author vs authority

[lobelia321]

I just had a thought in an email.

I believe that once a fic is out there, the author becomes just another reader and another voice in the babble of interpretations and responses. So I'm the author of but not the authority on my fics.

(This comes from preparing my Theories course. I'm up to the gills in Foucault and Barthes and the 'death of the author'. *dies*)

Comments

[azewewish.livejournal.com]

True enough. An author can tell you *intention*, but not interpretation. The best authors leave it up to the reader, always.

heh

[pippinspeach.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I agree with this...I've always thought that it's the author's job to get across the meaning they intend, and if people consistently misinterpret it in a way the author really doesn't intend or like, it needs to be rewritten more clearly.

But this is a longstanding point of difference between Brenda & me, & we're used to it, hehehe :)

Re: heh

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I replied to you here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/177515.html

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I replied to you here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/lobelia321/177515.html

[sheldrake.livejournal.com]

I agree absolutely. Once you publish a story, once it's in the public domain, then your relationship to it changes. Erk. I'm a bit too drunk to be thinking about this.

[cherry-glitter.livejournal.com]

How far does this go? I agree that readers bring their own interpretation and perspective to a story, but at some point shouldn't they be able to go to you, the author, and ask you what it means? You did (presumably) have a purpose and intention in writing it in the first place -- how does that just disappear?

So I think that the author is the ultimate authority in the sense that his or her meaning (explanation, intention, etc.) is always *there*, but not an authority in the sense that the reader has to agree with it (or even ask about it).

[freyafloyd.livejournal.com]

I think this is where there is a bit of a divergence between slash and published fiction. In a slash fandom, the reader has greater access to the author than they do to a real author. The different level of access gives us a different understanding of the fics.

The reader usually sees a book as a finished product. The book is all we will ever see of those characters, in most cases, so we judge it on that basis. If a finished piece of writing is the tip of the iceberg of an author's understanding of the character's lives and history, in slash we have access to the author to find out more about the characters. We do not have this with real fiction, so we interpret merely on what we read within the book.

In many ways responding to a work of fiction is just like responding to a person. An individual understands themself better than anyone else does, and an author understands their own work better than anyone else does. Sometimes the reader may point out things that the author has missed, but if the author has a proper understanding of their characters, then the missed areas will only have been inserted subconiously, and will still make sense within the author's understanding of the work.

People can re interpret within their own understanding of fiction, but this is really just a form of therapy or self analysis. I think the reader should try and see what the writer was trying to say, rather than get caught up in their own response or the response of their culture.

It is like the quote that travel broadens the mind, but you have to have the mind to start with. The same can be said of fiction. I think the whole idea of the reader's interpretation being in any way equal to the author's interpretation is a product of the morality of our times. People are entirely self obsessed . They don't care what an author is trying to say in a book; they just care about what the book says about their emotions and their lives. How are we ever meant to learn anything when we spend our lives using other people, culture, history, and the events of the world, merely to increase our own understanding of ourselves?

Their are more beautiful things to look at than a mirror.

[eyebrowofdoom.livejournal.com]

My authorial intention vis a vis interpretation is not a sacrosanct, self-contained and final whole, because I don't consider (social) reality itself to be susceptible to definitive interpretation -- so my interpretation is conditional by nature and incapable of trumping per se another person's.

While certain basic facts of the subject matter should not be in dispute and these should direct a reasonable reader toward a certain range of conclusions, I actually want meaning in my fiction to be slippery and conditional in the same way that meaning in actual human relationships is slippery and conditional -- the slipperiness is part of my aesthetic of realism as it were. If what one wants primarily to do is get across a static contention in an unambiguous way, one should be writing an argumentative non-fiction essay, not fiction, because the object of fiction is to give the reader pleasure. And the negotiation of slippery meaning, the sense of triumph a reader gets from formulating an interpretation from the (hopefully) intriguing material the author has supplied, is one of the prime pleasures of fiction reading. Another is the experience of spontaneous emotional human self-recognition -- like a faux de ja vu -- and surely ambiguity, which is endemic to one's experience of actual, non-fictional selfhood, must be part of the arsenal of techniques that achieves this.

[msilverstar]

Have been contemplating this -- you always have the best questions, dearheart!

I would say that the author is more than just another voice, but not the final authority on all aspects. We reveal more than we consciously know about ourselves when we write. Prejudices, assumptions, life experiences, thought patterns, ... Others can see them more clearly than the author herself. Intention matters but it's not the only thing.

And, given that we write RPS, I think we have even less standing to worry about ownership of ideas. We're appropriating the stories of other people's lives, for goodness sake! It's hard to take the moral high ground here.