Another Fandom Anniversary, Sort Of
In addition to being the birthday of one of my favorite characters, Neville Longbottom, today is also a bit of a fandom anniversary. Unfortunately, it’s not a terribly happy one. Five years ago today was my most extensive post in my least successful thread ever at SQ: “Through JKR’s Glasses.” (The thread is of course unavailable, as the old SQ EZBoard no longer exists as far as I know, and that thread had dropped off the boards before the website transfer anyway. The starting date of the thread was some unknown date in late July; I only know July 30 because I still have a document file, saved on that date, of a later post I wrote replying to several people.)
The Original Thread
The background to my original post was not, interestingly enough, a ship debate. It was only later that my literary theorizing was put to service in the shipping wars, as that environment tended to become a magnet for every misguided and misapplied theory that people could twist to their preferred ends. But this, my original foray into the world of literary theory, was prompted (if I recall correctly) by arguments over the moral qualities of Sirius Black.
Specifically, what I was noticing was that some people were starting to judge Sirius as they would a real-life person: “Sirius did such-and-such, so he’s a bad person” (stated in a more refined manner, of course, but the idea was something along those lines). This seemed to reflect a bit of a disconnect with JKR’s own presentation of Sirius; she seemed, rather, to view him as a character who was flawed in various ways, and who had done one particularly horrible thing at age sixteen, but who in spite of all that was ultimately a good guy.
Note to anyone wishing to jump in to the comments and argue about Sirius: Please don’t. That’s not my point here, okay?
Now, a disagreement with JKR’s moral presentation of characters and actions in the story wouldn’t by itself have prompted me to raise theoretical objections. I myself disagree with JKR’s moral implications on quite a few points, though not enough to spoil the story for me. Rather, my objection was to the practice of leaving the author out of the picture entirely. And so my primary point in the original post of the “Through JKR’s Glasses” thread was that saying “this person is presented as a bad character,” and saying “this person is presented as a good character, but I disagree with the author’s moral judgment on that point” are two entirely different statements, and that to fail to distinguish them would add unnecessary confusion to the discussion.
Big mistake. The thread drew the attention of, it seemed, everybody that opposed my position, and was largely a bore to anyone who generally shared my perspective. You must understand, of course, that at the time I knew nothing of literary theory, and of how overwhelmingly it opposes the idea of paying attention to the author. I was, of course, informed of this quite thoroughly, quite shortly. (In typing the previous sentence, I was tempted to say “…was shortly informed of this in no uncertain terms”; but that would have been incorrect, as more than a few of the terms involved were quite uncertain indeed. More on this in a few more paragraphs.)
Although several people jumped in to oppose me on the thread (most of them missing my point entirely), there were two highly-educated people in particular who went back and forth with me several times. One of these was more moderate about it, coming from the perspective of the “New Criticism” (as it was called in the mid-20th century, when it actually was new), which defines the meaning of a literary work as that which could be known about it from only the published text; I ended up parting company with her on, as far as I know, reasonably polite terms. The other was more extreme, coming from a Deconstructionist point of view, which denies the possibility of any stable literary meaning at all. So the thread ended up forcing me to debate, unaided, ideas of which I’d never heard before, which seemed off the wall but which were complex enough that it wasn’t easy to determine what was “wrong” with them. It was not a pleasant experience, and left me wishing I’d never brought up the subject in the first place.
(I should clarify that “unaided” refers only to the substantive debate itself. Shortly after I finally thought I had figured out the source of the misunderstanding-basically, that we were using different meanings of “meaning”-the Deconstructionist apparently wrote something snarky in reply, or at least snarky enough to get zsenya and arabellasq to jump in to defend me, and to send me emails apologizing for the fact that I’d been treated like that on their boards. The Deconstructionist abandoned the SQ boards shortly thereafter.)
The Aftermath: I. In Pursuit of Literary Theory
So after this, I did some reading up on literary theory, trying to figure out where all these crazy ideas were coming from. I found that there were various ideas in circulation, with my own perspective being the only one that wasn’t considered acceptable by much of anybody in the field. (This didn’t faze me; my perspective on present-day classical-music composition is in a similar position of unique disfavor among reputable scholars. So I’ve been there before.)
