tablesaw | Dear Dead Authors: You Can Take Your Affective Fallacy and Shove It Up Your Intentionality

Entry tags:

Dear Dead Authors: You Can Take Your Affective Fallacy and Shove It Up Your Intentionality

My ire was raised today reading

kate_nepveu's writeup of her Arisia experience, specifically being on the panel of "Idols with Feet of Clay."

But specifically, I want to address one particular argumentative tack, seen in Ian Randal Strock's own recounting of the con and the panel:

On the programming side, I was on five panels (I was scheduled for two more, but missed them due to traffic). The most lively was the first, "Idols with Feet of Clay". It was a discussion of the question: "Can you still read the works of someone with whom you are on opposite sides politically?" The panel write-up specifically mentioned James P. Hogan's Holocaust denial and Orson Scott Card's opposition to homosexuality. Of the five panelists, I was the only one who said one ought to be able to divorce the art from the artist, and read the fiction regardless of one's view of the writer.

(Emphasis mine.) The phrase "divorce [or separate] the art from the artist [or vice versa]" is pretty key in these debates, and it is singled out on both sides of the debate. For example,

nojojojo responds

Naturally he would be shocked, shocked I tell you, that people who are harmed by bigotry might not be able to divorce art from its artist, or "artistic" bigotry from its real, dangerous effect on the zeitgeist and law.

Nojojojo also links to an old post by

catvalente which sarcastically says:

Oh, but it should be about the art, shouldn't it? We should separate the art from the artist.

But here's the thing: I think the phrase is a smokescreen.

I mean, when I think of "The Death of the Author," I'm thinking of an outlook that is designed to fundamentally empower readers over authors. So when it comes to, as Yuki_Onna calls it, fuckmuppetry, why is this pulled out as a defense of authors?

Clearly, these writers aren't referencing the same theory I'm thinking of. In fact, they're calling back to New Criticism. New Criticism also plays with the idea of the Intentional Fallacy, but it couples this with the Affective Fallacy, which says that an individual's reader's impressions have no place in interpreting art. Thus interpretation of art is decoupled from both the author and the reader (and history and a whole host of other things) so that it can just be capital-A Art.

And thus the sleight of hand. When writers like Strock call for everyone to divorce the art from the artist, they're actually calling for everyone to divorce the reader from the art.

Now, one can argue that this is appropriate when constructing formal criticism (though, be careful if you do so here, because there are some pretty heavey hitters reading). But the real problem is that the context of all of these previous statements—and of various other discussions regarding social justice issues and author fuckmuppetry—is not of criticism but of reading. The actual physical act of reading, and of the concommitant decisions of what books to buy or request. Reading is not a context from which one can divorce the reader.

And so this is why I'm officially calling bullshit on the "separate the art from the artist" line in these discussions. And I call for others who agree with me to not buy into the framing of our opponents, and call this tactic what it really is: separating the reader from reading.

Am I being unfair to Strock in particular in this analysis? I don't think so. From later in Kate Nepveu's report:

And then—well, I'm pretty sure I didn't actually shout this time. But Strock said something about sensitivity training and how it's supposed to keep people from saying offensive things, and he thinks that maybe we should having training in how not to be offended at things people say, because it just gives the speaker the power to upset you, so why not just ignore it, why get upset.

I mean, this is just the logical extension of divorcing the reader from the reading—divorcing the listener from the listening. I mean, surely, there must be some sort of instruction that may be given such that, in communication, one may receive the communication without reacting to it. That's how the brain works, after all.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

*snorts* AM lazing around tonight, so went and read Stock's report, and could not help the sneer as he explained that HE explained his position "rationally and logically" (implying that everybody else who disagreed with him was irrational and illogical). I also fracking hate people who try to reduce complex issues to "two sides" as if life is some stupid half assed formal debate.

But my spleen now vented, let me squee at this incredibly excellent point--because YES, the postmodern statement of the "author is dead" is about challenging the idea that there is a single authoritative reading of the text which can be linked to authorial intentionality by expert readers even though they claim they're reading the text as an object separated from biography, history, etc.

