authors, readers and stories
Feb. 18th, 2005 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootSo, 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.
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.