One of the views I’d encountered on the SQ thread, the “New Criticism,” was (it seemed from the reading I did) viewed as somewhat dated and out of favor. I did have some sympathy with that view: I at least agreed with them that some form of objective knowledge is possible, and, given that their ideas were developed in an era when it was common for critics to go overboard on the supposed significance of biographical details about the authors, I could sympathize with their desire to focus on the text itself. However, I could not agree with their view that it was somehow inherently “fallacious” to consider extra-textual information about a literary work (I was tempted to call this view “The ‘Intentional Fallacy’ Fallacy”). But still, I considered my disagreement with them to be only a literary one (making differing choices about what questions to try to answer about the literary work), rather than a philosophical one.
The views that seemed to be more current were “Reader-Response Criticism” and Deconstruction, both of which deny the possibility of objective literary meaning. (Reader-Response seems to define literary meaning as whatever a community of readers makes it; Deconstruction seems to define it as an endless interplay of ideas suggested by the text, or something like that. I speak with uncertainty here, especially about Deconstruction, not only because I’m describing ideas with which I have little sympathy and which are based on philosophical positions with which I strongly disagree, but also because the theorists of Deconstruction seem to use their essays to illustrate their points about the impossibility of establishing a clear meaning of a text.)
(Some sources suggest that even Deconstruction is a bit dated. Apparently the more recent ideas are post-colonial and similar approaches, which seem to presuppose a neo-Marxist view of the world. I found these of little interest; among other things, they have the effect of making literature a sub-discipline of political philosophy.)
Eventually, I came across an interesting (and, amazingly, a readable) little book titled Against Theory. This is a collection of a series of essays from various literary perspectives, published in the early 1980’s, arguing over their respective concepts of “literary meaning.” I was interested to see that the authors of the title essay (Benn and Michaels), although they attempted to distinguish their position from the classical view which I hold, and although their reputation put them in the “Reader-Response” camp, didn’t really disagree with me on any point of substance. However, in making my way through the essays in the series (including Benn and Michaels’ later reply to their critics), I began to notice that what was happening is that everyone was using a different definition of “meaning,” and then criticizing everyone else for not using the term the same way they did. (As far as I could tell, only one of the authors-I think he was a Deconstructionist-even recognized that a disconnect of terms was going on, and even he didn’t seem to realize it very well.) And so I concluded: “Hey, wait a minute-these people are university professors, and they can’t even recognize the point on which they’re talking past each other.” It was at about that point that I began to lose interest in capital-T Theory, deciding that it wasn’t really going to add much to my understanding of anything. (It was also about then, if I recall correctly, that I thought up the phrase “The Definition Fallacy”.)
The Aftermath: II. Theory and Fandom
In some ways I regretted having delved into the subject at all. But the awareness of the issues did come in handy a few times. The first instance of this was about a month after the original thread, when some people decided to come over to SQ to debate ship, and one of them used a really shallow version of philosophical relativism in support of his position: something like “You’re not JKR, so you have no way of knowing what JKR meant by what she said.” I replied that “by that logic, language is meaningless and communication is impossible, since whatever anybody says about anything, we’ll never be able to know what they meant by it. So, in that case, I guess all I have to say is: Ahorpae ofa rgioa aoiarejho aroih a aroegia rhogneia? ahp ota rghoih ruhguiaze r hh gf afhgld fdklah.” (Or words to that effect.)
(Incidentally, it’s been suggested by some that that post of mine may have been the origin of random typing in the SQ collective vocabulary. This may be true-it did seem to be shortly after that incident that the Professors started doing that-but I had always assumed that the Professors had developed that habit of independently of me. In particular, they used random typing to indicate laughter, while I used it to make a philosophical point. I’d be honored if I did turn out to be the originator, but am guessing probably not. However, if anyone knows for sure, either way, I’d be interested to hear it.)
It was also at least partly as a result of those thought processes that I began to become aware of conflicting definitions of terms, used without awareness of the conflict (“Definition Fallacies”) as a common source of misunderstanding in discussions. In particular, this led me to coin the phrases “Canonical Shipping” and “Preferential Shipping,” which I think helped some of the “Preferential”-type H/H shippers to get along better with Quillers (and perhaps vice versa), realizing that we and they weren’t really necessarily disagreeing, we just had different tastes.
But, on the negative side, the thread did sort of mark the beginning of my “hitting the wall” at the Quill, running into the limits of my ability to elevate the intellectual quality of the discussions. The core old-school Quillers were, in general, pretty good about distinguishing their own perspectives from JKR’s when the two didn’t match. But most of them were less conscious of the issue than I was, and (probably to their credit) less bothered by it when people started mixing personal and canonical perspectives in the threads. And so, as the community grew, threads that frustrated me became increasingly common. (I should emphasize that I don’t think being able to remain unbothered by the sort of ideas that frustrate me makes you an unworthy person. If anything, it makes you a better person than I am! But though the frustration is not an ideal thing to have, it is there, and eventually I had to back off a bit from things.)