The absolutely falsely objective stance of New Criticism was one I became wearily familiar with during my undergraduate days -- and have called bullshit on ever since.

And to build on what you said: really, Stock and his ilk are trying to separate other readers from their readings in order to insert the Rational Objective Blah Blah Correct Interpretation (which involves as well the idea that somehow great art isn't tarnished by the artist's actions in any way--which really only applies to SOME artists--i.e. canonical white men).

This bullpuckey was all over the place during the early Racefail (and has reappeared since then in multiple ways).

And it still frosts me--nobody is saying "burn all the books" -- nobody is saying "keep those lousy writers from publishing," we're just saying "I don't choose to spend my money on the productions of these people because their actions are a part of my experiences that I as a reader bring to the interpretation of anything I read/view/interpret."

May I link?

Excellent insight here. With your permission, I'm going to point to this post whenever I see this sleight of hand employed.

Huh. Yeah. My issue is twofold, and neither of them have to do with authorial intent: one is I don't choose to read books by people I dislike, for whatever reason, because it gets in the way of _my experience of the text_, and the other is that if I find something hurtful in _my experience of the text_, I don't find the author's good intentions to be a get-out-of-pain-free card.

John M. Ford provided me with a lasting metaphor for reading: "Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight." (_From the End of the Twentieth Century_)

Absolutely.

I have to be honest: I'm not quite sure I understand the point you're making here. (Though before I go further into that, I should say that Strock's comment in Nevpeu's report, i.e. "Hey just stop being offended", strikes me as pretty stupid. I do read it with the caveat that it's reported speech and thus not necessarily accurate; but whether or not Strock said it, it's stupid.)

There seem to be a few separate connections here between the art, the artist, and the reader. Specifically, I think there are two different scenarios:

1. The Artist holds Viewpoint X. The Reader opposes Viewpoint X. The Art contains no reference to Viewpoint X one way or the other.
2. The Artist holds Viewpoint X. The Reader opposes Viewpoint X. The Art reflects Viewpoint X.

In case 2, you can separate the artist from the art, but Viewpoint X is still there in the art, so the reader isn't especially going to enjoy that book. There may still be a question of whether the reader should reject the art or judge it to be bad simply because of the differing viewpoint—there's Christian music that I (as a Jew) dislike because I think it's genuinely bad art, but there's also Christian music that I dislike for its content even though I recognize it as artistically successful. But I'm not sure that anyone would say that, for whatever reason ("separating artist from art" or any other), that a person is obligated to read, or try to read, or heaven forbid try to enjoy, something that would offend them even though it has artistic merit.

(Correction: I'm pretty sure that there are people who would say that. I just wish there weren't.)

But Case 1 is a different matter entirely. It's possible that one could argue that an author holding Viewpoint X will inevitably result in Viewpoint X being reflected in that author's art (and Orson Scott Card's politics may be a candidate for that), but let's take something a little more separable. Imagine an author named Sandy Springs whose writes a book called Atlanta Impossible, an impressively sprawling alternate history starting with the 1863 Union-Confederacy truce and telling the stories of the individuals who fought successfully to phase out slavery in the CSA in the 1890s, began a civil-rights movement in the 1920s, and so forth. The book is critically praised, wins the Hugo or Nebula (whichever award you think is the true measure of quality as opposed to a predictable sell-out that favors the mediocre), is widely recommended, they say Spielberg bought the movie rights, and so forth. Passing through the café in a bookstore on your way to the science fiction section, you notice a newspaper lying open to an interview with Springs; reading it, you learn that Springs feels passionate about abortion, frequently engaging in protests and counterprotests and writing letters to politicians and so forth. You're shocked, because Springs's views on abortion are completely the opposite of your own. Now, Atlanta Impossible doesn't mention abortion at all; there are women in the book, some with children, but no pregnancy (planned or otherwise) occurs in the text, never mind discussions of abortion. The question then is, knowing what you now know, are you still going to go buy the book, or will you turn around and leave (or just head to the puzzle section)?

