grist for one’s own mill

[kaigou]

Came across a thought-provoking (okay, given that linoleum can make me think deep thoughts, this may not be saying much) philosophical essay, ostensibly discussing whether or not Dumbledore is gay. But in the midst of tackling that question, Tamar Szabó Gendler had this to say:

...a number of leading critics of authorial intent [point out] that language is a social creation, and that authors do not have the power simply to make words mean what they choose. By this reasoning, it’s not up to Rowling to say whether Dumbledore is gay: her texts need to be allowed to speak for themselves, and each of her readers is a qualified listener.

By contrast, “intentionalist” literary theorists such as E.D. Hirsch Jr. argue that authorial intent is what fixes a text’s correct interpretation. Without such a constraint, Hirsch contends, one uses the text “merely as grist for one’s own mill.” And, at least to the extent that readers’ primary concern is with understanding what an author meant to communicate, intention is obviously central.

Isn't that the entire tension between fanfiction writers and original authors? Especially since that last sentence in the quote may appear to conclude that intention is central, but that conclusion is predicated on an assumption about a reader's primary concern. In other words: if fanfiction writers are not primarily concerned with what the "author meant to communicate" half so much as they are concerned with how the story plays out for them, then... Well, it's kind of open just how much (if any) concern there would be for author intention, if that were so.

I was thinking about this yesterday evening, and it seems to me that it's not entirely (or always) that the issue is solely with fanfiction -- that is, the act or presentation of the alternate/reader interpretation. After all, we could meta to our heart's content and we would inevitably still analysis/interpret, at some point, in a way that's contrary to the author's intentions. A good meta works on the text, but -- as I've been so recently reminded, in dealing with survey questions -- language can be a great deal more ambiguous than we realize.

So is the tension really coming from "you aren't allowed to write this" or is my sense from some author-rants correct that the underlying meaning is really, "you aren't allowed to think this"?

Ultimately, it doesn't make any difference whether or not I write fanfiction. I'm still going to develop, and then retain, an interpretation of the story, the world, the characters. I may use fanfiction to extrapolate my interpretation into other settings/conflicts, or to proselytize my interpretation to other fans, but the heart of either is my interpretation. And that's grounded in a sense that I am a qualified listener.

Carrying that further, that grounded sense could be a kind of entitlement: by reading/watching a text, I've signed up to be the other half of the tango. The author tells, and I listen, and my active listening entitles me to understand what I've heard.

Which seems rather basic, yeah, but there's something going on under there, and I haven't quite figured out a succinct finger to put on it. When authors rant -- whether it's about fanfiction, or in the most recent flailing, about e/book piracy -- I feel like I'm often picking up on a sort of entitlement from those angry authors. I mean that in the classic sense: a sort of privilege, by dint of being the One Who Speaks. Those who listen, therefore, are meant to sit there quietly and listen. When a listener writes, it's concrete evidence that this simplistic dynamic (one speaks, one listens) is no more than an illusion.

Perhaps what's twigging here is that one place online communities have really leapt forward is in speaking truth to power Those Who Do The Talking (that is, authors). But the source of that leap, I think, is drawn from the way online communities have done a lot to educate and inform fellow netizens about things like privilege, and discrimination, and Othering, and various other racist/sexist/homophobic/imperialist behaviors. Thanks to that core of activists, the concepts of 'derailing' and 'checking privilege' and so on are much more prevalent, or at least better known, than they were five, six, seven years ago.

Learning to apply the tools of identifying, analyzing, and calling out privilege may have also allowed fans to apply these same critiques elsewhere. Except that in the case of author/reader, the author's position of privilege is meritocratic, and the dynamic is (fundamentally) business, not culture. Money's exchanging hands somewhere, that is. So I'm not understood, I mean 'meritocratic' in that the author had to earn (create, revise, and convince someone to publish, etc) that standing as One Who Speaks -- it's not at all the same as being born into privilege by dint of race, religion, sexuality, or culture.

Maybe that's where my innate discomfort lies, with the author/writer tension: because I cannot justifiably condemn all authors as blind to their privilege (in the way I might with imperialism or sexism or the rape culture). I mean, they had to exert effort to get to where they are, so it's not all the same dynamic (in the creation of privilege) as what you see when the person could have that privilege just by being born. Does that make the entitlement any less grating? Hardly. But it does change the dynamic when it comes to a critique.

Another way to put that: if a cissex, cisgender, het, protestant, white man stays secure in his privilege by refusing to learn to see, then a meritocratic privilege results from refusing to keep seeing: from learning to become blind.

Instead of seeing the author/fanfiction tension in terms of the classic upper/lower of the oppressor/oppressed, maybe the dynamic is better expressed as: authors are collaborators. I do use that word in its wartime sense (though more strongly, for the sake of argument, than if I were speaking solely of my own perspective).

