[ SECRET POST #2448 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2448 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 051 secrets from Secret Submission Post #350.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[insanenoodlyguy]

Putting aside the fact that a philosopy regarding how to approach literal critique more than anything else and that it's not necessarily the perfect perception of literature aside (especially since a lot of it was about historical stuff with dead authors and written in the 1960's, didn't even think about authors being able to talk online about their intentions a lot, lot more when before we'd have to rely on letters or interviews that may or may not have even survived)...

You still have to base it on something IN the work. A shitty misinformed opinion is still a shitty misinformed opinion.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[feotakahari]

I remember exactly when I began to hate Death of the Author. I was in a writing class, and a student brought in a story she'd written about a girl who got attacked by a monster. The teacher called it a rape narrative, and insisted on the validity of his interpretation over the student's protests. (Then he started talking about how much he sympathized with the monster, presumably because he wasn't being creepy enough already.)

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I think internet "word of god" needs to be taken with a couple of fistfuls of salt. Especially when you have Orson Card saying that he didn't really mean it, that his work was actually pro-gay for its time (it wasn't), and he gave up on anti-gay activism years ago (he quit just after the last election). Then you had Anne Rice going apeshit (apologies to apes and shit) over bad reviews of weakly edited work. Not to mention a fair number of authors who get off on pranking and trolling their own critics.

I'm just not inclined to let authors use the internet or mass media to take a mulligan on their work instead of putting in the seat-of-the-pants time to go through the production process with revised edition.

EDIT: Or to be blunt, if your published work doesn't say what it's supposed to say without support from your twitter account, The Guardian, or a talking head interview on the news, YOU FAILED. Somewhere between conception and reception YOU FAILED. It happens now and then, either suck it up and put out a new edition, or do a better job editing next time around.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[ariakas]

I was just about to bring up Card. Someone needs to every single time there's a secret like this, I think. He's probably the most obvious example of a work meaning one thing back when he actually wrote it, then going back and saying that no! Now it means something else because my views have changed! ....To the point of re-editing the novels themselves.

Ender's Game was never anti-war! It was always pro-war! What do you mean every literary critic under the sun interpreted it the wrong way?! They're just stupid! *furious retcons*

You also have readers who picked up on something that absolutely was in the text and supported by plenty of evidence, but the author doesn't like that interpretation, so they handwave it into non-canon in interviews, articles, etc. (See: Rinoa as Ultimecia.) Yet, the evidence in the text remains.

Sometimes the Death of the Author really needs to apply.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[feotakahari]

Wait . . . You want to argue that fans should be able to use textual evidence to support an interpretation the author disagrees with, and your chosen example is Rinoa as Ultimecia? I'm not even sure what the "textual evidence" for that IS. (Yes, it's possible from the information we're given, but I've never seen anyone give evidence that it's more likely than any other interpretation, and I can't understand why you would want to interpret the story that way unless you hate everything the story's supposed to do.)

Actually, while I'm at it, why is Ender's Game supposed to be anti-war? War is the framework it uses, but to me, it seems to be a story about the inability to determine the "greater good" when one lacks the information to determine the outcomes of one's actions. That's not necessarily an anti-war message, and "anti-war" doesn't seem to be a framework through which the sequels make any sense. (For instance, Quara's attempts to protect the Descolada are portrayed as fundamentally naive.)

Edit: I should add that "anti-war" also doesn't make sense in the context of Card's earlier work. In a lot of ways, Ender's Game seems to be an attempt to revise the ideas of A Planet Called Treason--not to outright reject them, but to show where they were incomplete. APCT outright supported the slaughter of the illuders, instead focusing its conflict on Lanik's mental turmoil as he does something horrific while believing that it's necessary. Ender's Game twists the knife a bit further--it wasn't even necessary to kill the Buggers--but I think Card would have been a lot more blunt if he'd changed his mind enough to actively argue against war.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[ariakas]

it's possible from the information we're given but I've never seen anyone give evidence that it's more likely than any other interpretation

I don't have time for a massive debate about FVIII today; suffice it to say that you can Google sprawled, heavily-sourced essays with the collected evidence to this effect. Even you admit that, by itself, it's certainly as good as any other interpretation (based on the text alone). Had the WoG not dismissed, it could be as canon as any other.

