Meta: Reality's Subtext

[alixtii]

Via voleuse: hth_the_first on what makes a couple slashy, and liviapenn responding (not really rebutting) with "normal behavior isn't slashy."

See, the thing is: yeah, normal life is slashy. It's 'cesty. It's a lot of things, some of them things which even fandom doesn't have words for, that we don't see because we're not used to looking at a life-text that way. I've lived in an appartment with two other men, and I've lived in a house with my family members. And there have been perfectly innocuous events (doing the dishes even!) that if they were to appear on a television screen then yeah, I would read them as slashy or 'cesty.

Which is not to say that I wanted to sex with my roommates or my family members, or that they wanted to have sex with me. When we're looking at life, we tend to get caught up in the ding an sich, in issues of "what really happened." It seems perfectly sensible to wonder "How many children had Lady Macbeth?" when you've just had Lady Macbeth over for tea.

But literary texts don't work that way. Lady Macbeth has a dozen children and no children at the same time. The cat is both dead and alive. (Fanfic opens the box and collapses the eigenstates, so to speak. And this metaphor is so not my own; I remember wisdomeagle using it, but I doubt that it's hers either.) While for the most part we conveniently and deliberately forget that our life-text is a floating signifier (which doesn't mean that it isn't real or is radically modifiable or any other pomo nonsense, just that it's eternally cut off from the thing-in-itself), we can't forget that about our fannish texts. We can (and possibly should) argue over what is the most straight-forward interpretation of canon, or even the best interpretation, but not the right one. "It's just a story." (Real life is sort of story, too, but we don't usually look for morals in it, do we? And if I said, "The rain outside is a metaphor for racist intolerance" people would look at me funny, wouldn't they?) (Of course, sometimes we do treat life events as metaphors, like with tarot cards. But this is seen as an unorthodox response--and just not plain understood by some people.)

I mean, this is half the reason why RPF exists. Because John Kerry and John Edwards were slashy. Because William Moseley and Anna Popplewell really are het-tastic sometimes. (Sometimes as a deliberate choice on the part of the photographer, least as I construct the photographer-function.) Sometimes the subtext is a hint to "what really lies beneath" the floating signifier, as in the Lance Bass case, but I think that for the most case we (for at least the "my flist" value of "we") recognize that Kerry and Edwards weren't sexually attracted to each other, and that Will and Anna have almost certainly never had sex with each other. But because the signifier is floating, we can imagine it being attached to a completely different "what lies beneath," like Anna being a Vampire Slayer or Jason Dohring and Krsistin Bell breaking Katie Holmes out of a Scientologist fortress. (And OMG there's a sequel?! *goes to read*)

Do we really think that the only reason Simon could possibly have done what he did for his sister was if he were sexually attracted to River? And if we don't think this, does that mean their relationship isn't 'cesty? Because I think we can all agree that their relationship is 'cesty as hell and, if you privelege authorial intent or use interviews when constructing the author-function, deliberately so.

Reading subtext/slashiness/'cestiness isn't like finding out whodunit in a detective novel. Because whodunit is revealed at the end of detective novel (although I'm sure there's some postmodern detective novel out there that doesn't reveal whodunit) and, y'know, that's text. It's only subtext if there is no explicitly right or wrong answer.

Cinematic texts have elements like the camera work and the soundtrack which influence the way we read a text without changing one whit "what really happened." But these elements are objective features of the text, and part of the communicative mechanisms which make up the medium. Reading a text is more complicated than just figuring out "what is really going on."

So reading subtext/slashiness/'cestiness into/out of a text is a response to the floating signifier, to the text qua text, not to the Events Themselves. In Real LifeTM, if a brother accidentally enters a bathroom while his sister is getting out of the shower, that doesn't mean he wants to jump her bones (or vice versa). It just means they live in a house together and she forgot to lock the door and he neglected to knock or she didn't hear him and so he, completely by accident, saw his sister naked. That's what "really happened" (we say). And it happens. No big deal, although the sister probably isn't going to be very happy.

(Nor the brother, probably, who's likely to be actively repulsed by a combination of social taboos and the Westermarck effect. But we can read that repulsion as a performative act, either a deliberate dissimilation and pretense or as a less conscious Freudian denial. And of course this is why Freudian analysis is so much more popular in literary analysis than in, y'know, empirical psychology.)