Conclusion: An Attempted Clarification of My Views on Literature
So anyway-after the various interactions with fandom people and scholarly texts-my view of literature is more or less as follows:
1. I believe that, although we humans are imperfect in our reasoning, so that there’s no absolute and final way of verifying that we haven’t made a mistake on something, nevertheless reasonably stable knowledge is possible. As we learn more about something, we have more and more of a basis for reaching a conclusion, until finally we can say it’s “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Of course “beyond reasonable doubt” claims are only as good as the person making them is reasonable; but still, reasonable conclusions are possible, and I’ve never met anybody who lived as thought they weren’t. (This was the point of my random-typing argument in August 2001.)
2. There are, however, various purposes with which one may approach literature. One may read to understand the author’s intended implications, or to understand the psychological reasons that make such a story appeal to its readers, or to give a perspective from a given religious or political standpoint, or various other possibilities. This choice of how to read is essentially arbitrary, and can’t really be proven right or wrong. (If a person says “I think it’s sweet when Harry and Hermione ride the Hippogriff together, and I don’t care what JKR meant by it,” there’s nothing actually incorrect about that; but if a person said, “I think JKR plans for Harry and Hermione to become a romantic couple,” that’s a different story.)
3. It is important to make sure that the assumptions brought to one’s discussion of literature match the question one is trying to answer. Some of the prevailing literary theories (the “New Criticism” in particular) seem to have been developed primarily for the study of poetry, in which ambiguity and multiple possible meanings are often part of how the poem is intended to work. But a theory that works well with poetry may not work so well with a novel-and especially not when the novel is a multi-part mystery in progress, of which only the author knows the ending, and of which the author has revealed carefully selected hints to interested readers outside of the published text. (In particular, if you’re trying to figure out how a story in progress is going to end, rejecting authorial statements as a source of information is quite counterproductive indeed.)
4. I still believe that clear discussion is best supported by a careful distinguishing of personal from authorial perspectives-especially, by distinguishing “I think this is good/bad” from “The author is presenting this as good/bad.” But I suppose it’s a bit much to expect everybody to be able to recognize that distinction.
(“5.” I recognize the possibility that this LJ thread might spin out of control, just like the original one on SQ did five years ago. So it might be best not to post anything here that you want to keep, unless you’ve saved it someplace else. This post’s permanent existence is not guaranteed!)
The Original Thread
The background to my original post was not, interestingly enough, a ship debate. It was only later that my literary theorizing was put to service in the shipping wars, as that environment tended to become a magnet for every misguided and misapplied theory that people could twist to their preferred ends. But this, my original foray into the world of literary theory, was prompted (if I recall correctly) by arguments over the moral qualities of Sirius Black.
Specifically, what I was noticing was that some people were starting to judge Sirius as they would a real-life person: “Sirius did such-and-such, so he’s a bad person” (stated in a more refined manner, of course, but the idea was something along those lines). This seemed to reflect a bit of a disconnect with JKR’s own presentation of Sirius; she seemed, rather, to view him as a character who was flawed in various ways, and who had done one particularly horrible thing at age sixteen, but who in spite of all that was ultimately a good guy.
Note to anyone wishing to jump in to the comments and argue about Sirius: Please don’t. That’s not my point here, okay?
Now, a disagreement with JKR’s moral presentation of characters and actions in the story wouldn’t by itself have prompted me to raise theoretical objections. I myself disagree with JKR’s moral implications on quite a few points, though not enough to spoil the story for me. Rather, my objection was to the practice of leaving the author out of the picture entirely. And so my primary point in the original post of the “Through JKR’s Glasses” thread was that saying “this person is presented as a bad character,” and saying “this person is presented as a good character, but I disagree with the author’s moral judgment on that point” are two entirely different statements, and that to fail to distinguish them would add unnecessary confusion to the discussion.
Big mistake. The thread drew the attention of, it seemed, everybody that opposed my position, and was largely a bore to anyone who generally shared my perspective. You must understand, of course, that at the time I knew nothing of literary theory, and of how overwhelmingly it opposes the idea of paying attention to the author. I was, of course, informed of this quite thoroughly, quite shortly. (In typing the previous sentence, I was tempted to say “…was shortly informed of this in no uncertain terms”; but that would have been incorrect, as more than a few of the terms involved were quite uncertain indeed. More on this in a few more paragraphs.)
