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malsperanzaMeanwhile, something ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
black_dog posted back in September here has been percolating around in my little potato-stuffed head lately. He was sayin something about the value of a text left deliberately "open," ambiguous in some respect, so that it allows the reader (or fanfic author, or shipper, or fantasist) to construct alternatives in its interstices. Thus the idea of a text that is not a slashy text per se, but is slash-friendly.
Now me, I think all books are open texts. The author writes the damn thing and then launches it, little fragile paper boat, onto the waters of the world. What happens thereafter is outwith the control of the author, as it should be.
The rest behind a cut tag...
Thus, if JKR gives Draco blond hair for 4,000 or 5,000 pages, then there is no open place for Draco to be black-haired. But there is room for him to imagine himself as black-haired, or to wish that he had black hair, or--somewhere offscreen, at some unspoken moment of the story--to dye his hair black, in our imagination, and regardless of any objections JKR might wish to make. (The wise author is silent on these matters, and allows both book and readers to steer their own course.)
For the book is written to awaken the minds of readers to new possibilities; and this is true of every book.
Umberto Eco, author of one veryverygood novel (The Name of the Rose), several unreadable novels, and a lot of indecipherable essays on language theory, has written rather nicely on the idea of "open" works of art, those that "have in common . . . the artist's decision to leave the arrangement of some of their constituents either to the public or to chance." He means by this the sort of thing that happens in poetry and experimental novels (James Joyce, for example), but also, at some level, in every work of fiction.
Paraphrasing from a review of his essay, The Open Work, found on amazon.com:
Eco reminds us that works of art necessarily leave much to be filled in by the reader. In Moby Dick, for example, the author never mentions that the sailors on the Pequod have two legs. It is the work of the reader to reach such a conclusion, based on the context of the novel. While Captain Ahab is mentioned as having only one leg, Melville never says which one, again leaving to the reader to fill in the details. In this sense, literature is "parasitic," because it requires the reader to fill in many of the details of a given story.
This corresponds with other literary critics who argue that meaning resides in the receiver of a text. However, Eco suggests that authors can limit the reader's options for interpretation. For Eco, while much meaning resides in the interpretation of a text, the symbols employed by an author also have some meaning that a reasonable interpreter should understand. The "open work" then, is not an absolute condition. Some works will be more open than others.
Be patient; I will bring all this around to slash eventually.
Meanwhile, William Butler Yeats, who knew something about the imagination, and faeries, and fertile ambiguities, had this to say about people who dye their hair:
For Anne Gregory
'Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
'But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'
'I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
I invite the fertile imaginations of LJ users worldwide to work out what that poem might have to do with Umberto Eco's idea of the work of art as "open."
Butblack_dog was talking specifically about slash--about a book that is to all appearances written as straight, but that allows a slash reading. Why would it do so? Or rather, why would an author want her book to be available to radically alternative versions or interpretations? Don't most authors want to make their invented world and then invite you into it? Don't most authors want you, the reader, to accept their version of the world, lock stock, and barrel?
Why indeed? Because ambiguity is fertile, is generative, is magical. Because an author is not a dictator; a book is not a totalitarian state. Reading is, by nature, democractic.
So, instead of watching Buckaroo Banzai for the twelfth time, I ate my tater tots and watched another favorite movie, The Celluloid Closet. To anyone out there with an interest in slash who has not seen it, I say: rent it immediately.
This movie has a lot to say about slash, and subtext, and ambiguity. It's partly a documentary. In it, for example, Harvey Fierstein says:
"There are lots of needs for art and the greatest one is the mirror of our own lives and our own existence."
Quentin Crisp says:
"My mother took me to the silent movies in a spirit of ostentatious condescension. She told me that they were nothing like real life and that I must not believe them. And she was wrong, because everyone who comes from England to America and goes back says one thing first: It's more like the movies than you'd ever dreamed. And it is."
Stewart Stern, screenwriter of Rebel without a Cause, says:
"People talk about whether that was a homosexual relationship [Sal Mineo's and James Dean's characters]. The intention wasn't that. But any film is at the same time an expression of a writer, and it's an offering to an audience to create their own film. Rebel was about tenderness, intimacy. It was an attempt to widen the permission to love."
Arthur Laurents, screenwriter, says:
"All minority audiences watch movies with hope. They hope they will see what they want to see. That's why nobody really sees the same movie."
