Next Up: Author Intent vs. Reader Response

Recently, I was talking to a classmate who said that, regardless of the many different readings and analyses of stories that are made, the ultimate and definitive meaning of a story should be the one the writer intended it to be. I jokingly said that my classmate obviously was not a New Critic, because in my understanding they completely ignore author intent and focus only on the text as an end in itself (unless I understood Garry Sherbert incorrectly, which is entirely possible).

On this topic, I am working on an unrelated essay right now and came across an interesting quote by William Faulkner, about his novel ‘Sanctuary,’ that reads “Faulkner suggests that Popeye, the shining voyeur, is very real, that we can perhaps recognize his presence within ourselves: he is merely “another lost human being. He became a symbol of evil in modern society only by coincidence but I was still writing about people, not about ideas, not about symbols.”” William Faulkner himself has said that he wrote the book merely as a potboiler to make some money off a popular genre and that he did not intend for his character, who is now viewed as the epitome of evil, to be a symbol of evil. And yet, people go on writing essays about how Popeye is a symbol of evil. If even he can’t dictate the direction of critique with respect to his stories, I suppose there’s no hope for the rest of us. In this book of Faulkner’s, there have been essays written that say the main female character essentially brought on her own rape, and obviously other essays that violently refute that assertion. If I, as a woman, had written that book, I would be extremely disturbed to think that anyone would read my story as suggesting that a woman asked to be raped. But what if that kind of assessment were made after I was already dead and could say nothing to deny it? Then that might become a legitimate reading of my work, as it has of his.

I think that’s a difficult thing to accept about writing, the fact that once it’s out there in the world people will read it in whatever way is relevant to them and we have to accept that. It’s kind of like giving birth to a baby and then letting everyone else in the world just name it whatever they want to name it so that it has a million different names. One day you won’t be around anymore to call it by the name you gave it, and it will go on having perpetual multiple personality disorder for all eternity. It’s kind of like the way U of R MFA grad student, Mike Binzer, recently had his final portfolio on display at the MacKenzie Art Gallery -- a series of abstract representations of the human body – and my daughter walked in and said “This one is an otter, this one is a tree trunk, this one is a submarine (or a plum), this one is a snake, this one is a manta ray, etc.” Granted, she’s only six years old so he might not take her imaginative associations as seriously as an adult’s. But my point is that I think this is the nature of art, something that we as artists have to come to terms with. People will not always see our work the way we want them to see it and we have to find some way of being able to live with that and still sleep at night.

Do you spell that with an uppercase or a lowercase ‘w’?

In art class, my professor has been asking “What is art?” His idea is that something cannot be called art, and someone cannot be called an artist, until their work has been curated for exhibition by people in the “art world” and put on display. Even someone who creates amazing things is not an artist until this happens.  A girl in our class said she had a painting on display in a cafe somewhere, so did that make her an artist? “No.” His opinion is that the closer artwork is to food, the less likely it is to be called art (which I guess is why in Chapters Margaret Atwood’s books are on the furthest possible wall from Starbucks, which is instead closest to the teenage, self-help, and children’s section).

But I kind of agree with him with respect to the art of writing. I would say that I am a person who enjoys creative writing, but no matter how great I think my own writing is (which, by the way, I don’t), and no matter how great someone else thinks my writing is (mostly my mother), I will never consider myself a writer until someone in the “literary world” publishes my work.

Now, this doesn’t mean I think that everything published by publishing companies is worth reading or that all of those authors should be considered good writers either, or that some unpublished people may not be far superior writers, but I feel like I do not personally have the right to confer that title upon myself. I just think of myself as a person who participates in the act of writing. At what point can a person feel justified in calling themselves “a writer” as opposed to just “a person who writes?” Is there a difference between being a writer and being a Writer?

Insight from a student colleague

Thank you to Kelli for offering to give me "music to write by," which I thought was the name of a band. Apparently, the CDs in my vehicle (Kesha, Jennifer Lopez, Hannah Montana, Demi Lovato, Pink's Greatest Hits, and the soundtrack to that excellent animated Brazilian bird movie, Rio), which my children so enjoy, are not what one would normally call "inspirational." Who knew? Thanks, Kel. I will come armed with my flash drive asap.

