havingbeenbreathedout:professorfangirl:(Rebloggable by request)Ah, well, if that’s what you we

havingbeenbreathedout:professorfangirl:(Rebloggable by request)Ah, well, if that’s what you were being told in your English classes, then those profs were waaaaay out of date. No real scholar of literature has talked that way in at least two generations. The play of multiple interpretations was a central point of the theory of deconstruction, a term that doesn’t mean “to take apart,” but “to expose the internal contradictions in a text and show that any final or decisive interpretation is impossible.” (That’s part of it, anyway.) For theorists like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, any text has an infinite number of possible interpretations. This does not mean that every interpretation is “right”—that is, makes as much sense as every other. It means that every reader brings their own experiences, personal, cultural, and ideological, to bear on the text in making sense of it. Because every text makes sense not in itself, as a fixed record of the author’s intention, but as a medium of exchange between author and reader and culture. I call an interpretation “good” when that exchange is productive, when it creates meaning, when it helps us understand human experience in new ways.That interpretation of John doesn’t work so well for me because it turns his complexity into a matter of sweet surface appearance v. dark hidden truth, and that’s less interesting to me than seeming contradictions housed together in a more or less dynamic truce. (This is why I find Pennypaperbrain’s John so compelling: “In a nutshell, he knows he’s both a sadist and a good man….That’s not to say 4C John hasn’t had to fight any demons. Growing up before the internet, he was probably horrified by himself. He became a strong moralist, a doctor and a soldier, in part to discipline his fascination with violence and coercion, and to make it serve his best self. Subconsciously he may feel that his training has earned him the right to wield sadism the same way that he’s earned the right to take a life when he judges it necessary.”) But here’s the thing: other people love AQ’s interpretation, and it is coherent, consistent, and can drive a fascinating narrative. It doesn’t work for me, but goddamn it works. And that’s where interpretive undecidability pays off: there are readers out there for whom the appearance/reality dichotomy is more meaningful than it is for me. That characterization of John will be more productive for them. That makes it a “good” (productive, meaningful, provocative) interpretation. But now you see why I get so damn irked when someone says it’s “the ONLY valid reading of John.” Because “valid” doesn’t mean “true,” it means valuable. And there are so very many ways to value things, so many values people carry and exchange, and so, so many means of making meaning.This is the value, then, of fanfiction. It makes the play of interpretation material and productive of new meanings. In a way, fanfiction makes every text original, even transformative ones, because “original” doesn’t just mean something completely new that no-one’s ever seen before. I call a text original when it serves as the origin point for new interpretations, new texts, new characters and stories and worlds. So every interpretation becomes a new origin, and the only limit to how far we can go is how much it means to us.Yeah, I—The peaceful coexistence of wildly divergent interpretations of canon was one of my top two reasons for getting into fanfiction in the first place (the other one being the dearth of well-crafted, complex, non-heteronormative erotic writing in either mainstream romance novels or mainstream literary fiction). To claim that a given interpretation is the “only valid one” negates a huge part of why I find the fannish community so cool and inspiring. Different folks find different aspects of reality compelling, y’all! If anyone should understand that, it ought to be fandom.Hey, I’m just gonna tack on here, as one of the people who wrote “the only valid reading (in my opinion)” that unfortunately, sometimes when you try to say things hyperbolically to indicate great passion and enthusiasm, it doesn’t come across well online. I love the co-existence of multiple readings and agree 100% with everything above…I also really love spirited and vigorous debate without any ad hominem attacks.  -- source link
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