In any situation where a writer is trying to stave off Death Of The Author, said writer may wind up better off by treating all such efforts as stillborn and climbing into the coffin provided.
In other news, Surrender Dorothy.
No one ever won an argument on the Intenet. I'd like to stop proving that now.
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Meaning is not singular, nor universal. And, honestly, I like it that way.
1940465
Once a story is written, the Author's meaning is forfeit to the meaning found by the readers. Many Authors don't like this.
For a moment there I thought you meant something else.
Out of curiosity, what prompted this?
1940462
Pretty sure you can't legitimately claim that a book means something the author insists that it doesn't. You'd never concede for a second that this sort of nonsense is valid in everyday life.
1940692
That is exactly what I'm saying. For example, religious texts have been reinterpreted hundreds of times to mean vastly different things. Author intent dies upon publication, after that, only the words on the page can say what the story means, and every reader is liable to find their own meaning based on their own life experiences and current emotional/intellectual/spiritual state.
1940692
1940465
I believe that Estee is referring to the comments on this story.
1940793 Oh, I don't know. I've gotten some *really* off-the-wall interpretations of some of the stuff I've written, and some miss-the-boat indications where I'm not sure the reader even knew there was a boat there. The Death of the Author trope exists *everywhere* there are writers, and sometimes you just have to sigh and realize you can't do two things at once, that is A) Write a story with a plot twist so obvious that everybody gets it while B) keeping the suspense up so that people will read through it to find out what the twist was. I hit something like that with Diamond Tiara Buys a Little Sister just recently. My objective was that the readers would be 5% "So is Rose really DT's..." and 5% "Oh, I knew that all along" with 90% "I should have seen it coming, but I was blinded by tears" and so far that's about what the comments have borne out, +/- 5%.
Tired about explaining about Rarity in a tree, are you?
We've got an excellent special offer for a very unique coffin this week--the lumber was specially milled to preserve all of the scenes of pegasus torture that were expertly carved on the original tree.
Truly, a vessel to strike fear into the ferrypony.
1940851
All of what you say is true, and I agree. I meant only that the reason behind Estee's posting this blog post with this observation was the discussion about that story
1940692
Oh, you definitely can. Authors are just human beings like everyone else, and sometimes they/we get things wrong while writing.
The author certainly is in a good position to argue for their preferred meaning, since they know the text extremely well, but the author will only be arguing as another reader. The author doesn't get to say "the text means this, because I say so and as the author my word is law". The author still has to argue based on what the text says.
The text ultimately means what the text means, which might end up being something different (or even something bigger and better) than what the author intended for it to mean.
(Takes off my lit student hat)
To Estee: Sorry for contributing to the slightly-less-metaphorical death of the author, I didn't mean to. If it's any consolation, I think your explanation of your thinking was very interesting, and I doubt it actually made anything worse. I enjoyed the story thoroughly, and feel that if you inspire such strong feelings with your characterization that means you're doing something right. Sometimes, reader complaints actually just mean "you put my feels through a rollercoaster and did it so well that now I'm really upset." And like Rainbow, they'll take it out on the most convenient nearby target.
So yeah. Sorry :(
-Daedelean.
1941246
You may be.
I'm not really a human being, I'm a horse.
Actually, I'm not really a horse.
I'm a broom.
1941246
1941021
1940851
1940793
'
There's a passage in Up The Down Staircase (a novel about the special tortures of trying to teach within the NYC public system during the 60s) which mentions an honors student who received a trashing grade because the system told her she hadn't interpreted her assigned book correctly. The student responded by writing the author, who then wrote the system to say that yes, that was in fact the way the thing had been meant and the student had it right.
The system's answer was to revamp the assigned book list so that it only contained works from deceased authors.
So. Yeah.
It just gets frustrating sometimes. I know everything is open to interpretation and don't want to stop that effort from being made. I haven't deleted a comment yet. But I do sometimes get weary of being told how much I subconsciously hate (insert character here) or that I must have felt something was funny/appropriate just because (ibid) did...
Also, during insomnia, I should really just step aside until it ends. Except that, having insomnia, I'm in no shape to judge that.
1940769
Death. Taxes. Creationism/evolution. Liberal, Conservative, Tea Party.
Okay, that finished destroying the Internet. Moving on.
1941246
I contend that if "Death of the Author" didn't exist, it would have to be invented to give lit students something to do.
1941274
I didn't mean to say or imply anything of the kind and I'm sorry if I did :(
1941291
The history of literary criticism is riddled with ideas that seem incredibly stupid in hindsight. Critics used to believe that the hallmark of proper, respectable literature was that everything an author wrote had to have been inspired by a real-life event or person, for instance.
1941274
I've seen this story passed around a lot and am most intrigued to learn that it has a specific origin. Do you know if this event actually happened, or did the author of the novel make it up?