I think this is where the suggestion to "separate the artist from the art" comes into play. I, personally, would suggest that while you might not buy Springs's forthcoming Future Reproduced: Ten Short Stories About Reproductive Rights, you really should set aside the personal disagreement when it comes to the question of enjoying Atlanta Impossible. ("You should set this aside" may put me dangerously close to Strock's reported "You should stop being offended", and if that's the line that I'm crossing without seeing, tell me; but I think I can still see the line and that I'm not across it.)

Of course it's still very much the reader's choice about what to buy and what to put time into, and the reader is welcome to choose to avoid a Sandy Springs book because of the author's views on abortion, just as the reader is welcome to choose to avoid a Sandy Springs book because they only read books by authors whose last names are in the first half of the alphabet. The reader can do what the reader likes, for whatever reason. But while I'd recognize that the reader can avoid the second half of the alphabet, I'd disapprove of that choice; I'd say that the reader is missing out on many good works of art in doing so (both Vinges, James Tiptree, Connie Willis, Roger Zelazny, off the top of my head). And in the same way, I think I'll tentatively stand with Strock in saying that while you can avoid the art of someone you disagree with, I'd say that you're missing out on many good works of art, and in particular (unlike in Case 2) art that the reader would enjoy.

So. Naturally there may be a point that I'm very much missing, and I'm posting this comment so that, if there is one, I can find out what it is. But that's what I'm seeing, at any rate.

Huh. This, I think, is the point Strock must not have understood, and I wonder if that's because you didn't make the point on the panel, or (perhaps much more likely) you made it and he just wasn't getting it.

In his writeup (of which I admit I only read the paragraph about that panel), he says: I was surprised when I questioned my fellow panelists if their view required them to research the background of each author before picking up a book. They all said no, that they would only avoid an author's work if they knew the author's views, but they didn't feel a requirement to seek out those views first. I was also surprised when they said they felt no moral obligation to tell others to avoid an author's work if they were so opposed to the author themselves. And the funny thing is that both of these points that surprise him are quite nicely explained, "rationally and logically" to use his term, by your statement here: knowing that you dislike an author affects your enjoyment of the text. I mean, maybe Strock would argue that it shouldn't. (I make something of that argument in the comment below, which I started writing before your comment was posted. I'd certainly consider backing down from that argument.) But regardless of whether your dislike should or shouldn't affect your experience, it's perfectly clear that if it does affect your experience, then you're not going to feel the need to research an author's viewpoints (why would you want to seek out things that will impair your ability to enjoy a text?) or tell others to avoid the work (why would your personal feelings toward the text affect others' ability to read it?). In the context of your comment here, there's nothing in any way surprising about these things that surprise him.

I'm curious about something, and I hope I can ask it without sounding snarky, which I'm not at all. Has it even been the case that you've read a book, liked it, and then found out something that makes you dislike the author? If so, did it change your feelings about the text in retrospect? (I don't mean something so facile as "I thought I liked it, but now I realize I don't", but rather a more complex change in what you call your "experience of the text".) Could you reread a book you liked before learning something about the author, and would you still enjoy the book, or would your experience be too changed?

I didn't get too much into reader response or similar postmodern theory, because I'm not as strong on it. Maybe

ithiliana would weigh in on this. Also, you've already seen

kate_nepveu's post above, which details more about the reading aspect. But as I'm heading out to a party, I'm just going to make one strike at your argument and then leave cryptically. Like Batman. I'll try to follow up with actual detail tomorrow.

1. The Artist holds Viewpoint X. The Reader opposes Viewpoint X. The Art contains no reference to Viewpoint X one way or the other.
2. The Artist holds Viewpoint X. The Reader opposes Viewpoint X. The Art reflects Viewpoint X.

How are you determining whether a text "reflects" viewpoint X? Also, can a text reflect a viewpoint without referencing it?

I am the night!

Has it even been the case that you've read a book, liked it, and then found out something that makes you dislike the author? If so, did it change your feelings about the text in retrospect?