The poet Paul Valéry (quoted in the movie) says: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
With all this in mind, consider the movie Morocco, in which a veryverysexy Marlene Dietrich dresses as a man, transgressively erotic, and kisses a woman hard on the mouth--and does it to attract the man she is interested in. The man is thus forced into the voyeuristic position of watching her. Which, of course, is the same voyeuristic role we, the film audience, play--the same voyeuristic role played by every reader of a novel, spying on the secret world of the book, creeping into people's bedrooms, and even into their dreams.
Consider, too, that the man is Gary Cooper, a fellow whose sexual power on screen has a good deal to do with his soft, curved lips, long eyelashes, and delicate hands.
It is all veryveryconfusing, isn't it? But one thing's for sure: the average work of art is as open and full of holes as my aunt Frannie's tatted lace antimacassars. You could ride a coach and four through the gaps in most books.
Which is as it should be.
black_dog posted back in September here has been percolating around in my little potato-stuffed head lately. He was sayin something about the value of a text left deliberately "open," ambiguous in some respect, so that it allows the reader (or fanfic author, or shipper, or fantasist) to construct alternatives in its interstices. Thus the idea of a text that is not a slashy text per se, but is slash-friendly.Now me, I think all books are open texts. The author writes the damn thing and then launches it, little fragile paper boat, onto the waters of the world. What happens thereafter is outwith the control of the author, as it should be.
The rest behind a cut tag...
Thus, if JKR gives Draco blond hair for 4,000 or 5,000 pages, then there is no open place for Draco to be black-haired. But there is room for him to imagine himself as black-haired, or to wish that he had black hair, or--somewhere offscreen, at some unspoken moment of the story--to dye his hair black, in our imagination, and regardless of any objections JKR might wish to make. (The wise author is silent on these matters, and allows both book and readers to steer their own course.)
For the book is written to awaken the minds of readers to new possibilities; and this is true of every book.
Umberto Eco, author of one veryverygood novel (The Name of the Rose), several unreadable novels, and a lot of indecipherable essays on language theory, has written rather nicely on the idea of "open" works of art, those that "have in common . . . the artist's decision to leave the arrangement of some of their constituents either to the public or to chance." He means by this the sort of thing that happens in poetry and experimental novels (James Joyce, for example), but also, at some level, in every work of fiction.
Paraphrasing from a review of his essay, The Open Work, found on amazon.com:
Eco reminds us that works of art necessarily leave much to be filled in by the reader. In Moby Dick, for example, the author never mentions that the sailors on the Pequod have two legs. It is the work of the reader to reach such a conclusion, based on the context of the novel. While Captain Ahab is mentioned as having only one leg, Melville never says which one, again leaving to the reader to fill in the details. In this sense, literature is "parasitic," because it requires the reader to fill in many of the details of a given story.
This corresponds with other literary critics who argue that meaning resides in the receiver of a text. However, Eco suggests that authors can limit the reader's options for interpretation. For Eco, while much meaning resides in the interpretation of a text, the symbols employed by an author also have some meaning that a reasonable interpreter should understand. The "open work" then, is not an absolute condition. Some works will be more open than others.
Be patient; I will bring all this around to slash eventually.
Meanwhile, William Butler Yeats, who knew something about the imagination, and faeries, and fertile ambiguities, had this to say about people who dye their hair:
For Anne Gregory
'Never shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
'But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.'
'I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.'
I invite the fertile imaginations of LJ users worldwide to work out what that poem might have to do with Umberto Eco's idea of the work of art as "open."
But
black_dog was talking specifically about slash--about a book that is to all appearances written as straight, but that allows a slash reading. Why would it do so? Or rather, why would an author want her book to be available to radically alternative versions or interpretations? Don't most authors want to make their invented world and then invite you into it? Don't most authors want you, the reader, to accept their version of the world, lock stock, and barrel?Why indeed? Because ambiguity is fertile, is generative, is magical. Because an author is not a dictator; a book is not a totalitarian state. Reading is, by nature, democractic.
So, instead of watching Buckaroo Banzai for the twelfth time, I ate my tater tots and watched another favorite movie, The Celluloid Closet. To anyone out there with an interest in slash who has not seen it, I say: rent it immediately.
This movie has a lot to say about slash, and subtext, and ambiguity. It's partly a documentary. In it, for example, Harvey Fierstein says:
"There are lots of needs for art and the greatest one is the mirror of our own lives and our own existence."
Quentin Crisp says:
"My mother took me to the silent movies in a spirit of ostentatious condescension. She told me that they were nothing like real life and that I must not believe them. And she was wrong, because everyone who comes from England to America and goes back says one thing first: It's more like the movies than you'd ever dreamed. And it is."
