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Well, literary criticism tends to be rather heedless of the author's conscious intentions.

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Which is why I've never had much respect for Literary Criticism.

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I lost all respect for Literary Criticism when I saw someone try to apply Freud to a work (in the name of Literary Criticism), and claim that it meant something. Discussing the Freudian imagery of a work may be an amusing game, but it can't tell you what it means, any more than phrenology will tell you what a person is like.

But this suggests that what the author intended the work to mean is the only possible meaning -- which seems a bit problematic when one considers that readers/viewers are bringing widely different backgrounds and experiences to a work and that the work itself (assuming it lasts) is being seen in a different time period from that in which it was created. Some of the discussions about females (especially Meegat) in B7 point out the problems in the latter -- looking at 1970s females in light of 21st-century attitudes toward women; in terms of the former, the continuing debates about almost every aspect of the series (especially Avon and Blake) would again show that different people extract different things from the series. Those viewers are finding meaning in the stories, are finding coherent interpretations of character and motivation that fit with their perception of the world -- how is that not "tell[ing] . . . what it means"?

Rejecting all but an author's conscious intentions also seems to imply that the unconscious doesn't come into play when writing, yet various authors' comments would suggest otherwise. I believe it was Katherine Paterson who mentioned that it wasn't until she was asked about the plot of one of her later works (#9 or #10 or thereabouts) that she suddenly realized she'd been writing the same core story time and again, even though the individual settings and circumstances varied widely. That core story -- sometimes less obvious in the plot, sometimes the central tale -- would thus seem to be an important part of the "meaning" of her writing, but not one she'd consciously intended to be there.

DDJ

From: Kathryn Andersen kat@welkin.apana.org.au

And I quote from myself:

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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,

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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

From: Kathryn Andersen kat@welkin.apana.org.au

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But are internal explanations really severable from authorial intent.

It

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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

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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

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fit to include it, presumably there is some kind of message there, from which some meaning can be extracted.

Yes you *can* do that -- but not if you are playing the game of "find the *internal* explanation" -- as we do so often. The exploring of the history of the B7 universe in its own terms... For the internal explanation, one considers things like Blake's penchant for knowing historical trivia, and so on.

(kathryn bangs head against desk) Guess I failed to comminicate again.

No, I got your meaning, I just don't agree with it. The internal explanation still doesn't escape the author. Blake's historical interests don't come from nowhere - Nation put them in.

I've nothing against 'playing the game', ghod knows I've done it myself enough times, but I don't think we should ever lose sight of the fact that it is just a game, and everything we see in every episode was put there by somebody, though not necessarily on purpose.

I think the only time an internal explanation can escape authorial intent ('author' here including such people as set and costume design, prop/model makers etc) is when a connection between two or more elements within the series arises through what might be called coincidence, though in a rather loose sense of the word. That is, an internal connection that was not planned to be one as such. Take, for example, the similarity between the London, the salvage vessel from Fosforon, and the T-16 transporter in Moloch. They all look distinctly similar, and for a pretty obvious reason - it's the same model being reused. But the chances are that it is the same model in order to save time and money designing a new ship each time from scratch, rather than to build up a sense of continuity. It is (probably) not authorial intent that all three ships look alike, though it might be, since other episodes do feature original ships where the London model might have been used yet again.

Authorial intent is even less likely in the case of, say, Space City briefly appearing in the Andromedan War footage at the beginning of Aftermath. The implication certainly seems to be that it is supposed to be an alien vessel, probably reused on the premise (not unreasonable in pre-VCR days) that no one would notice. We can, however, rationalise its appearance by positing that what we are seeing is in fact Space City defending itself from alien attack, and it is yet possible that the model was used on that very premise. (More likely, we won't attempt to rationalise it at all, and just gloss over another tacky SFX shot.)

I can't offhand think of any surefire coincidence vis a vis characters, though there might well be some. Recognising them could well be a problem. Blake's disfigured eye in the last episode is a good example - it well be coincidental, but there have been at least two plausible reasons for it being conscious authorial intent (as a symbol of 'blurred vision', or as a deliberate echo of Travis).

In fact 'playing the game' would seem to be called into play more often to explain away anomalies and disparities, which abound in B7, yet these too tend to arise through authorial intent (often coupled with authorial carelessness, sometimes by the same author in different episodes).