And then, that evening, in the course of doing his wash, that brother takes his sisters' bras and panties out of the dryer and he puts them in a laundry basket. Hell, maybe he even folds them. This is Standard Operating Procedure in pretty much every family across the world that has its own washer and dryer.

But if I'm watching a forty-minute show and thirty seconds of it is devoted to each of these events, then yeah, it Means Something. Because things don't "just happen" when read as part of a literary text. Because we--if you let me channel Jubal Early for a moment--imbue them with meaning. We give it a purpose. We construct an author-function, and we decode a message, and yes, the decoder ring is jury-rigged so the message will be sex, sex, sex. The mechanism of literary (and within literary I include cinematic and other modes of artistic criticism) criticism is predisposed to read sex out of a scene, in large part because literary critics like thinking about sex. And so do writers, so they play along.

Let they who are without sin throw the first stone.

A long expositionary dialogue conducted while two female characters are dressed in towels in the girls' locker room is femslashy. Because yes, Virginia, the all-female space does queer the relationship, despite the fact that this is Perfectly Common Behavior and having conversations dressed in a towel in a locker room doesn't make one a lesbian. (I have doubts as a het male how often this type of behavior actually happens outside of television, but that's neither here nor there. Because, as I've said, "actually happens" isn't the point--there 's a system of cinematic signification and realism doesn't really play into it all that much at all.) (Plus we can't forget the camera as a placeholder for the het male gaze, which sexualizes things even further. I should probably have used two male characters in a boy's locker room, but that's not so much fun for me to visualize. But the point would be the same.)

When I watch Buffy and Faith in season 3 and see them as femslashy as hell, when the heart that Faith draws isn't a love-heart at all but really a vampire heart (with a stake through it), and besides teenage girls use that sort of heart imagery to each other all the time without meaning anything at all sexual by it (although I still think those interactions are femslashy as hell too), I'm not illegitimately reading my own interpretation into the text. (Although if I were reading my own interpretation into the text I don't see necessarily why that should be illegitimate, but I probably wouldn't write an essay for a grade on the Anne/Violet 'cest in Man and Superman just because there's not a lot of textual evidence.)

I'm using a more-or-less agreed-upon system of deciphering textual cues, regardless of whether cues were intentionally put in by the writer. (Are Rosalind/Celia so gay on purpose? Probably, but who cares if it's not deliberate? It's a facet of the text that's there. It even meets the non-visual criteria of hth_the_first's slash texts--and when I imagine it, it meets the visual criteria as well. Which is not to say that we would at all assume that two cousins who were that devoted to each other had to be sexually attracted to each other if it were happening in "the real world.")

And when someone points out that hermeneutic I'm using to interrogate the fictional text isn't the same one I'd use to interrogate real life, I answer: whyever the hell should it be?

And then I imagine them making out with their sister.

Comments

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

I'm claiming there are no meaningful relationships being written today (or ever, since it's today that we're doing the interpreting) for which we cannot sensibly and legitimately imagine ourselves to be meant to view the relationships as sexualized. To me it seems that to ask anything about we're "meant" to think beyond that is to come dangerously close to priveleging authorial intent, or at least to giving the text much more power and agency than it actually has.

Okay, I guess that the problem is that I am not equipped with the proper vocabulary to have this coversation: When you say that writers "play along" I took away that you were saying that all authors are hoping that the audience will read the situation as sexual. I'm not sure I know how to use the term "meant" in a way that doesn't stand in for "it is the author's intent". (Outside of the prism of what the author wants you to take away, what does 'meant' mean?) So, I took you to mean "meant" in a way that implied you cared, and gave primacy to, the intent of the author.

I think your second paragraph is saying that the author is intenting to say one thing, but throwing in other things that lit (or tv or film) critics can interpret in other ways, for the fun of having a secret language, and that authors and critics love that things mean two things at once.

Am I at all getting warm?

Part I

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

You seem to have a pretty strong grasp on what I'm saying. Lit critics care less about what a author meant than about what they wrote, although of course knowing what the author meant might be useful in deciphering what they wrote. But often texts function in ways their author never would have or could have intended. Sometimes this is a good thing, when the author merely intended to create a piece of propaganda, for example.

Since fiction is always written in a voice which is not strictly speaking the author's, by writing a fictional narrative the author is problematizing the question of their intent.

To explain, I work in a field where intent of the author is primary and critical, and thus authors use their language with extreme precision. Clarity of intent is the gold standard, by which your success is measured -- losing that intent could cost someone their life, cost you your savings, bring down a government, etc. So, understanding a world where 'authorial privelege' is not important is like learning a whole new culture.)