I'll respond to this, even though,

tahnan, I'm pretty sure you know the answer for me, but this is absolutely true for me in some cases. It depends on the author, what unlikable thing I find out about, and how much I then retroactively see that in the text.

For example, I see very little of Card's atrocious views in most of his early fiction, so learning about them did not affect my enjoyment of his books. However, once I heard Richard Peck's hold forth on his dislike of youth, the disrespect of whippersnappers, and the evils of modernity, I suddenly realized his distasteful views were ubiquitous in all of his fiction, and I could no longer read his books with pleasure. When I read an essay by Spider Robinson all about how Heinlein is the God of all things, I suddenly started seeing Heinlein's views of women in every single Spider Robinson story, and could no longer read Robinson with pleasure. (ObDisclaimer: I know that liking Heinlein is not distasteful to many people. However, since this is about personal reactions, I will unashamedly state that liking Heinlein is distasteful to me.)

I'm curious about your formulation of disapproval for people avoiding books by authors for any-reason-whatsoever--is a reader then obligated to only seek out good books, or to maximize their seeking out of good books? I am honestly curious, because as a reader, I spend a very significant amount of time reading books or stories that I would call not very good as literary works of whatever, at the detriment of time spent reading books that I myself know and believe to be good books by authors I approve of at the moment, that I believe I would and often do enjoy--when I get around to them.

Or, to rephrase this in a TV sort of way, because I am reminded of how appalled people were that I chose to watch The Vampire Diaries knowing that it's not good TV: I spend much more time watching bad TV than good TV, because it is itself a form of enjoyment. I could certainly be watching good TV, critically acclaimed TV, what-have-you; but is it a necessary ethical imperative for me to be doing so?

Just a quick explanation, in case what you're specifically wondering about is Roland Barthes' "Death of the Author" vs. New Criticism, and may someone with better understanding strike me down if I am wrong:

Barthes' point, extremely boiled down, is that when you approach any text, you can read into it whatever you like. So, if you're "reading" Star Trek, you can damn well read K/S into it. If you're reading the Bible, you can read the Prosperity Gospel into it. The point is, the "reading into" is not a problem for Barthes. Rather, he says, the "reading into" is the entire point. Sometimes, a reader's "reading into" includes knowledge about the author and his or her intentions. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it includes no knowledge about the author's culture whatsoever, leading to vast "misunderstandings" about the text. (See: Prosperity Gospel.) But it doesn't matter to Barthes, because to Barthes, the important thing is what the reader takes away from the text.

So, for Barthes, it is pointless to distinguish between your situations 1. and 2., because if the reader brings in knowledge about the author's opinions on any topic, whether or not that topic is explicitly invoked in the text, that's their right and it's perfectly reasonable for them to respond to the text however they please. The author is "dead," not in that we need to ignore him or her, but in that he or she has absolutely no say over what the reader brings to/reads into the text. He or she wrote it, and maybe wrote paratexts that surround it and affect its reception; that's the extent of it. A multiplicity of readings is inevitable, because each reader brings something slightly different to the text.

Anyhow, that's very different than New Criticism, which claims that there is a deeper meaning that exists within a text - not the meaning the author intends for it to have, but there is a singular deeper meaning - and that all scholarship is an attempt to get at that meaning. New Criticism can be just fine and all, it's not my cup of tea, but it's not the same thing as what Barthes was saying. And if you dig New Criticism, it maybe makes sense to say that you should ignore the author's stated viewpoints, because if you pay attention to them, you're potentially unable to get at that unified deeper meaning of the text.

So as I understand it, the point of this post was to clarify that Barthes specifically does NOT suggest that we should divorce the author from the text, that that's not what the "death of the author" means. Rather, New Criticism does. So people should stop referring to the "death of the author" in this way.

As for whether or not people should be New Critics or do their own interpretations - Of course, you're allowed to disapprove of people's actions; we all are. To be honest I think that you are stepping over the line of "well, stop being offended," but I'm not really the arbiter of that. Personally, I side with Barthes. Part of why I like fanfiction is that it allows me to read back into texts that I find offensive or whose authors I can't stand, letting me reclaim them for myself. But my readings are only one of many, and as far as I'm concerned, if other people don't have the headspace or the spoons or the desire or the will to read things that are associated with douchebags in their estimation - then it's not my job to say "oh, but you're missing so many good works of art!" It really, really isn't my place to police other people's reading habits.

