Question about how we look at text

[sartorias]

I’m beginning with the assumption that before print, when few in Western Europe were literate, and most texts copied laboriously, there was a sense that texts were authoritative, or truth

Comments

[sartorias]

What happens if when you find out something about dead authors? I was talking about this the other day with rachelmanija. We were talking about how it was easier to deal with flagrant anti-Semitism in writers producing work previous to WW II, but I told her my discovery that one of my favorite Georgette Heyers, The Grand Sophy was published in 1950, with that truly heinous middle chapter, seriously interfered with my enjoyment of the book until I just read it and skipped that chapter--which has little impact on the story.

(She talked about reading Agatha Christie's autobiography, and her own unthinking use of Jewish stereotypes, until the war and the Holocaust occurred, and she met a Jew who had absolutely nothing like any of the stereotypical traits. After that, Christie's books tended to have villains be anti-Semites.)

[sartorias]

McKinley has had issues with readers? O dear.

Yes, I have heard about Season Three. . . I think I might just skip that one, and go straight to season four, if I do watch them.

[desperance]

...and a writer can pronounce on the sexuality of a character, completely external to a published text, and expect that to be taken into consideration; and, and, and.

I think you're right. And a part of me wants to deplore it - if it's not in the text, it's not in the story! - but I play these games too, or play up to them. If we blog about our work at all, I don't see how we can avoid it. I talk cheerfully about one series being an alternate-world scenario rising from the world of another series, with in-jokes planted for those who are listening to me; and I wait for readers to spot the metaphysical break in continuity between a novel and a short story ostensibly set in the same world; and, and, and.

Yes, things are changing. They probably always did, only slower: so that one writer wouldn't expect to spot change in their lifetime. These days? Six times before breakfast.

[sartorias]

Oh, that's right! The whole "Dumbledore is gay" scenario--except that the internal evidence was there, in the last book, for those who could discern it. Just oblique.

[joycemocha]

And usually we haven't seen this information until some time after the author has passed away, when his or her journals are published. My appetite for Steinbeck, for example, was whetted by reading his journal on East of Eden, and I snapped up the collections of Steinbeck letters and a compilation of journal plus letters about The Grapes of Wrath. But for me it hasn't been an analysis tool for a literary purpose as much as it has been a way to look at the writing process. So I've always been looking for this type of information. It's easier to obtain now--but it's also clear that others looking for the more argumentative side of literary criticism are also looking for this information as well, these days.

[steepholm]

Interesting questions. I think you're absolutely right that the internet has changed things, but in a way it's simply made available to the many what the members of cliques, salons and literary movements always had - a rather more inside view of the processes of composition, etc. I can see the problems, and it will be fascinating to see the ways people work around them (as they will), but on the whole it's a change I welcome.

More generally, I don't think one can set up a cordon sanitaire between different kinds of knowledge. Nor do I see a time when scholarship will consist not in gaining knowledge but preserving one's innocence of a text, keeping oneself "pure" for the nuptial embrace of mind and page. The idea of the isolated text was never a reality, I think - more an ideal or a kind of thought experiment that got fetishized by certain critics.

[sartorias]

I think you are right--but it could be taken more seriously, perhaps, by those of us who had little experience and more reading of criticism than in reading about lives and interactions.

I know it took me years before I learned about Madame du Deffand and how they basically passed around one of the Encyclopedists. He was a boytoy, little respected for his mental attainments, and I'd assumed the Enclyclopedia was made up by stern-browed, rigidly neutral experts, a la Britannica experts in modern times.

[thistleingrey]

Changing, definitely, but not only reader and text. I saw on my work-based Twitter feed this morning that a museum in Connecticut had retweeted something Demi Moore (@mrskutcher) had posted to Twitter, and I went o_o. Several layers of "huh" re: shifts in relationship of ... producer and consumer, I guess I'd say here.

I have to say, I'm unfavorably impressed by the fact that (apparently) very few people queried that author's choices in public prior to publication. (I was still reading r.a.sf.w at the time but never began following its .c sibling.) Also, aren't there multiple layers of palimpsest overlay/underlay?

[sartorias]

Well, the author in question was a bit of a salon hostess, if I'm not mistaken--who is going to criticize the hostess? Though I could be completely wrong about that as I hadn't visited that site for many years.

Oh yes, layers and layers.

[heleninwales]

Well, some of us did disagree over some things. Though the author was a valued member, it wasn't her group. But I think the problem in this specific case was that the people who might have said something were not au fait with the issues. Several of us feel very bad about this whole affair because it slid right past us

[sartorias]

This is completely understandable--also the fact that we don't always think but a few seconds about a post, or our answer, before we move on to the unending stream. Deeper or larger implications of an idea might escape our notice.

[klrichardsson]

I was thinking about this the other day. All literary theory aside (which really only sets you up to hate reading for pleasure), is there a place now where we can separate author and text? My problem is: can I enjoy a work and leave an author's politics/policies/homelife out of it? Are there books that are forever ruined for me because of some slip of phrase, some connection made between work and author's beliefs behind work? Can I let the world/work stand on its own and not be bothered by the *insert issue here*?

I wonder if we're too close to authors now. We get our information real-time, and there's none of that mystique anymore between creator of story and story. We know their dirty laundry lists, what they ate for breakfast, and I wonder if that's too much info -- if we're too close to them to do anything but read it all into the text. Maybe we need to step back and let the text speak for itself

[sartorias]

Well, I always liked literary theory after I got away from English majoring, and switched to history. Then I was free to read a critic, examine the text from its POV, and then take or leave what I wanted. (But during my brief stint as an English major, I utterly loathed the rigid lockstep existentialist approach that was de rigueur at the time, as most assignments were expected to employ this particular paradigm.)

The sense of reader entitlement has caused some posts of late--Guy Gavriel Kay was finger-shaking recently, I see links all over, and Neil Gaiman even stepped down from Mount Olympus on behalf of G.R.R. Martin, whose fans got vociferous about the long wait for his next volume.

[scribblerworks]

Ah! "Reader entitlement" is another topic altogether, I think. And one, frankly, that I am less mild about.

[klrichardsson]

I think too many English degrees warped my thinking (damn Lit Theory!), so it all kind of ties into the same thing, for me. Why is the reader reading the work? What does the reader expect to get out of it? How much does the reader appropriate, because the reader invested the time to read the work? What canon does the reader bring, based on the reader's socio-economic-cultural-whoo-haha-etc.?

Seriously, English degrees take all the fun out of reading. I think I'm nostalgic for the old days, when writers inhabited a shack in the woods, and only interacted with fen through their works. It makes it so much less complicated, since readers didn't have the forum to directly bitch at the author. ;)