Does Word of God Matter?

[ljlee]

Originally posted to Avatar Online, but since I have long since despaired of intelligent discussion on most fan forums I'll repost here. See also The Myth of Canon (found via amyraine's essay recs), Death of the Author etc.

Comments

[vmuzic]

I agree with the word of the creators insofar as it supports my own view.

Seriously, I agree with you. In teachers school we are taught that reading is the process of making meaning. Whatever people decide to read into the story is what it means to them. It seems arrogant that one person can limit the confines of the story.

Plus, in Ember Island Players I thought they were explicitly acknowledging that Jet's death was "really unclear."

[ljlee]

reading is the process of making meaning

Echoes of death of the author there, methinks. It would be kind of boring for there to be only one interpretation of a story--the fuller the story, the wider the field of possible interpretations.

[amanda_violet]

I have a complicated relationship with Word of God. If it clears up something that was ambiguous or unclear, chances are I'll accept it. If it contradicts the headcanon I've contstructed, I'll ignore it. If it offers an interpretation of adequately explained events, I'll either agree or disagree (yes, Mr. Card, I do pity Ender and think he's nothing but a victim, you can't tell me otherwise).

I guess my attitude is thus: Word of God delivering factual information is okay, most of the time (unless God has been silent for so long that I've come up with my own facts. Missed the bus, dude). Word of God has only as much clout as another fan when offering interpretation.

[ljlee]

Yeah, I have no problem with Word of God as long as it's not meant to control the readers' perceptions and invalidate conflicting valid interpretations.

Ender's Game was sort of yaigh to me, personally. The concept that you can commit multiple murders before you shave and wipe out an entire race and still be considered a good person... and the incredibly contrived lengths the story went in order to make this happen... (including my perennial peeve, the villain with no motivation except to torture Our Hero) it was just sort of icky. After all that I'm surprised Orson Scott Card would have anything but words of praise for poor victimized Ender.

[amanda_violet]

My uncle gave me Ender's Game for Christmas when I was 11. I have a weird family.

Card's perspective on Ender (found in the foreword to my edition) is that he represents the "weird kids," the outcasts, nerds, introverts, etc. and is a "hero" for them. To which I say, as a weird nerdy introverted person, NO. If you read the story from that perspective, then it's a twisted, self-important escapist fantasy about the weird kid finally giving the stupid bullies what they deserve, nyah nyah. By contrast he criticizes people who pity Ender, which I do, because he is a child manufactured and manipulated to be a killing machine.

I actually like the book. I just don't like what he thinks it means.

[ljlee]

Ah yes, that makes sense. Ender never came across as any sort of hero to me, personally. I like your interpretation much better. :)

ETA: Evidently though, lots of geeklings like the book for the reasons Scott mentioned: It's a power trip for the teenaged outcast. How being manipulated into genocide and spending the rest of your life trying to atone for it is empowering, I'll never know. o_O If anything it's a horror story about an introverted geek's smarts being turned to terrible purposes.

[amyraine]

The flip side of the thesis of the Myth of Canon essay is the attitude that 'I'm emotionally invested in these characters therefore they should do what I want and if they don't do what I want the creators/actors/writers/producers are wrong, not me

[ljlee]

I can like or not like it, I can criticize it as poorly executed and cite reasons, but I can't tell them they are not doing the 'right' thing with their own work. That's ridiculous.

Oh obviously, nothing is an excuse for being a jerk. It's like that video you linked on your LJ, "it's okay to not like things, but don't be a dick about it."

Death of the Author means that "Word of God" is just one of many valid interpretations, it does not mean that word of fans gets to supercede Word of God. I wish some people would understand that.

Quoted for truth. Author comments are interesting, and so are authors' lives. If the focus is on the text, the influences that go into the text illuminate things about it without having to dominate interpretation. It seems like a contradiction to say the text is all-important and then ignore its context, though maybe it makes sense in post-modernism since the movement seems to eschew context.

Damn, I should see Prometheus one of these days. I thought it looked interesting, then it a blink it was gone!

[amyraine]

OMG is this relevant, regarding the movie "Prometheus". A quote:

"...until and unless we do get a sequel that puts all this stuff upfront, Space Jesus is - and can only be - one of many feasible backstories. Like Deckard’s is-he-isn’t-he status, no amount of digging into the movie’s thematic DNA or production history can answer this question definitively. If we don’t know, it’s because Ridley Scott doesn’t want us to know. He wants us to fight over it. Damon Lindelof quotes him as saying: ‘I would rather have people fighting about it and not know then spell it out, that's just more interesting to me.’"

Here's the original essay, if you want to read it first.

[loopy777]

As with most of my opinions, I have so many nuances on this one that it looks more like dithering than an actual opinion. It also gets into a big debate on the definition of "canon;" being someone who is actually minimally educated in religious history (or, specifically, Christian religious history), I go with a more traditional definition of canon, in that certain works can be canon, but behind-the-scenes info cannot be. Like, Rowling saying that Dumbledore is gay is not canon, but if a supplimentary source revealed it, then that document could be canon and so the fact of Dumbledore being gay would be in a canon source. A fact cannot be canon.

So, for me, Word of God is at best interesting information that I may with to take into account.

It also doesn't help that creators change their minds. Like, it used to be "canon" that Luke Skywalker's Uncle Owen was Obi-Wan Kenobi's brother. That fact appeared in a scene that was cut from Return of the Jedi, but was included in the novelization. George Lucas himself supported that view.

[loopy777]

So, we're down to the fact that Word of God is unreliable, and exists outside the fiction being discussed (which renders it hard to verify, more obscure, and an alien medium). Can it help with interpretations of events? In some ways. There was a Star Wars book where the climax was described unclearly, implying that one character had stolen the body of another character, but the author later clarified that the "clue" was simply meant to convey that the "hijacked" character survived the attack and merely absorbed one of the hijacker-character's unconscious habits as a result of the clash. The ending was obviously not meant to be ambiguous at all, and all the readers understood that much, so that Word of God simply decided which fandom camp was correct. Should it have been left to a subsequent work to clarify? Perhaps. On the other hand, it was nice to get the matter resolved and it looks like those characters aren't going to be picked up again anyway

[amyraine]

This sounds a lot like what my post-modernist professor was trying to get at--the only reliable thing is the text. I don't want to dismiss text-only interpretations, I just don't want to be limited to them

[ljlee]

Great argument hitting the canon purists where it hurts. The religious angle is actually a really good one because the history of the Bible itself, and the concept of the Bible as a unified canon... pretty much manufactured out of whole cloth. If actual omnipotent-omniscient-infallible God's revealed Word is so messy and fragmented, I don't have high hopes for the secular gods of fandom. And the collective, often corporate nature of creation in most of popular media just muddies the waters even more.

In this case, I think God is Dead. ;)

Word.