Er... forcing children to unknowingly commit genocide for the "greater good" can easily be seen as a criticism of the young age of infantry recruits/conscripts in most wars who do not fully understand the implications of their actions/their leaders intentions on a larger scale. The bulk of literary critics at the time understood Card as positing that as a bad thing and Card himself commented to the effect that they had a point... ...until his political views hardened, he edited the novel "to match the times" (i.e. his views), and proclaimed that no! Forcing children to unknowingly commit genocide was always morally correct and awesome, stupid, stupid (goddamned liberal) readers!

...How many times are you going to edit this comment? Card comes out in pretty much every Death of the Author discussion I've ever seen on the internet because he's a sterling example of why you not only can, but sometimes must remove the author from the work to explore its original intentions.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[feotakahari]

I'll set aside FFVIII and plausibility now, since I don't know enough about that. What really gets to me is FFVIII and themes--if you enjoyed the story of FFVIII, doesn't having Rinoa turn out to be Ultimecia render the entire story not only pointless, but stupid? And if you didn't enjoy the story of FFVIII (which, to be fair, I didn't), why are you spending time interpreting it when you could move on to something that isn't sappier than a Hallmark movie?

As for Card, I'm not saying it's good to conscript children, just that there are a lot of things Card could have done if his specific message was "conscripting children is bad" or "war is bad" that he didn't do. (The most obvious is that he could have written about actual children--Ender often reads as more of an adult than the adults, albeit an incredibly ruthless one, so it's a bit of a stretch to read him as an innocent corrupted by those around him.) It seems like the main reasons that "war is bad" is a message people take from Ender's Game are

1): the original never said "war is good," and

2): "war is bad" is a very common message in stories that are about war and don't say "war is good."

It seems a bit unfair to Card to say that he wrote a "war is bad" story just because he didn't originally write it as a "war is good" story, especially when there's another message to take from it that's very, very rarely done. (The reason I loved Ender's Game was that I found it pleasantly unusual for an author to portray a philosophy he seemed to agree with while at the same time showing the worst possible way it could fail--it felt so much more honest than all those authors who have the philosophy they agree with always succeed and competing philosophies always fail. If we read Card's message as "war is bad," then the final twist falls in line to say "war is bad," and the uniqueness disappears.)

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[ariakas]

RE: FFVIII. There is a large contingent of people who played the game and felt that the story and themes pre-third disc had a great deal of potential, and that potential is squandered in the late game by turning it into nothing more than - as you say - a sappy romance worthy of a Hallmark card. If Rinoa is Ultimecia (which, given the evidence, I believe was the original intention - later changed when they decided to take a different, and terrible, trajectory with the story) it restores some of that potential.

RE: Ender's Game. None of that changes the fact that Card went back on his own statements and even revised the original work to correct what he perceived (belatedly) as an incorrect interpretation, when he'd accepted that interpretation - and even supported it - before as his own views changed.

Card's far from the only author to do this, either. Nor is Ender's Game the only book he's done the "no no it really meant this" interpretative retcon with, as the poster above me pointed out. Thus, Death of the Author is not only a valid perspective from which to critique literature, in some cases - such as Card's - one must do so.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[feotakahari]

I'll give you that it's not an author's place to change what he said earlier. (I argued that in a lower comment in relation to Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451.) And I'll back off on FFVIII, since I clearly don't know enough about it to argue with you.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[blunderbuss]

I just want to take your last paragraph and staple it to the foreheads of an entire fandom and its creators. It does not matter what you declare as Word Of God, if the story shows something completely different then it's your failure to not get your ideas across and now you have to lie in the bed you've made.

Re: Especially when they start going "Death of the Author"

[quantumreality]

The fact that some people in the Harry Potter fandom abuse this literary analysis device is what leads me to half facetiously say the only time they get to use "Death of the Author" is when the author is actually dead.