I don't know in what field you work, but sometimes fields which seem at first like they should privelege intent for the sake of clarity don't always actually do so. That is to say, I think authors being clear is prized in all contexts, but it's not so straught-foward what we should do after that clarity is lost. (In theory it is lost in all cases, but in practice it is lost more badly in some than in other.) Take American constitutional law, for example, which certainly can be a matter of life or death (forgive me for boring you with our politics if you're not American, but the examples that pop to my mind are the ones from my experience). A conservative textualist like Justice Antonin Scalia looks to what an average reader in 1800 would have read a word like "person" as meaning, and more liberal justices see meaning of the text as changing and evolving--but no tries to guess what the Congress was thinking, on the theory that that way lies madness.

I can think of cases where it would be important to know the intent of the author--if reading a treasure map, it's more important to know where the author thought the treasure was than to know where, strictly speaking, the map says the treasure is--but it was too specifically exclude cases like this, in which we are concerned with "what really happened" (where the treasure is really buried) rather than "what the text is saying" (where the map says the treasure is badly), that I made the point that literary criticism isn't trying to answer "whodunit," but "whatsaidit."

Re: Part I

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

Your choice of example is interesting because I am a lawyer. Most of the time making your intent clear and not having any subtext/room for interpretation is the most important element in your work because you don't want a judge taking the opportunity to go litcrit on you and come up with a result that you didn't intend (unless you don't really care which heirs get your money, or what the terms of your employment contract are -- in which case, go ahead and let some random judge decide for you).

Re: Part I

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I actually quoted Justice Scalia in my honors thesis, because literary critics really are actually a lot like judges in what they do (deciding what things mean), except literary decisions have less practical effect on the world, and vying legal interpretations don't coexist quite so peacefully.

I don't think anyone opposes an author choosing their words carefully, but the very reason such precision is called for is that they will ultimately be judged upon what the words mean, and not what they wanted them to mean.

Part II

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I think your second paragraph is saying that the author is intenting to say one thing, but throwing in other things that lit (or tv or film) critics can interpret in other ways, for the fun of having a secret language, and that authors and critics love that things mean two things at once.

I don't think it's as simple as having one meaning for the simple people who "speak the language normally" and another for the critics with their strange games. (I'm admittedly hyperbolating what you said a little.) For one thing, I think that people not schooled in critical theory are perfectly schooled in how to pick up on slashy and 'cesty subtext just by being literate in their culture--they might not take it to quite the extremes to which a member of fandom or a queer theorist might take it, but one doesn't need a Ph.D. in literary crit to see the Frodo/Sam relationship in LotR as somewhat homoerotic. Our culture (and here I'm not sure if I mean American culture or English-speaking culture) as a whole isn't really any less sex-obsessed than litcrit people, and so are just as likely to read sex into things where they might not in "Real Life."

It's not that there's a simple meaning (for normal folks) and a complicated meaning (for critics), because every meaning is complicated and tentative. The author isn't so much as trying to "say one thing" I think as they are trying to tell a story, and sometimes the author recognizes that their story will mean more than one thing at once, and sometimes they don't.

Outside of the prism of what the author wants you to take away, what does 'meant' mean?

Texts can "mean" independent of what the author intended them to mean. If I draw a chalk heart on your door to signify that I love you, and a gangster tells a hit man to burn down every house with a chalk heart on the door, then my chalk heart "means" that your house is going to be burnt down even though I didn't mean that. It's because the mark is being interpreted under reading conditions that I didn't anticipate. But when the hit man burns down your house, it's not that they're reading the mark incorrectly, because for them chalk heart = house gets burned down.

Am I at all getting warm?

I think you have the basic idea, yes. Am I making myself clear?

Re: Part II

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

I think so. I think you're saying: text, because it exists, has meaning to those who view it, even outside of what was intended by the author, because we come to it with baggage and will impose a meaning on it (which might or might not match the intent of the author). So, you can say "this means X" even outside of the author's meaning, because of the mere existance of the text.

Given that we live in a hypersexualized culture, we've privileged sexual meanings over other meanings, so it's possible, even likely, that a lot of people are going to read characters doing normal stuff or having a deep but platonic friendship (or family relationship) as a sexual relationship.

Re: Part II

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Yep, that's pretty much it.

Re: Part II

[penfold-x.livejournal.com]

Hallelujah