Although several people jumped in to oppose me on the thread (most of them missing my point entirely), there were two highly-educated people in particular who went back and forth with me several times. One of these was more moderate about it, coming from the perspective of the “New Criticism” (as it was called in the mid-20th century, when it actually was new), which defines the meaning of a literary work as that which could be known about it from only the published text; I ended up parting company with her on, as far as I know, reasonably polite terms. The other was more extreme, coming from a Deconstructionist point of view, which denies the possibility of any stable literary meaning at all. So the thread ended up forcing me to debate, unaided, ideas of which I’d never heard before, which seemed off the wall but which were complex enough that it wasn’t easy to determine what was “wrong” with them. It was not a pleasant experience, and left me wishing I’d never brought up the subject in the first place.
(I should clarify that “unaided” refers only to the substantive debate itself. Shortly after I finally thought I had figured out the source of the misunderstanding-basically, that we were using different meanings of “meaning”-the Deconstructionist apparently wrote something snarky in reply, or at least snarky enough to get zsenya and arabellasq to jump in to defend me, and to send me emails apologizing for the fact that I’d been treated like that on their boards. The Deconstructionist abandoned the SQ boards shortly thereafter.)
The Aftermath: I. In Pursuit of Literary Theory
So after this, I did some reading up on literary theory, trying to figure out where all these crazy ideas were coming from. I found that there were various ideas in circulation, with my own perspective being the only one that wasn’t considered acceptable by much of anybody in the field. (This didn’t faze me; my perspective on present-day classical-music composition is in a similar position of unique disfavor among reputable scholars. So I’ve been there before.)
One of the views I’d encountered on the SQ thread, the “New Criticism,” was (it seemed from the reading I did) viewed as somewhat dated and out of favor. I did have some sympathy with that view: I at least agreed with them that some form of objective knowledge is possible, and, given that their ideas were developed in an era when it was common for critics to go overboard on the supposed significance of biographical details about the authors, I could sympathize with their desire to focus on the text itself. However, I could not agree with their view that it was somehow inherently “fallacious” to consider extra-textual information about a literary work (I was tempted to call this view “The ‘Intentional Fallacy’ Fallacy”). But still, I considered my disagreement with them to be only a literary one (making differing choices about what questions to try to answer about the literary work), rather than a philosophical one.
The views that seemed to be more current were “Reader-Response Criticism” and Deconstruction, both of which deny the possibility of objective literary meaning. (Reader-Response seems to define literary meaning as whatever a community of readers makes it; Deconstruction seems to define it as an endless interplay of ideas suggested by the text, or something like that. I speak with uncertainty here, especially about Deconstruction, not only because I’m describing ideas with which I have little sympathy and which are based on philosophical positions with which I strongly disagree, but also because the theorists of Deconstruction seem to use their essays to illustrate their points about the impossibility of establishing a clear meaning of a text.)
(Some sources suggest that even Deconstruction is a bit dated. Apparently the more recent ideas are post-colonial and similar approaches, which seem to presuppose a neo-Marxist view of the world. I found these of little interest; among other things, they have the effect of making literature a sub-discipline of political philosophy.)
Eventually, I came across an interesting (and, amazingly, a readable) little book titled Against Theory. This is a collection of a series of essays from various literary perspectives, published in the early 1980’s, arguing over their respective concepts of “literary meaning.” I was interested to see that the authors of the title essay (Benn and Michaels), although they attempted to distinguish their position from the classical view which I hold, and although their reputation put them in the “Reader-Response” camp, didn’t really disagree with me on any point of substance. However, in making my way through the essays in the series (including Benn and Michaels’ later reply to their critics), I began to notice that what was happening is that everyone was using a different definition of “meaning,” and then criticizing everyone else for not using the term the same way they did. (As far as I could tell, only one of the authors-I think he was a Deconstructionist-even recognized that a disconnect of terms was going on, and even he didn’t seem to realize it very well.) And so I concluded: “Hey, wait a minute-these people are university professors, and they can’t even recognize the point on which they’re talking past each other.” It was at about that point that I began to lose interest in capital-T Theory, deciding that it wasn’t really going to add much to my understanding of anything. (It was also about then, if I recall correctly, that I thought up the phrase “The Definition Fallacy”.)
