Re: Narnia movie (was Re: Religion in SF)

Sea Wasp wrote:
> Christopher Adams wrote:
>
> > Putting it another way - *why* does what the author tried to do *necessarily*
> > mean more than what the reader takes away from the experience of reading the
> > text?
>
> What do you mean by "mean more"? To the individual reader,
> whatever Rorschach Inkblot he sees, if that's the way he reads, then
> that's going to "mean more" to him.

Well, it's going to mean *something* to him, unlike (say) the inkblot
he hasn't yet seen. That's sort of the point of reading, to get new
meanings. Will they be the meanings intended by the author? Not
necessarily. But I think we agree on this.

> But that "meaning" is just for him.

That's almost a tautology; all nontrivial meanings are private. In
particular, the author's meaning (or intent) never really escapes the
author's mind. Communication is an attempt to transfer meanings from
mind to mind, but it very seldom (if ever) succeeds perfectly. When
the medium is something complex and indirect like a work of art,
there's pretty much zero chance that any particular reader will get out
of it what the author intended to put in it.

> To me, and probably to you, it means nothing.

I'm not sure what 'it' is here. An inkblot, or a book? Why can't it
mean something to me or to you? Unless you just saying the meaning
your or I get is not the same meaning. Agreed, in that case.

> The only meaning that can or does have any reality to
> it outside of individual reading minds is the one that was placed IN
> the book by the one active, engaged intellect involved in MAKING that
> story: the author.

No, that meaning doesn't have any existence outside of an individual
mind, either. The author may be more or less successful at conveying
it into other minds, but it's only a 'meaning' in some mind.

And, despite your assertions to the contrary, I don't think it's so
uncommon for authors to put things into their works subconsciously. In
which case, a reader who spots those things knows something real about
the work that the author does not. Similarly, I think it's not
uncommon for authors to *fail* to put things into a work that they had
in their head, but never actually conveyed into the text. In which
case, a reader is not wrong to say "It ain't there, no matter what your
intent was."

> And here we weren't even talking about "meaning" but about whether it
> was okay to dare read the books in a different order than they were
> published. The only person that one could possibly consider to have
> any OBJECTIVE say on that question WOULD be the author. Why would what
> ANYONE else had to say on the subject be meaningful to anyone except
> that one person doing the saying?

Perhaps because another first-time reader is in a more similar
situation, with a more similar perspective, than is the author. If you
want to know what it feels like to get a tattoo, you should ask someone
else who got the tattoo, not the guy with the drill.

> [W]hether you believe authors are infallible or not, they ARE the creators of
> the work

Yes.

> and know what they meant when they wrote it.

Sometimes. But then again sometimes not, thanks to memory lapses,
after-the-fact rationalizations, basic changes in worldview, etc. And
that's even before you get into questions about whether they included
things without realizing it, or are now lying about what they meant
(for whatever reason).

> If you can
> appeal to anyone at all about whether it's "okay" to read a work in a
> given order, who the hell else could or would you appeal to?

Someone else who has read it. That seems like an obvious no-brainer to
me; nobody else is in a position to offer advice of the "been there,
done that" variety. Certainly not the author, who has never had
anything remotely like the experience of sitting down with the books
and discovering their content without preconceived notions or spoilers.

David Tate

.

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