Stewart Stern, screenwriter of Rebel without a Cause, says:
"People talk about whether that was a homosexual relationship [Sal Mineo's and James Dean's characters]. The intention wasn't that. But any film is at the same time an expression of a writer, and it's an offering to an audience to create their own film. Rebel was about tenderness, intimacy. It was an attempt to widen the permission to love."
Arthur Laurents, screenwriter, says:
"All minority audiences watch movies with hope. They hope they will see what they want to see. That's why nobody really sees the same movie."
The poet Paul Valéry (quoted in the movie) says: "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
With all this in mind, consider the movie Morocco, in which a veryverysexy Marlene Dietrich dresses as a man, transgressively erotic, and kisses a woman hard on the mouth--and does it to attract the man she is interested in. The man is thus forced into the voyeuristic position of watching her. Which, of course, is the same voyeuristic role we, the film audience, play--the same voyeuristic role played by every reader of a novel, spying on the secret world of the book, creeping into people's bedrooms, and even into their dreams.
Consider, too, that the man is Gary Cooper, a fellow whose sexual power on screen has a good deal to do with his soft, curved lips, long eyelashes, and delicate hands.
It is all veryveryconfusing, isn't it? But one thing's for sure: the average work of art is as open and full of holes as my aunt Frannie's tatted lace antimacassars. You could ride a coach and four through the gaps in most books.
Which is as it should be.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 02:40 am (UTC)And I really must rent The Celluloid Closet. That's one of those movies I have always forgotten to rent. (Btw, there's a discussion on
I definitely agree that all texts are open and I tend to get annoyed when I feel like the author is trying to close it off. Like I can't stand it when authors put in an epilogue or something that ties up the rest of everyone's life after the ending. When author's do that I almost feel like they're slapping my fingers away from the story so they can wrap it up and take it back home with them. But you can't do that. Once you tell the story it's free and you can't pull it back. It almost feels like they're killing the text, pinning it down like a butterfly specimin. It's the mark of a lesser storyteller, imo, because it shows you want the audience to be passive. You want to teach by rote instead of have a connection.
Remembering the conversation in
no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 03:01 am (UTC)He used to live quite near where you went to watch movies the other night: on east 3rd St and 2nd Ave, right down the street from the HQ of the Hells Angels, by the home of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, and across the street from the home of the Catholic Worker, where its founder, Dorothy Day, died. In other words, on a street set aside by the Men in Black for the use of Resident Aliens from all planets of this our wonderful Galaxy New York.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 01:52 pm (UTC)At the same time, ambiguity is one of the things I like about poetry. I like how, for example, I can write a poem, for no particular reason, and then think up the explanations and meanings for it afterwards, and I like the fact that the same set of words will bring up different ideas and images in other people's minds. I also like how books can be analyzed - how you can take vague lines of scenery or whatever that you're sure the author just put there on a whim and relate them to themes or characterization or make them metaphors, and it works, because that in the nature of symbolism, and things.
But I think the ambiguity or the open-textness is definitely important, if you look at things from a fanfiction perspective. Harry Potter fanfiction is so popular because, firstly, there are so many characters and they are all very vague, and almost cariacature-like, which invites speculation, and secondly because JKR's world is self-replicating. By which I mean, the rules on which her world differs from the real world are established and very easy to duplicate - it's easy to see how she derived the Wizarding World and easy to imitate her steps. In the same way Star Trek is like a fanfiction-unto-itself, which is one of the things that made it so succesful - you have your basic repeating format, findplanet-dostuff-leave, and then because space is infinite etc you have endless plotlines at your disposal - also why many episodes of Trek have typical fanfic-scenarios, everything from the AUs to mind-swapping and even to mpreg. But I digress.
So: all books are open if you make them open, because you can draw upon your own experience and your own perception and bring things into the text, and make interpretations, that weren't meant. And some books lend themselves much more easily to this process than others. I often wonder about what makes works accessible to fanfictioning, and I've thought it might be a sense of completion and self-containment in the texts. But I can't pin it down, because by my standards the Dune series (with a large universe to play in and an easily-grasped world-building idea) generate very little fanfiction. On the other hand, nobody writes, say, George Eliot fanfiction, because(from me limited readings of her) her stories are very much with the Get the Point Across, not built primarily on interesting characters or a specific world that others could pick up and use for themselves, but as a vehicle to communicate The Message, and meddling with The Message, seems, to me anyway, like stepping into a very wrong place and undermining the whole idea of the book.