1941315
Don't ever feel you have to censor yourself to avoid upsetting me -- and that goes for every reader, every time. There is nothing to apologize for. I want to see what others have to say, along with what might be found within any work. And it's not as if I have total rein on my subconscious. Stuff will get in now and again without my knowledge. Period.
I was tired. And sometimes, the line gets crossed between 'This is what I perceive' -- which I will never delete no matter how strongly I might disagree -- and 'This is what I know you meant, so stop denying it already!'
The former is debate. With insomnia, the latter feels like Smarty Pants Incident.
ETA: As for the essay incident, that's the earliest appearance I've seen. Snopes was unhelpful, but my search terms might have been suspect.
Given academia, I feel it's taken from a true incident, but good luck running it down.
1941347
Duly noted, and good luck with the insomnia :s
I may have to get hold of the novel and see for myself exactly what it says. I usually see this story told as a true incident, but if it was only a made up scene in a novel that would make a difference.
Well, as the saying supposedly goes, "Tragedy is when I stub my toe, comedy is when you fall down an open manhole." And given that you're writing about the interactions of six different characters with a wide range of personalities, it's probably inevitable that there's going to be somebody out there who identifies more with the victim of your comedic violence than its perpetrator.
1941246
Well, that's true as far as it goes, yeah. But the idea that you have to argue on what the text says doesn't mean quite the same thing when the author can create new text. It feels foolish to argue with, say, JK Rowling about whether or not Dumbledore is gay, because she can just go
and now it's text and you're definitively wrong. And then once you've got that, is there any fundamental difference between JK Rowling performing a public dramatic reading of HPatFH, and JK Rowling just saying "Dumbledore is gay"? I don't see any.
1941468
Lately, it's also been some amount of "That perpetrator would not perpetrate!"
...possibly the least scanable sentence of the day.
Incidentally, guess how many books you just got banned.
(Wonder how much Scholastic would pay for that...)
1941480
The author can do that, yes. But if he or she does, then he or she has, as you say, created a new text, which says new things (and arguably implicitly conceded that the original text didn't say what she had intended for it to say). You've chosen a fairly minor example of authorial intervention though. What if J.K. Rowling instead came out and said that she intended for Voldemort to be the hero all along, and the series to be the tragic tale of his defeat? Would that then be true just because Rowling said so?
Anyway, if we're trying to understand the death of the author it's probably best to step away from beloved texts we feel like strongly defending. We can all acknowledge that the world is full bad writers, who will try to write something and fail badly, and create texts that read more like parodies of their chosen genres than earnest examples. We have all seen arguments by (Group Of People We Disagree With) that are so bad that they only make the speaker look foolish, even though they were intended to be persuasive. Literary texts also are existing things, with shape and form. When we read a text, what we see is the text as written, not the author's intention.
As I said earlier, the author is in a good position to argue for their intended meaning, because they got to try to encode that meaning in the text in the first place and they are intimately familiar with how they did so. But if there is a disagreement between them, the author can't fundamentally change the text's nature just by saying so. Rowling can say Dumbledore is gay and that's no big problem because there was nothing in the text that implied he was straight. But if Harry had stumbled upon Dumbledore and McGonagall having a shag on the headmaster's desk in the second year, and established that this happened regularly, then readers could rightly have pointed to that to say that Rowling is wrong.
I actually saw, on some dumb gizmodo article, an argument that ended with one party admitting the other had convinced them and thus changed their mind. I was flabbergasted, I wanted to print out the conversation and frame it.
1941613
I think we mostly agree, then! The author's interpretation is usually going to be the one that fits the text the closest, because the text was shaped around that interpretation to begin with. But, that's as far as it goes.
1941274
That's taking "death of the author" rather further than most!
1941274
As one of those commenters, I'd like to respond.
You've used the basically the same bit two times now - first as a punchline, then as the setup. Both times you tagged the story as "comedy".
When I and some others raised our concerns with Dash's actions, these were your replies:
"And for those who feel the ending was a little cruel towards Twilight, consider that...may have just saved Equestrian life, civilization, and any hope for romance as they know it."
"No one can get back at you like your friends -- and on a few occasions, no one may have more right to do so."
"Some of those who commented felt Twilight's ending treatment was on the rough side....I thought it was about right."
"It's a prank, plain and simple, "
"So what we wind up with is four Bearers helping Rainbow out with what they feel is something harmless,"
Given that, I hope you can see why I would think you actually do regard Dash's actions as funny/appropriate. If I'm wrong and caused you pain as a result, I'm deeply sorry.
1944729
Also castration as joke and pony-inflicted punishment on invading rapist humans. (I still need to clear that up, but no one will believe me when I do.)
ETA: oh, and political elitism. Can't forget that. Anyone wanna try?
'About right' can apply as 'For the characters at that moment', but that's another pointless discussion.
...was that quote mining? Should I feel honored?
But... not always what the writer believes, frequently what the writer was thinking about.
Any rate... s'okay. So it goes.