The Aftermath: II. Theory and Fandom
In some ways I regretted having delved into the subject at all. But the awareness of the issues did come in handy a few times. The first instance of this was about a month after the original thread, when some people decided to come over to SQ to debate ship, and one of them used a really shallow version of philosophical relativism in support of his position: something like “You’re not JKR, so you have no way of knowing what JKR meant by what she said.” I replied that “by that logic, language is meaningless and communication is impossible, since whatever anybody says about anything, we’ll never be able to know what they meant by it. So, in that case, I guess all I have to say is: Ahorpae ofa rgioa aoiarejho aroih a aroegia rhogneia? ahp ota rghoih ruhguiaze r hh gf afhgld fdklah.” (Or words to that effect.)
(Incidentally, it’s been suggested by some that that post of mine may have been the origin of random typing in the SQ collective vocabulary. This may be true-it did seem to be shortly after that incident that the Professors started doing that-but I had always assumed that the Professors had developed that habit of independently of me. In particular, they used random typing to indicate laughter, while I used it to make a philosophical point. I’d be honored if I did turn out to be the originator, but am guessing probably not. However, if anyone knows for sure, either way, I’d be interested to hear it.)
It was also at least partly as a result of those thought processes that I began to become aware of conflicting definitions of terms, used without awareness of the conflict (“Definition Fallacies”) as a common source of misunderstanding in discussions. In particular, this led me to coin the phrases “Canonical Shipping” and “Preferential Shipping,” which I think helped some of the “Preferential”-type H/H shippers to get along better with Quillers (and perhaps vice versa), realizing that we and they weren’t really necessarily disagreeing, we just had different tastes.
But, on the negative side, the thread did sort of mark the beginning of my “hitting the wall” at the Quill, running into the limits of my ability to elevate the intellectual quality of the discussions. The core old-school Quillers were, in general, pretty good about distinguishing their own perspectives from JKR’s when the two didn’t match. But most of them were less conscious of the issue than I was, and (probably to their credit) less bothered by it when people started mixing personal and canonical perspectives in the threads. And so, as the community grew, threads that frustrated me became increasingly common. (I should emphasize that I don’t think being able to remain unbothered by the sort of ideas that frustrate me makes you an unworthy person. If anything, it makes you a better person than I am! But though the frustration is not an ideal thing to have, it is there, and eventually I had to back off a bit from things.)
Conclusion: An Attempted Clarification of My Views on Literature
So anyway-after the various interactions with fandom people and scholarly texts-my view of literature is more or less as follows:
1. I believe that, although we humans are imperfect in our reasoning, so that there’s no absolute and final way of verifying that we haven’t made a mistake on something, nevertheless reasonably stable knowledge is possible. As we learn more about something, we have more and more of a basis for reaching a conclusion, until finally we can say it’s “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Of course “beyond reasonable doubt” claims are only as good as the person making them is reasonable; but still, reasonable conclusions are possible, and I’ve never met anybody who lived as thought they weren’t. (This was the point of my random-typing argument in August 2001.)
2. There are, however, various purposes with which one may approach literature. One may read to understand the author’s intended implications, or to understand the psychological reasons that make such a story appeal to its readers, or to give a perspective from a given religious or political standpoint, or various other possibilities. This choice of how to read is essentially arbitrary, and can’t really be proven right or wrong. (If a person says “I think it’s sweet when Harry and Hermione ride the Hippogriff together, and I don’t care what JKR meant by it,” there’s nothing actually incorrect about that; but if a person said, “I think JKR plans for Harry and Hermione to become a romantic couple,” that’s a different story.)
3. It is important to make sure that the assumptions brought to one’s discussion of literature match the question one is trying to answer. Some of the prevailing literary theories (the “New Criticism” in particular) seem to have been developed primarily for the study of poetry, in which ambiguity and multiple possible meanings are often part of how the poem is intended to work. But a theory that works well with poetry may not work so well with a novel-and especially not when the novel is a multi-part mystery in progress, of which only the author knows the ending, and of which the author has revealed carefully selected hints to interested readers outside of the published text. (In particular, if you’re trying to figure out how a story in progress is going to end, rejecting authorial statements as a source of information is quite counterproductive indeed.)
4. I still believe that clear discussion is best supported by a careful distinguishing of personal from authorial perspectives-especially, by distinguishing “I think this is good/bad” from “The author is presenting this as good/bad.” But I suppose it’s a bit much to expect everybody to be able to recognize that distinction.
(“5.” I recognize the possibility that this LJ thread might spin out of control, just like the original one on SQ did five years ago. So it might be best not to post anything here that you want to keep, unless you’ve saved it someplace else. This post’s permanent existence is not guaranteed!)