Geeks vs. Geeks

[sistermagpie]

Happy birthday, trazzie--an house early!:-D

I think I may have achieved ultimate geekness today. I went to see the the frogs finally and it was great! Blue frogs, red frogs, yellow frogs, huge frogs. Poison frogs, sticky frogs, Jabba-the-Hutt frogs. I saw an African bullfrog eat a mouse (yipes!) and did a virtual frog dissection. Then I swung by the North American birds exhibit to make sure they had a magpie (she's in the case with the bald eagle in case you're looking). I stared longingly at a Zuni crow fetish for a long time before admitting I couldn't afford it. Then I bought a calendar filled with quirky science facts, which I'll probably be blurting out throughout the year. I think the only way I could get geekier is if I moved into my parents' basement. Other than that I've got it all covered.

And speaking of geeky, that leads into recent discussions about why people are in fandom, which connects with Aja's idol_reflection essay. What I have to say is actually pretty obvious, but I'm saying it anyway.

Aja starts her essay with the sentence, "Draco Malfoy is the most controversial character in the Harry Potter canon," which is, of course, controversial in itself. I know somebody commented, "Wouldn't that be Snape?" But I think I know what she means. Snape is probably the most interesting character in canon, the most complex. I suppose he's controversial if you consider it controversial that he used to be a DE. But his controversy is all within the text. What I think Aja meant is that while not everyone likes Snape as much as anyone else he doesn't seem to inspire the same kind of anger regarding his interpretation. Oh, people can fight about his interpretation--I don't want to dismiss the Snape/Sirius fan wars, for instance, and after OotP there's the whole, "Was Snape perpetually picked on or did he deserve what was done to him in the Pensieve?" (A concept which disturbs me as well--I think he gave as good as he got, myself, and still didn't "deserve" it.)

But I think the reason I think of Draco as controversial is that, let's face it, even the author seems to focus in on this character's fans as in need of re-education or at least explanation. JKR's bad boy comments about Snape are usually in the context of questions about his love life. With Draco the mere existence of fans seems to be enough. In fandom what always strikes me isn't that not everybody has the same reaction to the character but that very often it seems like this character makes people very emotional. It's not just that you might disagree about what he will get in canon, it's that for some people (me) the idea that he's a hate object there to show us that "some people are just bad" and so must be punished is really disturbing while for other people (and here I'm speaking of specific posts I've read that have basically said this) the idea that Draco should inspire compassion is just as disturbing and must be stopped or at least explained away as being fangirl fantasy.

Anyway, how this relates back to the other recent discussion is that that thread asked, "Why do you stay in the fandom if you don't like the source material?" and "don't like the material" seemed to include not liking the way the author handled certain things, or not trusting her to handle them in a way you won't find disturbing. The "real reason" behind this attitude was suggested to be that people liked their interpretation of canon better than canon itself. So if one didn't like how the MoM scene was handled it was perhaps because one's idea of Lucius as being competent and cool was wrong, or because one wanted Sirius to marry Remus instead of going through a veil. Draco fans, well we know we're screwed. Anything that doesn't involve leather trousers, a change of heart and an Order of Merlin First Class is going to set us wanking, right guys?

Right. But what's funny--and I suspect cathexys just wrote about this but I'm doing it anyway--what's funny is the insinuation that not liking the way something that happens in canon means you were wrong in the way you read canon before that. This, of course, surprises me because of course what else is an interpretation based on but canon? I know I, personally, like to base everything on canon. It wouldn't be fun at all if it wasn't based there. I get annoyed when I mess something up, a quote or something, and have to rethink when it doesn't back up what I'm saying. So I know that no matter what happens, these things won't go away, unless canon specifically gives me another explanation that speaks to exactly what I see.