Here from

ithiliana's link. In the case of:

1. The Artist holds Viewpoint X. The Reader opposes Viewpoint X. The Art contains no reference to Viewpoint X one way or the other.
2. The Artist holds Viewpoint X. The Reader opposes Viewpoint X. The Art reflects Viewpoint X.

... I propose that Viewpoint X is almost certain to be present in the art, whether or not the author intended it, and a reader who has been notified that it's likely to be present will be able to spot it. A non-notified reader might not notice it, because Viewpoint X, in many of these cases, is a matter unconscious bigotry to which many of us have been desensitized. We absorb those messages at the unconscious level, and they continue their damage.

There is also the possibility that Viewpoint X is not actually present in the art, but it's not worth the reader's time to find out. The world contains vast amount of art; why waste time on art that has a strong chance of containing subtly disguised toxic messages?

Those, of course, are separate from the issue of support: regardless of how good, clean, and unbiased Card's works might be, I do not wish to (1) give the man money (he's declared the government should be overthrown because some of my friends are married), nor (2) support his career by recommending his works or even allowing them to (further) influence my concepts of "what is science fiction."

while you can avoid the art of someone you disagree with, I'd say that you're missing out on many good works of art

There is more excellent art in the world than one person can absorb in a lifetime. Every choice to view, read, consider a piece of art is some level of support for that art, and by extension, that artist. And while I don't need to only support art by people I love and agree with, I can avoid supporting art by people whose values I despise.

We, each of us, have the responsibility to build the world around us. We have the responsibility to move toward the future we wish our children (bio or otherwise) to inhabit. The future I wish my children to enjoy doesn't contain homophobia, and while I know I won't eradicate it in my lifetime, I need not strengthen it by supporting art that's used to support homophobia.

The claim "but you'll be missing out on GREAT ART" implies there's some kind of art shortage.

And while there is, in fact, a shortage of available, accessible art by people who hold strong feminist, anti-racist, sex-positive, non-Christian, LGBT-friendly etc. ideals, a big part of that is because of the belief that it's reasonable to support despicable artists who produce works that are in line with publicly-acceptable bigotries. "His plots are intriguing; his worldbuilding is excellent -- just ignore the sexism; it's a product of his time," and so on.

I feel that your propositions require a state where "Viewpoint X" is something that one may feel strongly about, but is not central to one's identity. If Author Q holds Position Z on Vegetarianism, that's something I have the privilege of being able to put aside while I read. But if Author Q holds women in contempt, even if Author Q is writing an opus containing only non-gendered beings, I do not think knowing the author despises me is something it is fair to say I "should" be able to put aside.

My word, if only you knew how many 3am-on-the-Syfy-channel movies I've watched...in fact, you've reminded me that Iron Invader is starting. (It's already terrible.)

But that's really my fault for introducing the word "good" into the mix. Replace "good" with "enjoyable", probably. I didn't really mean to suggest that there's any moral imperative to partake only of capital-A-Art, or even any of it. The sentence about the extensive praise for the quality of Atlanta Impossible was intended to suggest "and therefore this is a book that you, as the hypothetical reader, believe you would enjoy", though of course I did couch it in terms of absolute Quality. Which, well, wasn't really my point at all.

So, right, I meant only that a reader is welcome to read or not read for any reason at all, and I'm not sure that I think it's a good idea to avoid something that the reader would otherwise like (High Art or otherwise) because of a fact about the author.

Now, having read Kate Nepveu's comment above (and see my comment on it), it's clearer to me now that, for some people, knowing a fact about the author can in fact interfere with their ability to like the book. That falls into the realm of "that the reader would otherwise like": Kate wouldn't like the book in that case.

That might or might not have been any clearer.

