Of course critics have all the same prejudices as writers. All the same, if something appears blatant to a critic, I don't see why the critic shouldn't point it out.

The way I see it, there are two sides to this process. The writer has something to communicate (and this is always true, even if it's just "enjoy this thing I did") and the reader has something to interpret (although not all readers are going to want to). These processes are only tangentially relevant to one another. Even if the author didn't mean to put any "deeper meanings" into a work, if someone finds one there, that means it's there. It's not as though writers buy big syringes full of "Meaning" that they can choose to inject or not inject into their work.

Given the tone of the OP, I think most of the attitude he's finding in these writers is on the client-side of the interpretation process. Which is to say, you're looking into this whole thing and seeing what you want to see, not unlike what I was just talking about.

I can buy the argument that an author may put meaning into their work subconsciously. However, I don't quite believe that just because someone finds meaning in something someone wrote, that it particularly means that. Everyone Is Jesus In Purgatory does exist, and it does get overused. As people tend to find patterns in things anyway, it's not unexpected that they should find patterns in other people's work as well as in nature.

In any case, I don't really work myself up over it: if someone wants to read tea leaves in books, that's their business. If someone wants to pretend that Law and Order or CSI are so deep, that's their business: they're crap and I don't watch them anyway. It keeps morons out of my hair.

Also, DBZ is not better than Batman, nor is Batman better than DBZ: they're two different kinds of bad.

All the same, if something appears blatant to a critic, I don't see why the critic shouldn't point it out.

Because being humble is a virtue? :p

I read and interpret literary criticism for a living (I'm a public librarian, and it's one guidance to policies for what we buy). The problem is less when the critic says "The view of women presented in this book really put me off" and more when the critic says "Obvious, Mr Authoré Writer is a gynophobe male chauvinist". Or "Only gynophobe male chauvinists enjoy Authoré Writer's books". Which is quite common, frankly.

The part about readers annoys me most. Back when I did time in academia, I took a short course in sociology of literature; if I had did life, that's what I would have been doing.

One thing pointed out then in our reading material was what the reader does with what she/he reads. It was also pointed ou that a lot of people working in the discipline tended to ignore the reader. As in, you read Authoré Writer's works, gets irritated with the depiction of women, and then present a theory about why his readers read him - without even talking to a reader, and at most checking who actually buys his books.

The main example of the opposite was Janice Radway. Radway studied the attitudes in Harlequin-style romances and what the readers who read them thought and how they reacted. While she found many things had been said about the subject, she found no one had studied the actual readers. They had just made a literary analysis and assumed things about the readership. Radway didn't just do that: she did interviews and investigations of actual Harlequin fans. (Of course, they might have lied. They probably did, all people do. But sociologists making quantitative research are quite aware of that, thank you) The results were quite different from earlier analysis, although Radway's personal views on Harlequin literature remained very low, to say the best.

Radway also pointed out that earlier investigations had contained many rather nasty influences of the researchers personal background: middle-class academis vs working class housewives, and their looking down on what was the objects of their research was quite visible. This is also something I see when people make criticism about works, often with no knowledge of their own stance and position. A friend of Indian descent, for instance, have pointed out that a lot of literature about adventure literature made by people who definitely were anti-imperialist and so on still is hideously racist and condescending to people in the third world, just in a different way than, say, a Biggles story.

The reader constantly absorbs and transforms what he reads. This means one, if not all "common" reader may do so in a completely different way than a critic does, since they are different people. This even happens with works which is made only to bring a change in the views of the reader, like commercials.

(This, btw, means that if someone, say, really gets a transformative experience from the old Transformers movie, it might not be the movie. It might be just you, even when it comes to positive experiences).

Erik

What I meant by "if you find meaning in something it means that something has meaning" was that meaning only exists inside your head. It's perfectly possible for the author's conception of the meaning and the audience's to differ, and there's no reason to say that any of these meanings are invalid, because the idea of "meaning" as a construct external to a subjective viewpoint doesn't make sense.

So what you're saying is that everything is pretentious.

Somehow, I had to think of Evangelion all the time while reading your post.

Did someone say weeaboo? 'Cause I think I heard someone say weeaboo.

edited 4th Nov '09 8:36:20 AM by Smokie

Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar...

Well beam me up Scotty!

Personally, my whole take on this is that it's perfectly alright for author tracts to exist. Every story, when it comes down to it, has them, as somebody is going to take something in a different light than somebody else.

Of course, most works should be took at face value, but some people (the viewers/readers/players) just can't seem to help themselves at all.

It's perfectly possible for the author's conception of the meaning and the audience's to differ, and there's no reason to say that any of these meanings are invalid, because the idea of "meaning" as a construct external to a subjective viewpoint doesn't make sense.

Oh yes, definitely! It gets ridiculous when you make claims about the author or other readers based on your interpretation, though. Then it comes close to, as I said, telepathy - or necromancy, when the author is dead. :p

Erik

Actually, the OP viewpoint bugs me for one simple reason: yes, it does.

Writing doesn't happen by accident; if words or images are in a text, it's because the author put them there a reason. A good writer thinks really hard about what that reason is, a bad one doesn't. Sure, it's possible to analyze things in a way that is Completely Missing The Point, but I think that's less a matter of the extent of the analysis and more of the quality of the analysis.