And this is only a little related, but now I'm thinking about how people like fairytales and myth, and since forever people have been rewriting them and putting their own meanings into them, fanfictioning away, and that has been literature: overlaying your own themes and messages over an original structure, using your own perspective to retell a bare-bones tale. It seems so wrong to go after a finished, fleshed-out work and meddle with it. Does that imply that the HP books are somehow empty and un-filled-in, are not a complete statement of their author's message? Or is it that they seem so 'real' that stories can spin off them like they can spin off actual reality. And you could easily write, say, Hamlet fanfiction, and lay your perspective and message over that, and everyone would think you were incredible witty. And look, we've come full circle!
Wow. Haven't been inspired to go on at such length in a while. *grin*
no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-11 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 01:52 am (UTC)Great Expectorations slash, eh? I am picturing Miss Havisham/Estella... erk, it's like sticking a fork in my brain.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 10:08 am (UTC)Whoah. No. Not that bad. Just a side of Herbert/Pip.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 11:11 am (UTC)And now I want to write black-haired-Draco fic. Wah!
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 02:36 pm (UTC)Hair color, especially blondness, is definitely a Marker. I think a Draco who suddenly wakes up one morning to find he has dark hair would be rather intriguing.
I have always defied Danish genetic codes, and pictured Hamlet as dark-haired, like Sirius. But of course Hamlet is fair.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 02:39 pm (UTC)And Hamlet is fair? Really? Hamlet was always dark-haired in my head. But, you see, there's an example of hair color really not mattering at all. :D
By the way, did you ever get those icons?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-13 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-13 10:30 am (UTC)I have consulted the internet. Apparently this bitmap thing is a common problem. The internet tells me that the bmp-ing occurs when the Temporary Internet Files folder is full, and that if you clear the cache (Tools --> Internet Options 'delete files') the problem will be fixed. I am attached to my Temporary Internet Files, though, so I haven't tested it.
My new idea is that, perhaps, if you go into the Temporary Internet Files folder, the icons may have been saved automatically. It hasn't worked on my computer, though. You should be able to get there through My Computer -> C -> Documents and Settings -> Owner -> Local Settings -> Temporary Internet Files. Then organize them by Internet Address, and if the icons appear they'll be under my website address, and they're called haicon2.gif or something like that. Then you'll be able to just copy the files out of there. I have no idea if this will work, but the userpics from livejournal have been saved into my cache as gifs, and the format is preserved.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-13 02:22 pm (UTC)Meanwhile, I looked for the Temporary Internet Files folder within Outlook Tools, and couldn't find it. No mention of such a thing in Outlook Help either. God I hate Microsoft.
So I looked for it on my C drive in the WINDOWS folder, and found a Temporary Internet Files folder there. It has just one folder in it called "IE5" that is full of masses and masses of subfolders full of indecipherable stuff (probably crap). But when I tried clicking "delete" on the folder I got a message telling me that I was deleting a system folder and my programs might not work anymore.
This is why I hate Microsoft.
Will see if I can get an explanation of what to delete and how to delete it. O_o
Look!!
Date: 2003-11-13 03:09 pm (UTC)Many Tanks, as we say in the Marines.
no subject
Date: 2003-11-30 04:45 pm (UTC)And as long as I was replying to your other comment: "Ops (http://www.thedarkarts.org/authorLinks/Slightlights/)" may be the exception that proves your rule, though I hardly thought it transgressive at the time! (Caveat lector: I did write it relatively quickly a year and a half ago, and there's at least one thing I'd alter if I believed in doing so, but it was fun.)
no subject
Date: 2003-11-12 03:53 am (UTC)But on reflection I think there's another reason why I may have looked at the issue this way, and I think it only became fully clear to me upon reading your post. I think you make a wonderful point, citing the Celluloid Closet, about the correlation between the social aspects of homosexuality and the slightly oblique, tentative way of appropriating a text that is characteristic of slash. For a long time (and we're not totally past this), homosexual experience was defined by an oscillation between concealment and coded revelation. The intentional flashing of a gay-friendly code is a highly charged event, because of the very intimate way it signals -- for the individual who picks up on it -- a safe zone in an environment that is otherwise full of anxiety. In fact, I might even say that the flashing of this signal can feel like an erotic act itself, a directly sexual tease. It's certainly can feel even more significant (and this is an odd thing) than an overt, bland, propagandistic declaration of support.
So I wondered whether JKR was playing that particular game. And I think she is, for all the reasons outlined in that post. And to me, that signals a greater imaginative engagement between JKR and her gay readers than even a more overtly pro-gay text might represent. I think that's kind of cool.