That makes more sense to me; thank you. The thing is...your formulation might work for me if a given reader had a shortage of reading materials, but for many of us that is not so much the case? Like, I could spend the next ten years arbitrarily, for no reason other than to make a point, not reading authors whose last/family name begins with N-Z, and I would still be staggering under so many possible things to read that I sincerely believed that I would enjoy in some fashion or another. My reading strategy does, in fact, involve filtering out a ton of stuff that I sincerely believe that I would enjoy. My problem is usually not finding interesting stuff to read, but filtering it out to a manageable level. Right now, for example, that means reading nonfiction and Battletech tie-in novels, and I should probably be filtering the nonfiction more. There are tons of non-tie-in sf/f novels I would no doubt adore, and a bunch I would love to read eventually, but I only have so much time and energy. In this situation, even a completely arbitrary filter actually does me a service.

I'm going to preface what I'm about to say with two statements:

1) good grief, that panel sounds like it was filled with idiocy of the most harmful kind. I'm totally with kate on those issues.

2) I tend to think that both the Intentional Fallacy" and the Affective Fallacy" are highly flawed if not plain wrong, and am no great advocate of the New Critics.

But, that said: although both fallacies were important principles espoused by Wimsatt and Beardsley, the intentional fallacy does not entail or imply the affective fallacy. Nor does the fact that they are historically linked mean that the former is necessarily operating as a smokescreen for the latter. It's employed as a defense of fuckwitted authors, I think, quite simply because the intentional fallacy is _already_ a way to defend a fuckwitted author in and of itself.

I think this is because we have a conventional metonymy that allows us to consider an author's works as part of his self. So when I say "I can love 'Being and Time' even though Heidegger was a hateful Nazi", I am also saying-- at least metonymically-- "there is part of Heidegger that is lovable". Thus, no matter how much the intentional fallacy seems to be structured as a divorce between the author and the work, it can never be so, because our minds will automatically reconnect the work to the author, as a metonymy of the author (i.e., taking the production for the producer.)

At which point (and following along your own lines in this post), said speaker can then say "I am defending Art, you philistine!" and turn it into a straight-up critique of the particular reader who is saying "uh... maybe we might want to look at this Nazi business with respect to Mr. Heidegger...".

So... I agree with you, fundamentally, that the intentional fallacy can easily be used as a crude bludgeon, but I don't think it's likely that it's operating as a historical screen for divorcing readers from texts, because:
a) the one idea (intentional fallacy) does not logically imply the other (affective fallacy), and
b) it is unlikely that most people who are using the intentional fallacy are sufficiently familiar with the history of the linkage to be using it as a smokescreen.

I think that this is important because if someone is using an authorial-intent argument in a discussion about the ethics of reading, it will be more useful to critique it directly than to claim that all authorial-intent arguments of this kind are actually disempowerments of readers.

This is a very interesting idea to talk about, though-- which is why I am posting although I do not know you, for which I apologize if the comment is unwelcome-- and I'd love to hear any criticism or feedback you might have.

This has happened to me many times. It definitely affects my enjoyment of something to find out the creator is an ass, because when I read/watch/listen to that thing, now I will constantly be reminded that they are assholes.

The thing is, though, if I avoid works by people I know are assholes, it generally doesn't deprive me of anything, because there so many things out there by people who either aren't assholes or at least I don't know about them being assholes.

I don't particularly want to support people who I know are assholes. I don't care how good person X thinks asshole author Y's book is, because I have several hundred books on my to-read list already and more are constantly being written.

I don't understand why I would waste my time with asshole author Y. They're not the only author out there writing stuff.

OK, so:
* It is silly, stupid, or probably both to expect members of the audience to divorce themselves from a work of art - in fact, it seems that it's a fair statement that one of the hallmarks of great art is that there is a connection to the audience. I get that.

* It is equally silly, stupid, or probably both to divorce the work of art from the real world (the context in which it connects with the audience) which means that it is entirely unreasonable to expect the audience to disconnect some parts of the real world (in the cases being discussed here, meta-knowledge about the context of the art, which is surely relevant). I get that as well, and surely Marshall McLuhan could be brought into the conversation here if we wanted to talk theory in this regard.

