The Fifth Element

[malsperanza]

black_dog calls me on my careless conflation of reader (of the text) and writer (of a new text based on one the author has read).

I was careless in conflating the writing of a fanfic with the reading of the underlying original fiction. I really like the distinction, which (oddly) I hadn't noticed. Must think more about that.

Nevertheless, if we start from the premise that all reading comprises an act of interpretation and filtering, one might well ask: What is a fanfic but a text that "reads" and interprets another text?

Oh, OK, I agree: Once we start reinventing the meaning of "read" and "text" and so forth we are lost. (We are somewhere near rue de Rennes, I'm pretty sure, because that is Les Deux Magots over there, full of Americans drinking pastis and hoping to trip over French philosophers.)

Setting aside the semantical question of whether writing a fanfic constitutes a form of reading or not, I would not say that I consider appropriation and interpretation the same thing, still less that "both [are] subsumed under the heading of appropriation." If anything, I think it's the other way round: appropriation is clearly (to me) a form of interpretation, or a means of access to interpretation, a tool of interpretation.

Let's take the most stripped-down example: an appropriation of one chapter of an HP book that repeats the text word for word without alteration, except that it is signed as being authored by one Roland Benjamin Malsperanza. The US Copyright Act has established that such an appropriation is not legitimate (in the crudest sense, which is to say, the legal sense) because it is not "transformative." The artist Sherrie Levine (who has run afoul of the US Copyright Act more than once) would disagree: she would argue that the mere fact of the appropriative act, the removal and re-presentation of that text in a new context, constitutes a transformation and therefore a new work.

That's a meager, poverty-stricken sort of interpretation, to be sure. It reduces the original text to an object of possessive desire--a mere object belonging to the desirer (Roland B. Malsperanza); and it reduces the interpretation to an almost contentless act: the act of swiping. But I would still say that even this reductive and insulting form of fanfic is an interpretation of the original text. Just not a very good one.

Admittedly, even the Supreme Court has fallen on its ass trying to grapple with the precise meaning of "transformative." For a thigh-slapping good laugh, go read the Supreme Court's decision in the 2 Live Crew case, in which Mr. Justice Souter actually provided the world, once and for all, with the legal definition of "parody" and "satire." Jeezus, I thought, after 2500 or so years of fretting, someone's finally sorted it out. What a relief. But it's gonna put an awful lot of folks up at Yale out of work.

So I will accept that there is a distinction between the transformation of the text that occurs in the mind of the reader and the transformation of the text that occurs when that reader writes a fanfic. But what interests me, essentially, is the transformation itself, more than the locus of the transformation.

That said, I do agree with you, black_dog, this far: "One can find authorial intent to be a fallacy and still ... believe that the artifact itself constrains possible interpretations; one can focus on reader response and still believe that generating this response is a technique and can have an intentionality behind it. One can believe that intent may be ultimately undiscoverable in principle but can be approached convergently, though careful marshalling of argument and evidence."

Not that I think authorial intent is a fallacy, but I take your point. It seems to me that the "engagement with intent" which you want to preserve is simply an aspect of reading, and therefore resides, like every other interpretive mechanism, within the subjective realm of the reader's reception of the text. Thus, we can propose (for example) that JKR leaves certain silences in her books so as to give space--consciously--to the reader (or fanfic writer) who wishes to create slash relationships for some characters. Having proposed that this space is created deliberately by the author, we then deduce that it was done for political reasons; it was JKR's way of allowing her books to take a political position in favor of slash without distressing her child readers or reducing her wonderful books to propagandistic fronts for her agenda.

Well, since this particular image of JKR's authorial intent is one that appeals to me, I'd like to embrace it. Perhaps I do, even. But I see problems with it, and not only because I am (for the moment) rooting for the Reader in the great struggle of Author, Reader, Text, and World for control of meaning.

1. We could ask JKR. She's alive; she might even tell us. If we presume to discern her (somewhat hidden) intent without asking her, are we not erasing her and creating a fictional JKR, one who suits our agenda?

2. Since the evidence for this piece of authorial intent is minimal, and consists mainly of silences which we perceive as friendly silences (together with a few other markers of a generically liberal position, such as people of color, strong female characters, and the like), do we not open up the books to an opposing presumed agenda? If there is room for those silences to be friendly to slash, there is also room for us to read those silences as utterly rejecting slash, obliterating it, fiercely hostile to it. Doesn't this leave the reader in charge, despite the fact that we have admitted the idea of authorial intent into the discussion?

3. In perceiving (or imagining) this author's intent to be an intent that we like, are we not attaching ourselves to the author in lieu of her text? I mean: attaching romantically. It is a kind of displacement, natural enough, understandable, but nevertheless strange. This is the strangeness of RPS: as if the author were a character in her own books, available to our interpretation.

Hmm. OTOH, perhaps the author is a character in her own books. Her (fictive) voice is that of Fictitious Omniscient Narrator. Well, I guess I could see that Voice as having identifiable authorial intent. But it gets awfully complicated and Scholastic (as in Aquinas, not as in the publisher of children's books, except, perhaps obliquely).

It's not that I think the author is a Dadaist, writing automatically like that monkey with a computer who may, some day, accidentally type Hamlet. I simply think that we can't ever know the author's intent; only that she has one.

But the black_dog then disarms me by saying: "I think that reading with the hypothesis of intent, reading with a suspension of appropriation and a deliberate if temporary submission to another sensibility, is a good mirror of this kind of interpersonal encounter, and has similar good effects." And this is a very beautiful assertion, which I cannot resist, still less object to.

All right. In the great battle of Author, Text, Reader, and World, I side with the reader. On the whole. That doesn't mean I am so dogmatic (:D) as to deny the existence or influence of the other three. Those Theorists (now, happily, unemployed, thanks to Justice Souter) who make such arguments seem to do so for the sheer fun of defending absurd positions. The pleasure, for me, is in the struggle among all four.

So now we return to that pesky appropriating writer, the fanfic author who creates a ... well, a fifth element and a sixth. Now we have Author, Text, Reader, World, Second Author, and Second Text. (And expanding around these like the gaseous rings of Saturn we have reviewers and the folks who write the screenplay adaptations, and the actors who create the stories in a new medium, film or audiotape or whatever. But let's ignore them, shall we? They are just aspects of the World, really.)


There is a lot to be said about what happens to the battle for meaning when the four elements of Author, Text, Reader, and World are enlarged to six, but I think I'll leave that for a separate post.

Comments

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

You clean your kitchen floor?? Wow.