'Internal explanation' is a barrier erected by the viewer to shield her/imself from awareness of the author (a process that more commonly goes by the name of 'suspension of disbelief'). A good author works to facilitate the erection of that barrier, otherwise s/he might as well just get up on a soapbox and rant (and authors who do just that tend to be considered bad authors). There are exceptions, of course, as in comedies of the Naked Gun/Airplane mould that work by tearing that barrier down at every opportunity. But most serious dramas, like B7, strive to create an internal consistency that either puts the wall up for the benefit of the viewer or at least offers sufficient raw material for it to be constructed.

Even at its best, it's a translucent wall. It's down to the individual viewer to decide just how far s/he is going to restrict his/er vision - to stop at the internal explanation, or to see beyond it to the shadowy author lurking behind it.

In practice, of course, it's not exactly difficult to do both at the same time.

Neil

Kathryn wrote:

Like arguing that Deliverance is sexist because a rocket is a phallic symbol. 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".

And I think, well, that's one of a number of possible meanings, but not the first one that occurs to me.

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"Kathryn" == Kathryn Andersen kat@welkin.apana.org.au writes:

Warning: I spent three years studying LitCrit at the University.

On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 03:54:18PM +0200, Natasa Tucev wrote:

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Well, literary criticism tends to be rather heedless of the author's conscious intentions.

Which is why I've never had much respect for Literary Criticism.

A work has a context, and part of that context is the author.

True.

Yes, an author's intended message isn't usually what the audience hears, but it still is an important factor.

Is it? Why?

The way I was taught, the authors intentions are not always disregarded, but they are *always* viewed with great suspicion. There are reasons for this. The more important ones are:

* The work the author sees is never the same work the reader sees, even if they're looking at the same physical object. The authors view of her own work is unavoidably tainted by her own vision of what she wanted to accomplish, she tends to see the Platonically ideal work rather than the actual work. Differently put, while the reader gets the text and only the text, the author gets the text and all her memories of what she was thinking while she produced the text. The result is that the author's opinions are really opinions about a different work from the one the readers see.

* Authors are not reliable sources about their own intentions. They are human, and they tend to want to be seen in as good a light as possible. Therefore, they often claim far more noble intentions than they really had, and far more "elevated" inspirations and sources than they really had. If you were to believe what the authors themselves say, nobody has ever written a novel because they wanted to make money, and nobody has ever been inspired into writing by Stephen King or Barbara Cartland. Almost invariably, they claim to want to say important things about the human condition and to have been inspired by James Joyce and Marcel Proust. In the long run, this gets rather hard to swallow.

What you're saying here seems to be that Literary Criticism wishes that works of art didn't have authors at all, or that who wrote it is irrelevant.

No, but Literary Criticism prefers to talk about things that are at least theoretically knowable. Once we get telepathic scanners capable of looking back in time, *then* we can talk about the author's intentions. Until then, we chose to disregard statements that are unavoidably tainted by ambition, greed and fallible memory.

Which is ridiculous! Or we wouldn't have spent so many interesting hours discussing Ben Steed -- or the differences between Terry Nation and Chris Boucher...

Do we really *discuss* Ben Steed's intentions that often? Occasionally, we speculate on what they may have been, but that is more of morbid curiosity, I think.

And I do not think we discuss the differences between Terry Nation and Chris Boucher. I mean, really, what would that be about? "Well, Terry is dead and Chris is not"?

We *do* discuss the differences in the *works* of Terry Nation and Chris Boucher -- and *that* is interesting. There we can actually say things, like for example that Boucher's works tend to be rather a lot darker and more pessimistic than Nation's. This is something we can discuss. This is something that is drawn from the sources available to us.

Discussing the Freudian imagery of a work may be an amusing game, but it can't tell you what it means, any more than phrenology will tell you what a person is like.

A lot of silly things are done in LitCrit (and is it even possible to use Freud and *not* be silly?), but I think you are generalising a bit much here.

From: Calle Dybedahl calle@lysator.liu.se

If you were to believe what the authors themselves say, nobody has ever written a novel because they wanted to make money, and nobody has ever been inspired into writing by Stephen King or Barbara Cartland.

"Yet there is something to be said in extenuation of weather and scenery, which, together with adjectives, do much to lighten the burdens of authors and run up their word count." Edgar Rice Burroughs, in foreword to 'Skeleton Men of Jupiter'

Neil