And then that brings it into the even wider idea that something going one way or another in canon *definitely* won't change the way things really are in life, which also seems to be a question. I mean, at this point I think the books could go either way on this issue and still be consistent. A lot of us are probably preparing ourselves for things to go in a way we're not going to like...perhaps this makes me secretly hope they do go in a way I'll enjoy, not even just because I would like it but because it would freak people out who are possibly even less prepared than I am on this. I mean, sometimes when people say people questioning the books moral position are claiming to be morally superior it does just seem like just a disagreement about moral values. After all, everybody considers their own moral judgment "superior" in terms of being correct. If we didn't think something was right we wouldn't consider it moral. I admit I have had some conversations where this was just laid out, where the very things I thought were ethically bad news were defended, and it usually left me disliking the books more than I did when I started because it scared me.:-)
Anyway, I think it just always comes down to this idea in fandom--all fandoms--that the ultimate thing everyone wants to have is objectivity. That's fandom gold. It's just more valid if you can say, "it's just canon" as opposed to, "this is something I want to see" or "this is what I believe." Everybody wants to remove themselves as much as possible that way. I'm not sure why. On one hand I guess it's part of the whole thing where fans call other fans geeks, you know? "Maybe you personally invest in ships or characters, but I just read what's there and appreciate it in an intellectual way." But maybe it's also about the relief of having something about your worldview validated, even if it's only fictionally: See, I told you these two were meant to be together. Of course I'm really better than those mean kids at school. Evil exists and it uses ethnic slurs...or whatever. Oversimplifying there, obviously. But you know what I mean? That's my big problem with the theory of fans being disappointed because they love their own speculations more than the real thing. Not that that doesn't ever happen, because it does, but because it can also be an easy and dishonest dismissal or real criticism. There's a lot of problems a reader can have that aren't the author's fault (for instance, it's not a flaw in the writing that the couple you like doesn't wind up together), but in general the author's going to have more responsibility about these things, like it or not. If you start blaming too many things on the readers...well, then you're Anne Rice writing insane things on Amazon.com where you claim everybody's reading wrong and the author can never make a mistake or handle anything badly.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Don't worry about having this conversation here--actually, I'm really enjoying it!

I have very little experience in academics but when I was in grad school I remember having a problem with what seemed to be the idea that you could take one way of looking at things and apply it to anything written. For instance, you took the principles of modern feminist reading and applied it to something written hundreds of years ago and called it analysis. To me that just seemed like twisting a text to fit whatever you wanted to say, even if the text didn't support it because that's not where the author was coming from and there were other reasons given by the text itself for whatever you were claiming was part of your theory. Is that the sort of thing you mean?

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

Yay, onward goes the arcane discussions of method. :)

That's some of what I was thinking about, yes. The best example of that I can think of is a little too arcane and musical, though...but here goes. There's a powerful (as in, very useful) and widespread kind of musical analysis called Schenkerian analysis, developed out of common practice harmony and a specific repertoire of music, with a lot of assumptions potentially (or not) built in, but a basic theory of how music works assumed. Some people have tried to apply it onto Renaissance music, which predates common practice, and just doesn't work the same way. If you treat the early music as just notes, you can apply the theory to it--but it's manifestly ignoring the inner logic and structure of the music as well as our historically informed knowledge. It's a little like modern readers reading the Antigone--they usually just don't understand the way that the world works in that work, the ground rules of the tragic universe where human actions directly cause disturbances in nature, and inevitably end up with large parts of the text that they just can't explain and don't understand. (The part where Antigone says she wouldn't do what she was doing for anyone but her brother is a great case in point--drives modern interpreters crazy, makes sense (yet doesn't lose some of its disturbing overtones) from a contemporary standpoint.)

That's some of what's going on...perhaps the other thing we tend to do is confuse working through how something works (analysis) with our commentary upon the mechanisms of a universe (usually criticism). I think I've lost the train of my own thought now, though.

The idea that the author is dead has fallen something out of favor, and the intentional fallacy has taken a beating over the past 50 years. I think it does matter to deal on some level with ideas of what the author intended, the situation that the author is coming from, the ideas possibly being embedded in the text...because in this case, I generally find that to ignore the author's stated intentions is to generally end up excising some features of the text. I don't think it's a particularly 'difficult' (in the sense of resistant to analysis) text--I think its WIP-ness has made it seem more like that than it is.

Could be wrong. :)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Ah! Yes, I think I do see what you mean.

