From: Kathryn Andersen kat@welkin.apana.org.au
And I quote from myself:
A work has a context, and part of that context is the author. Yes, an author's intended message isn't usually what the audience
hears,
but it still is an important factor.
If the audience doesn't hear the author's intended message, doesn't that make him or her a pretty crap author?
Though having had the intended message of some of my own fanfic totally bypass at least some readers, I guess that makes me a pretty crap author too.
I sympathise with Una and her self-confessed blind spot, since I can be just as slow on the uptake. And it's irritating when you get the message yourself but someone sitting next to you can't even begin to see it. And that's just the intended messages, before you get to work on the subconscious ones.
But to say that "this message means whatever I decide it means" is pretentious and arrogant.
I don't think so. Not if the decision is substantiated by the content of the text. It might, however, be pretentious if the meaning was invented regardless of the text. And I'd certainly say it was arrogant to say "this message *can only* mean whatever I decide it means", with the implication that all other interpretations are invalid.
Like arguing that Deliverance is sexist because a rocket is a phallic symbol.
Once I'd deciphered Meegat as an anagram of Gamete, I began to wonder if the phallic dimension might not have some applicability. Not that a phallus, symbolic or otherwise, is in itself inherently sexist, but the way it is deployed in a work of fiction (or indeed real life) can be. Since Avon and Meegat go through the find, fool, fuck and forget phases in precisely that order, then I'd say it's valid to say that the episode can be interpreted as containing a degree of sexism. Whether that sexism resides in Avon, or Terry Nation, and whether it is conscious or unconscious, is another matter. To denounce the episode is sexist would be to assert that Nation, deliberately or otherwise, wrote the script to affirm his own sexist attitudes. Perhaps he did, but then again maybe not.
I think one reason why the argument about that was so much at
cross-purposes was that one lot were thinking "but it wasn't *intended* to be sexist" and another party was thinking "intent is irrelevant, the only meaning is what I see to be there".
I think the usual problem in such arguments is simply neither party seeing what the other is seeing.
But of course, it's only in the context of a work of literature that you can even talk about it having meaning at all -- if one is wondering about the *internals* of the universe, such as "Why does Blake know about churches and Gan doesn't?" then looking for internal explanations of such things hasn't got anything to do with meaning or authorial intent at all -- because they are external to the B7 universe.
But are internal explanations really severable from authorial intent. It was, after all, Nation's intention that Blake should know something Gan didn't, even if it was just an excuse for a bit of info-dumping. And it was also Nation's intent to give us that information, otherwise the exchange between Blake and Gan would never have been written in. Since Nation saw fit to include it, presumably there is some kind of message there, from which some meaning can be extracted.
Neil