The most recent debate about piracy and international distribution and corporate interests had notes of that. I was getting senses of some of these intentions/implications in some of the posts I read. There's the "we're all from the same group" (you love stories, I love stories) as though authors and writers come from a shared wellspring -- here, I'll call it the 'story-culture' as analogy to an ethnicity or significant shared trait. From the readers, there's the "you sold out to the man!" which brings in shades of accusing collaborators with the oppressive/occupying governing force. And there's also the "you don't see the costs we're paying," from the readers, trying to check the authors' (earned) privilege as a result of pleasing The Man... and the authors, in turn, defending themselves as unable/powerless to control this, or do that, or change this, when it comes to corporate powers-that-be.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that some authorial comments raised strong analogies for me of privileged collaborators insisting they'd worked hard to earn their position (gain the trust of oppressors who'd otherwise see them as the enemy) and that any change would have to come from somewhere else (the masses yearning to have cheaper/more accessible books). I'm not sure where I'm going with this -- I'm still meandering around on it, so carry it in any direction in comments -- but some of the conversations about that piracy/distribution fail also reminded me of the way USian history has traversed with each wave of immigrants. That is: one wave comes in, must struggle against vicious racism and stereotyping, manages to get a foothold and a little bit of dignity, but feels that holding too tenuous to risk it on behalf of the next wave of (a different ethnicity of) immigrants. Meanwhile, those at the very top are just fine with all of it, because it means those at the bottom are too busy fighting over scraps to have the energy to spare on whether it wouldn't be better to turn those energies against the system that benefits from the antagonism.

Not that I'm fomenting rebellion against the corporate publishers (and frankly, I have no idea how that would even work), but I just find it peculiar, and intriguing, that the dynamic of author vs. fanfiction writer seems to track closely to some of these other analogies. Far better, I mean, than it does to the strict oppressor/oppressed dynamic that I also saw tossed around in the most recent fail. What that means, or what else that might be telling us about the system and our parts in it, I've not yet figured out.

Comments

[dejla]

I--am going to go away and think about this.

However, as an author and a reader, what I've always thought that writing/reading was, was an attempt to communicate something--to tell a story, to tell a story that explains how I feel about something, or just to tell a story about what I think might happen on a certain Thursday if the sky turned red.

In the same way, when I read, I assume (and I know what assuming does) that the author wants to communicate something to me. I may not always get what the author is trying to say. In some cases, I may get what he/she is saying, but I may not like it, or I may say, "but what if" and get an entirely new idea from it. It's not the story the author wanted to tell me, but it's the story I really wanted to read, and since the author didn't write it, I might go away and write it myself. In which case we go right back to the communication problem I started with.

Still, in most cases I am more interested in what the author wants to tell me than in what other people think about what the author was saying, should have been saying, or didn't say. In other words, as far as I'm concerned, authorial intent trumps reader wishes. But that's only my opinion, and I don't expect to have others agree with me.

It seems to me that an author/reader communication disconnection is a failure on someone's part, or on both parts, not necessarily just a new view of the story.

[mediumrawr]

There are two problems with the assertions of critics like Hirsch.

First, their idea of the "correct interpretation" is arbitrary. They center the idea of 'correct interpretation' around authorial intent because that seems right to them, because intra-press western culture has attached a great deal of importance to the author. (It's not alone in this. A number of other societies have attached this importance as well. But, notably, Western culture between the Romans and the press did not.) But if one were to decide that there had to be a 'correct interpretation', there's no actual reason to fixate it on the author. Why not on the intent of the literary agent, or the editor, or the author's mother whose eternal love (or lack thereof) is that which the work (maybe) responds to?

The second is the lack of understanding of what actually happens when readers try to get back to authorial intent. Most readers do try to do this. (Some readers, us pretentious literature students, may say we don't.) But they don't get back to authorial intent; they get back to a character inside their heads who they think of as the author but never really is.

When Rowling first tried to get published, as is I think now pretty well known, her agent got her to change her publishing name from Joanne Rowling to J. K. Rowling specifically to hide from readers that the author of the book they were picking up was female. How many people read at least a couple of books of Harry Potter thinking that the author was male? Could they have truly gotten back to authorial intent, under that mistaken assumption? In fact, barring a psychic connection, you'll never really get back to the author. Even when someone like Poe writes something like "The Philosophy of Composition", tracing back over everything they did writing a story, you never know the accuracy or the honesty of their recollections.

I'm not one to buy too much into what I see as online fandom's obsessive interest in politically correct degradation of language, which is often no more than an inconvenience and frequently a method for bringing low those who try to present contrary and conservative opinions. To me, the arguments about authorial privilege re fanwork are increasingly ridiculous; they're so caught up, on both sides, with this pretentious, righteous language.

The bottom line is that we've already won. Fanfic has got out of the jar and there's no putting it back in. You can get along with the creators and the readers of fanfic or you can not get along with them, but the latter action means lower sales, means losing the loudest fans, means a lot of emotional investment into something you can't control. As a creator, you'd better have a really good reason for all that, since you can never hope to win.

A lot of authors, though, don't really understand what's going on. There's a fandom language that is spoken by fans, but a lot of writers don't come out of fandom. Their first contact with this culture is when people start writing about their stuff, and maybe the first thing they feel is the same as when you show someone something you've been trying to get just right for so long, and their response is, "Well, you need to fix this. And this, and this." And right next to them, their entire support structure, from editors to publishers, are telling them that their legal rights to their work may be endangered by the existence of that stuff.

I'm hesitant to turn that kind of person into the villain for class war. Remember that authors aren't used to being celebrities, and may not realize that every gut thing they happen to say to an interviewer about copyright is going to get turned into the fandom football, on top of which a dozen big-name-linebacker-fans will leap on top of in a huge, messy pile-on.

If something I said turned into that, from some community I didn't know, my immediate reaction wouldn't be to change my mind. It would, "Holy shit, those people are crazy."

Whoa, long.