I tend to instinctively lean towards the "Author is Dead" idea, I think, in terms of not really wanting to read interviews and such. I think if the author has to explain something then it's not in the text and the text has to stand on its own. And really once the HP books are done I doubt anyone will have any need for the interviews because they're more just hints of things that will presumably be explained. I suspect at the end of the series everything will stand on its own. Perhaps it might not always read the same way, but it will make sense.

At the same time, though, I think knowing something about where the author is coming from is important in the ways you explained. JKR is a contemporary writer who's writing fantasy, but also spoofing her own society and drawing on particularly literary traditions. There's a lot of things future readers should understand about that background when reading the books (people should understand a lot of it now, too).

It reminds me, for instance, of things I've spoken to teachers about re: Shakespeare and updating his plays. I had one teacher who said she usually hated modernized Shakespeare because people often thought you could literally turn the characters into modern people when you can't. Whenever the plays are allegedly set they depend on certain Elizabethan assumptions that make them work and if you ignore them the play doesn't work the right way. Perhaps, sometimes there can just be a disconnect when things the author assumes everyone agrees on aren't actually agreed on.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

I use the interviews as regulation upon speculation. I don't think she lies to us. For instance, there is a cottage industry amongst some (some, not all) fans of Snape to deny the "horrible person" comments, and many others (especially the "sadistic teacher"). I take the latter, especially, as a "Don't expect any exculpatory reasons for his behavior to pop up" (he doesn't actually mean it, it's an act, etc.), which is a favorite theory of some. I think the interviews will be largely useless when all is said and done, because I think we're about to get some very solid information on some big things, especially the metaphysics. And the metaphysical revelations are going to permanently piss some fans off.

A good antidote to "author is dead" is (especially in my field) to stop pretending that music comes out fully-formed in nice packaged Collected Works editions, and go to a manuscript library and look at originals. Both the New Critical and the deconstructionist approach that tend to just look at text forget about things like bibliographic codes and context. When you note the careful arrangement of a manuscript book of Lieder or the marks in the composer's hand on a proof, making corrections and changing things, or even a whole 'nother version of a song, the author starts to come back to life as a controlling figure in the creation of a work. I'm working on Marenzio's Ninth Book right now, and there is no doubt that the order of the madrigals and selection of poetry is completely determined and meaningful...and so a little bit of Marenzio himself as an artistic personality comes to life there. When you actually have real hard data about a composer's life, there can be careful yet incredibly illuminating connections to make (like with my main man, Richard Strauss). (And revisions can tell you a massive amount about a work. Same thing goes in literature).

Rowling's work needs to be read in context, with an awareness of the genres that she is spoofing or playing off of. On the other hand, I don't find too much value in the deep mythological hunts that some engage in and consider definitive, because she takes things and twists them, and only the way that she twists them is particularly applicable. (I feel differently about Wagner's relationship to myth, but that's different time, different place, and very different treatment). I have a strong suspicion that her Christian ethos is going to be important to the denoument, too.

The eternal question of balance between the local and that which is good for all times; there's often a significant loss in modernization, but I feel like sometimes one can go through and peg exactly what is being lost, and decide how much that matters. Alas, all my good examples are musical, but here goes: Don Giovanni gets staged any number of ways. Everyone misunderstands Don Ottavio, because our ideas of masculinity are so radically different than the late 18th century. You can *do* it, but anyone who knows more of the context notes what gets lost, and how it doesn't sit with the rest of the text. All opera seria is much the same way; wild mythological settings are all about the 18th century, and even that far back is unrecoverable for an audience not willing to do their homework. Much the same problem as with Shakespeare, I think.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Yes--that's exactly how I see the interviews as well. She's talking about things that are in the text that we just haven't seen yet. Once the text is finished we'll know what she means by most of the things she's saying here, I should think. Often she'll start to say something and stop because it reveals something, after all. After the series is over she may do very different kinds of interviews that we can read differently.

the author starts to come back to life as a controlling figure in the creation of a work.

