Open text

[malsperanza]

Meanwhile, something 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.