I don't think I can compare to Arilou's insightful takes on the rest of this, so I'll just say:

This seems inconsistent with  ^{your stated preference for fiction that is vapid and not intellectually stimulating.}

Stuff like that annoys the fuck out of me, because when I sit down to watch TV or read a good book I want just that: To have a little bit of relaxing fun, not for some fuckwad with a typewriter to try and preach his message to me. I gotta wonder why these people go through the trouble of writing it as some sort of story when they could just write an article or film a documentary instead. Either of those would take far less effort.

edited 4th Nov '09 8:49:32 AM by Haven

"Writing doesn't happen by accident"

I beg to differ. Have you seen my posts in Troper Updates lately?

Writing does (and will) happen by accident, but even then, there's going to be imagery and metaphors existent, it's just the way it works. However, what I see it as is that most things are usually inferred by the readers/viewers but not always by the creators. After all, one man's masterpiece is another man's worst idea to come around.

The only kind of writing I can think of that happens by accident is, say, a cat walking around on a keyboard. I would agree that is not a valid target for analysis.

But, for serious, writing is not something that occurs in nature. It is always the product of someone sitting down and choosing words. Depending on how good a writer you are, you choose these words with more or less deliberation or care—but just because they may not be chosen very well doesn't mean they're not chosen.

For instance, looking at the original post  ^*

^{I had a more detailed version of the following, but it came off really rude—but then, analysis is kind of an invasive activity}

, you might reasonably come to the Alternate Character Interpretation—as Hulk did—based on the words he uses, among other things, that James S Pratt is not being serious. Whether or not that's the case, it wouldn't be unreasonable to see the original post as hostile. Even if the OP didn't sat down and think "I'm going to choose words deliberately to make me sound as though I am at a precise level of anger", does it mean that we shouldn't read him as sounding angry?

To me, that's what all literary analysis and interpretation is like, except on a larger scale.

Well, the best way to think of it as is sort of (I know people will think it's stupid) like Rule34; if somebody's bound to take anything in existence and turn into something sexual, then that same person could take any kind of chain of words and get some kind of imagery, metaphor, or other meaning out of it... yes, even the random Rock-Falls-Everyone-Dies type of story or the purely random Crack Fic.

edited 4th Nov '09 10:09:27 AM by AJ the Black Dragon

Oh, well, sure. Not every meaning is inherent in the piece, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to try to find some.

But what I meant by "writing is not an accident" is just that: Since someone, a conscious living human, is always the one making the choice to use one word or image over another, I think it's valid to ask "Why did they do that?", a.k.a. "What does that mean?"

@OP: Hooray for anti-intellectualism!

Since someone, a conscious living human, is always the one making the choice to use one word or image over another, I think it's valid to ask "Why did they do that?", a.k.a. "What does that mean?"

And in many cases, since not even the author knew, any honest answer will be "Damn me if I know!"

Erik

Again: sure, they may not know why, but that doesn't mean there isn't a reason. There's always a reason that one word was chosen over another—if it's just "sounds prettier", for instance, what makes it so? Maybe the reason is something as simple as "the author read something in the news and a word from the article stuck with him, " but what was so compelling about it?

@OP: didn't you post essentially this same rant before a few weeks back? Why are you posting it again?

Again, it's all determined by the reader what the author was thinking at the time. Words do have power, but not everything's concrete.

I mean, for some people, the word "beautiful" screams MARY SUE!! However, somebody else reads it, it's all "how-hum-yeah"...

-ninja'd

edited 4th Nov '09 10:34:35 AM by AJ the Black Dragon

Morven: Attention cravings.

Again: sure, they may not know why, but that doesn't mean there isn't a reason.

I remain steadfastly unconvinced of the telepathic powers of literary critics, and very unimpressed with their ability to know themselves and how their own view influences what they read.

Erik

And that's not what I'm trying to convince you of. That's a meaning you came up with yourself. Honestly I think that your reading there isn't supported by the text you quote—I think it's a leap to make the conclusion that I mean "critics are infallible" based on what I said—but I can accept that maybe there's a huge pro-critic bias about which I'm oblivious. Do you see what I did there. :p

To me, the lack of telepathic powers is why it's necessary to analyze a piece to find out what the meaning is: we can't just read the author's mind, and the author is not necessarily consciously aware of all the associations (otherwise there would be no reason to do, for instance, something like freewriting), so we have to pick apart the text to make sense of it. And no, the analysis is not immune to analysis itself—I don't think anything is, really.

edited 4th Nov '09 11:20:03 AM by Haven

You know what? Maybe we should be like... Kids! Take everything literally and just act stupid about it and the like...

Or, we could simply accept that Most Writers Are Human and that humans are animals who have deep associations with words and pictures (yes, even cavemen were fond of storytelling and art, look at the cave drawings), in which we accept that all things have a deeper meaning than what's at face value.

edited 4th Nov '09 11:26:32 AM by AJ the Black Dragon

O HAI James

@ Lull up there: I've mostly Sorry, I skipped some posts. -ed this thread, but I'd like to marry you for that post.

Morven has solar energy!

Did I? I don't recall doing so, except insofar as I took a similar stance in the Japan And Values Dissonance topic—which that topic as a whole is a good example of what's wrong with this shit.

Bon Sequitor has solar energy!

There'd probably be a lot less anti-intellectualism in the world if the things that are called "intellectualism" were actually intelligent.

Haven has solar energy!

Just because words don't happen by accident doesn't mean the author is secretly describing his penis every time he talks about skyscrapers.

EDIT: That's what gets me though. There seems to be this inherent assumption that if you aren't searching for symbolism or trying to discern something about the writer's culture—or especially if you come to a conclusion that differs significantly from what everyone else is saying—that you're some sort of lesser being who just doesn't "get it." Fuck that. I "get it." I probably "get it" better than the analysts do.

edited 4th Nov '09 1:26:24 PM by James_S_Pratt