Tag: authorial voice

Authorial Intent vs. Reader Response (Pt. I)

Yesterday, I talked about authorial voice. I recognized, however, it can be a questionable endeavor to assert what an author really meant. Intra-textual clues can guide one or external communications with the author might assert elements.  It can be more difficult when the author lived a couple of millennia ago in a different cultural context than the reader’s, like in the case of Sophocles. Or if one is asserting implicit symbolism or meaning encoded in the text when the intra-textual clues are ambiguous.

Thus, as I thought about the authorial voice, I also thought about authorial intent vs. reader response. Just to toss out a few definitions:

First, authorial intent:

Authorial intentionalism is the view that an author’s intentions should constrain the ways in which a text is properly interpreted.

Authorial intentionalism has been tackled but another of different schools of literary criticism, but here I’m going to limit myself to reader response theory. It is nicely summarized over at the Poetry Foundation:

[Read Response Theory] gained prominence in the late 1960s, that focuses on the reader or audience reaction to a particular text, perhaps more than the text itself. Reader-response criticism can be connected to poststructuralism’s emphasis on the role of the reader in actively constructing texts rather than passively consuming them. Unlike text-based approaches such as New Criticism, which are grounded upon some objective meaning already present in the work being examined, reader-response criticism argues that a text has no meaning before a reader experiences—reads—it. The reader-response critic’s job is to examine the scope and variety of reader reactions and analyze the ways in which different readers, sometimes called “interpretive communities,” make meaning out of both purely personal reactions and inherited or culturally conditioned ways of reading.

Today, I thought I’d share a couple of quotes from authors whom I like who are rejecting how readers interpret symbolism in their works in ways they hadn’t intended. I’ll come back later this week with a quote or two from author(s) who fall more in the reader response category.

First from Flannery O’Connor from a letter:

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

The second from Ursula K. Le Guin and her The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction:

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing courses the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

The third from Ernest Hemingway and his Selected Letters 1917-1961:

Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.

While Le Guin is right to warn against pomposity and perhaps over- or clumsy use of symbolism, both appear to reject the meaning a reader might read into their stories (though that last line of Hemingway’s always leaves me wondering).

Authorial Voice

Some things on my mind have me thinking about authorial voice. So I’m going to do a few posts on various related topics. Authorial intent vs. reader response will come up later this week, but today I want to talk about authorial voice vs. a character’s voice.

Often times when I am teaching, this distinction is one that students struggle with. I think of the character Tecmessa in Sophocles’ Ajax. I actually used to have a pair of cats named Tecmessa and Ajax.

Tecmessa (Grey and White Tabby) and Ajax (Black Cat)

When I read it with students, they often think the play is sexist because of how Ajax treats Tecmessa (a sort of “shut up, woman” attitude). But I encourage them to note that there is a difference between a character’s voice and an author’s voice. To look beyond that one voice to see how she fits in the play as a whole. Ajax himself is dead halfway through the play, due to his rigid attitudes towards relationships and inability to adapt. Meanwhile, the definition of nobility Tecmessa asserted to Ajax (recognizing common humanity and the responsibilities we have to one another in community) is where Odysseus and Teucer (the two main positive characters) end up at the end of the play. Just because Ajax is sexist doesn’t make the play necessarily sexist. The authorial attitude towards Tecmessa is different than a single character.

This came to mind as I was reading reviews of the new Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Confession: I haven’t seen it yet. School is so crazy, I’m probably going to wait until spring break to resubscribe to Netflix and binge the dickens out of it. And the reviews don’t leave me in a hurry to watch it. I’ve already noted the discussions of Aang’s character being flattened out. The treatment of Sokka also seems flatter. Specifically, his character arc with his growth in his attitude towards women and traditional gender roles has been eliminated. As The Mary Sue notes in comparison to the Netflix One Piece live action treatment,

Taz Skylar’s Sanji was able to embrace the less-savory aspects of his character, so why was the choice to make Ian Ousley’s Sokka less sexist so prominent?Why introduce a character to develop if there is no character to develop? Much like Sanji, Sokka’s attitude toward women is a key trait that is necessary to include, in order to show growth. If the One Piece writers could navigate how to adjust Sanji to fit their series while reflecting his in-anime character, surely those writing Avatar: The Last Airbender could have done the same with Sokka.

In another post centered on this issue, the actor playing Sokka is quoted as saying:

“I feel like we also took out the element of how sexist [Sokka] was. I feel like there were a lot of moments in the original show that were iffy.”

🤦🏻‍♀️ Having a sexist character isn’t iffy -it’s how the world around the character reacts that makes it iffy or not. And Sokka’s sexism was (as I recall) shown to be in error and occasions for learning. The Mary Sue provides good specific examples and how they are handled. And note how it relates the larger issues of the social norms of the Water Tribe (that were challenged and changed in later books) as well as the war trauma Sokka had suffered as a young boy. And if you want to fight sexism, eliminating it from your narrative doesn’t accomplish anything. Including it in a character who grows from it might lead readers to see themselves and grow along with the character.

I’ll highlight how it is handled in the opening episode, as Rambler Kai notes and provides the video for on Twitter:

(This and many other Twitter examples at the Mary Sue).

I’m sad to think about the character as made less interesting and just more flat, but also see that mistake I’ve often seen in my students – mistaking a character’s voice for the authorial voice. I’ll repeat what I said about: watch how the world around the character reacts when weighing how the author might be leading you to respond to that character’s point of view.