a remarkable degree of clingy-cuddliness and petting between two men. As long as it was in the context of this 'elevated' sentiment. Homosexuality is a far from stable concept, and the turn of the last century was one of its more fluid periods; that's always been the timeframe I saw Tolkein's most basic cultural understanding coming out of.