I get by with a little help from my daughter

This afternoon, in between fetching snacks, searching for Strawberry Shortcake figurines, and putting the caps back on abandoned markers, I tried to work on my third short story. My 6-year-old asked what I was doing, so I started to read her the first page. After a few paragraphs, she said: "This is going to take all day, isn't it?" Which led me to believe that it must be very engaging. Then she decided that she would help me with ideas. The following are her suggestions:

1. "Then she gets hit from a car. Write that down."

2. "She stinks like a rotten egg."

3. "She's dripping with blood."

4. "Her face is squished like a big plate."

No, she did not come up with all of these morbid quotations in a vacuum. My story does in fact have some morbidity to it. I must admit, the simile in the fourth one intrigues me.

Then, she sat down with her markers and drew an illustration to go with my story. "Here is her face when she's beautiful. And here is her face squished and covered with blood." I told her that if I ever need an illustrator, she's hired.

"Here she is when she was beautiful, and here she is when she is squished and bloody." - Avary

In this one, Avary adapted my story and made it her own. She drew five pictures, then put them in order. 1. She gets married; 2. She has a baby; 3. They are a family; 4. She is a mother; 5. She is dead.

What's fair in fiction?

It has taken me awhile to process last week’s readings. Between all of my classes, I have read three poems about the death of young children and two stories about potentially terminally ill children. Because my own kids are the reason I breathe, these texts hit me particularly close to home.  It got me thinking about the ethics of writing about death and serious illness.

With Ben Jonson’s two poems about the deaths of his first daughter and first son, biographically I know that he was writing about his own children; the poems have a special poignancy for me because of that. With the others, I don’t know if the situations were purely fictional, or based upon stories told by people they know, or if they are essentially works of non-fiction. It seems to me that if you have not actually had a child in the pediatric oncology unit, it may be insensitive to write imaginatively about that situation, especially if you receive financial compensation for it. On the other hand, you could be doing a service by giving voice to a situation that others who are enduring it may not be able to adequately articulate. If a person wrote about the experience of being a soldier in war when they had never been a soldier in war, would it seem offensive to soldiers who had actually had that atrocious experience? And would it be accurate? What about someone writing a story about labour who has never given birth?

Particularly in Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk,” I felt like I questioned the reliability of the narrator because I didn’t know if the story was fictional and because she identified herself as a writer from the beginning, so I didn’t know whether to feel manipulated or genuinely touched by the text. It’s like when I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces while everyone still thought it was totally true and I cried while I read about the tooth-pulling-without-painkillers incident. After I found out that that part was basically made up, I felt like I wanted my tears back. I still appreciated the literary skill he displayed, but I felt cheated, and almost violated, at having my emotions played with like that. Apparently, many others were upset by his lie, too (or were we all just upset that he lied to Oprah?). Are there unspoken rules about what is okay to write about fictionally and what is not? Or is it all okay, as long as we make it clear whether it is fiction or non-fiction? Is anything off the table, or no?

My progeny: four small feet of inspiration

Yesterday morning, my youngest daughter crawled on top of me in bed and said "Mama, get up! I will say cockadoodledoo to you! There is colour outside!" Even though I was still excruciatingly tired, I woke up because I was so intrigued by what she had just said. I could struggle for a creative way to say that the sun is shining, but how truthful and interesting it is to say that there is colour outside. (My oldest is just as creative: at four years old she said a passing train looked like a giant caterpillar -- check out that simile! An English major in the making!) My youngest's comment yesterday reminded me of a story by Richard Matheson called "Born of Man and Woman" in which a child raised in a basement refers to rain as "the water from upstairs." I am intrigued by voices like this, that try to find a way to describe something that they can't understand or explain or have no knowledge of. I have often heard the saying "Write what you know," but there is so much potential creativity hiding in the things we don't know, too. One day I might be able to write a book just based on all the amazing this my children say -- a children's book, anyway!