It's funny...I'm of two minds on this in fiction. On one hand, like I said, I think it's important that every book is the product of someone's head. HP especially I think holds together as well as it does because at base it's all one person. There's one person behind every character no matter how different, and that's very exciting.:-) It also seems very obvious to me in this series. Everyone really does operate on the same wavelength in HP. That part I think is very interesting to look at and helpful in understanding the work. Otoh I get very nervous about looking at drafts as anything more than part of the process that brought the writer to the finished story. Like, my writing partner and I have been working on something with an editor who gave us very good notes on what wasn't working and why, and I think if someone ultimately looked at our early drafts they might get exactly the wrong idea about things from it. Sometimes when you hit upon the right way to do something the wrong way just disturbs you and you don't want anyone to see it.

Tolkien's an interesting bird that way, I think, because parts of LOTR read like a draft. You can see echoes of the way the characters started out with Frodo as Bingo and Strider as Trotter--really a lot of these things probably should have been edited out more thoroughly to make things more coherent. So it's good to know these things, but occasionally I've seen people then try to use it to explain the final version, so that rejected ideas are used to explain the ones he ended up with instead of being used to show why they were the wrong ideas.

I don't find too much value in the deep mythological hunts that some engage in and consider definitive, because she takes things and twists them, and only the way that she twists them is particularly applicable.

ITA. I feel this way especially when it comes to the mechanics of the universe. For instance, Pensieves. They seem to work for me the way most things work, on the instinctive level of, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could put your memories in a dish and show them to other people?" Rowling isn't looking at it from the perspective of a serious fantasist who wants to know the physics of her magic. That wouldn't be in line with the rest of the impulses behind the series. That's something I tend to notice as jarring in fanfic as well--people often make magic just work differently in fanfic, drawing on powers and religions or exacting spiritual payment for spells that just doesn't happen in canon. The magic works in canon for me because JKR knows how it works instinctively and can communicate that to me on the page.

[straussmonster.livejournal.com]

Ah, the mechanics of the universe. The things that really must be there to make it even seem like the same place, and some of which I'd also put under the heading of 'metaphysics', as there's often a larger thematic resonance for why magic works the way that it does.

I do tend to greatly dislike the importation of foreign magical ideas in canon. At worst, it smacks of great grand agenda on the writer's part, ranging from 'magick' to Wicca to god knows what, but it almost never fails to not belong in the governing ethos and metaphysics of the books. (The whole thing with working instinctively is also why, for me, no one can write certain characters--or maybe that's more because no one really knows what certain characters are thinking, and thus the motivations and actions always seem a lil' screwy. But I'm nitpicky.)

Pensieves are the one place where I have sheer mechanical issues with the magic. You know what it is, of course--it's the goddamn issue of being able to see things in someone's memories that they couldn't have possibly known at the time, which just raises so many horrific difficulties that I wonder whether that was deliberate, or a case of not thinking it through, or what. I supposed one can go with the "dude, it's magic" defense, but we're usually done a lot better than that. I'd love to ask about that and see if it's flint-y or not; it sticks out for me as one of the very few things that really makes me go 'buh?'.

off to try to work on papers through this accursed headache :(

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Ack! I really hope your headache feels better soon--you're definitely making good sense with it to me!

I definitely agree on the instinct issues and characters are, I agree, an even better example. Even when I've loved characterizations in fic I'm always aware of them as someone else's character. When I think of a fic characterization as based on canon I know I'm more agreeing with what the person is saying about the canon character rather than feeling the character has been recreated the way s/he exists in canon. One big reason for that being that being that the character is part of the author's larger story, and when she's part of someone else's story she naturally means something else right then. Hmm. Now I'm thinking about books I've written for other peoples' series where they are overseeing it so the character have to be IC enough for their tastes and how close I'm able to really come.

Anyway, I agree about the metaphysics too and the Pensieve is the perfect example because it so clearly doesn't work in so many ways. How can a memory then be something you wander around in and see things the other person didn't? That's not so much memory as Time Travel. How far could Harry wander in the Pensieve? Could he have gone and visited Dumbledore on the day of OWLS all those years ago? That makes no sense! But sometimes when people try to make the magic more uniform by basing it on principles of wicca or whatever it changes the entire series from the ground up.