* Enjoyment of art is a personal thing. We should not expect others to enjoy what we enjoy, nor should they expect us to enjoy what they enjoy. If they do, hooray, we have something in common. I understand this too.

Some thoughts:

Firstly, when it is said that one ought to be able to divorce the art from the artist, and read the fiction regardless of one's view of the writer, there are at least two possible readings of the word "ought". One is "of necessity, one should." As I mention above, I get that this is a silly or stupid expectation.

Another reading of "ought", here, though, is "in an ideal world, one would." I actually tend to sympathize with this latter interpretation. I think it's very easy to fall into a sort of personal McCarthyism if one is willing to "judge a book by its cover" in this sort of way: if X, you're blacklisted. Admittedly, that personal McCarthyism probably hurts no one but yourself, but it's hardly something worthy of emulating on principle: it stands out as one of the more egregious examples of political and institutional paranoid closed-mindedness.

I guess my real questions here are these: has it become an intellectual virtue to not only have a closed mind on certain things, but to celebrate the exercise of same? And if so, why?

. I think it's very easy to fall into a sort of personal McCarthyism if one is willing to "judge a book by its cover" in this sort of way: if X, you're blacklisted.

Removing institutional power from the meaning of the terms "McCarthyism" and "blacklisted" -- there's another sleight of hand for you.

William Mayne, a children's author I loved when younger, turned out to be a pedophile who sexually abused his young female fans and was sent to prison for it. Recently I found one of his early books on sale and re-read it, gingerly. The book is the same but as a friend said, the main feeling was of relief that it's set in a boys' boarding school and none of Mayne's horrendous attitudes towards young girls appear. So yes, the pleasure of reading Mayne is gone for good even though I objectively recognize that the book is still excellent in itself.

This!

The most recent printout of my list of books I'd like to read some day is 35 pages. More things get added to it every year than I actually manage to read.

If the artist's views sneak into their art (as often happens), divorcing the art from the artist doesn't make their art any more palatable. So yeah, that would require somehow divorcing myself from what I'm reading, and I honestly can't see any point in reading if I'm going to do that--if I even could do that.

And as

torachan points out, there are many books out there that do not require the effort of trying to ignore the author's personal beliefs in order to enjoy the book!

I don't understand why I would waste my time with asshole author Y. They're not the only author out there writing stuff.

This!

I did my very best to make it, more or less in the form I put it in my con report, which I will put here just for ease of reference:

my position is that I don't read works by people I know are jerks because it's unfair to the work, I'd keep looking in the work for signs of jerkdom, but that people read so differently that I wouldn't presume to say what anyone else should do, as long as they're happy with their decision. I also noted that I think it's ethical and rational to say that you don't believe in authorial intent and therefore don't see the author in the work at all; or that life is too short to read things by jerks; or that you'll recommend books but mention the problems you have with the author and let the person you're talking to make up their own mind.

Another thing I said at the panel, which I didn't put in my report because I was trying to be quick about it, is that I don't actually _like_ having this kind of reading-brain. I've lost books I wanted to _keep_, damn it, this way. But it's the way my brain works.

I can't think of any specific book where subsequent knowledge of the author's views or personality has changed my opinion of the text. But I can certainly imagine that could be the case, because it often happens to me that someone will point out something about a text that I hadn't recognized before and then I can't not see it, like the young woman/old woman optical illusion. The trigger for that kind of recognition could well be, for instance, learning that an author is prejudiced against X, which causes me to see patterns in their work related to that prejudice that I had overlooked before.

That's a separate question from whether I can re-read a book I liked before I learned something about the author, which I don't do because, as I said in the quote, it wouldn't be fair to the book; I'd be looking at it the whole time through the lens of "is this reflective of the author's beliefs about X", which is a rotten thing to do to a story and no fun for me either.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 3

Dear Dead Authors: You Can Take Your Affective Fallacy and Shove It Up Your Intentionality

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject