The Gaming Den

Personally, I'm not particularly fond of the concept. I suppose part of it has to do with playing a lot of TTRPGs, in which this viewpoint rarely leads to anything good (not that eschewing it is much better, thanks Skip), but when applied to literature as a whole?

I dunno, man. All it seems to do is to encourage nitpickiness and word inflation. Like if you wanted to get across the point that Dumbledore is Gay But It Doesn't Matter, you would have to stop the plot and point this out. Or change the story in a way possibly not for the better in order to include it.

What?

I'm assuming it has something to do with this.

There's a G.K. Chesterton quote which runs something like, "A good novel tells you the truth about its hero, and a bad novel tells you the truth about its author."

Way too often people who don't have the skills at characterizing or just flat-out don't know how people work and operate. And it gets worse when they get into their notions of good and evil.

For an easy example, take Eragon. Paolini is a vegetarian atheist. So, the Filthy Evil Traitor in the starting village is the butcher. Later, you find out the elves are vegetarian atheists. They mention offhand how Eragon will be a vegetarian atheist, too. Why? Because Paolini thinks being a vegetarian atheist who reveres life is the right way to live.

Then Eragorn usually goes and kills some fools and keeps on walking, whistling.

So, yeah. It's cool to include a message in a story if the message 1) fits 2) doesn't take over the story. J.K. Rowling, whatever her faults, got this sometimes. The Malfoy family is small just to point out that prejudice vs. acceptance means "prejudice" eventually won't have many friends left.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Personally, I'm not particularly fond of the concept. I suppose part of it has to do with playing a lot of TTRPGs, in which this viewpoint rarely leads to anything good (not that eschewing it is much better, thanks Skip), but when applied to literature as a whole?

See, talking about this same deal as relates to constitutional interpretation, it seems like the opposite.

TTRPG is the one place where Death of the Author makes the most sense. It doesn't matter what the people meant, because you have the actual rules right in front of you.

It doesn't really work at all in literature, because you get two kinds of Death of the Author people:

1) Moby Dick is about a big white whale, and that's all, fuck you, there are no underlying themes.

2) The Whale in Moby Dick symbolizes gay people, and the story is about how hunting gay people is counterproductive, but if you just move to land (IE don't ask don't tell) then it all works out just fine, yay us.

Either they want to pretend that underlying themes and messages can't exist, or they don't like the real ones, and want to remove the only source of definitive answers in order to shove their own bullshit down your throat.

tl;dr Death of the Author good in TTRPG, bad in literature.

I'm the sort of guy that, upon reading Moby Dick, did not discern any subtext beyond "This dude really fucking hates whales" and "The author must really fucking like whales, why is every other chapter about whale biology?"

The problem is that all art is a key. Sometimes a single key may fit many locks, even locks it was not intended to fit.

The classic example is a story about Hemmingway or Faulker(I'm fuzzy right now) where a student tracks him down and tells him his theory about how the author's fishing stories are all about man's relationship to nature and industrialization and the author replied "It's just about fishing, stupid."

There is a reason that literary analysis by Literature professors waits until the author and author's friends are comfortably dead (50 years usually).

So the answer is: it doesn't matter. All work in the field of Literature is people making shit up about some shit other guys made up. Unlike science, there is no truth you can deduce because you are looking at fiction. At best, you can say interesting things about the fiction.

And if you haven't guessed, I was in fact a Literature major in college.

K wrote:The problem is that all art is a key. Sometimes a single key may fit many locks, even locks it was not intended to fit.

The classic example is a story about Hemmingway or Faulker(I'm fuzzy right now) where a student tracks him down and tells him his theory about how the author's fishing stories are all about man's relationship to nature and industrialization and the author replied "It's just about fishing, stupid."

There is a reason that literary analysis by Literature professors waits until the author and author's friends are comfortably dead (50 years usually).

So the answer is: it doesn't matter. All work in the field of Literature is people making shit up about some shit other guys made up. Unlike science, there is no truth you can deduce because you are looking at fiction. At best, you can say interesting things about the fiction.

And if you haven't guessed, I was in fact a Literature major in college.

I realized this after taking my first college humanities class, which is why I am not a literature major.

Blicero wrote:I realized this after taking my first college humanities class, which is why I am not a literature major.

Yeah, I thank my mom for the lesson by proxy. She won a local poetry contest by writing a poem about Lake Crescent through each season. The judges went off about the symbolism behind each season and how meaningful it was to start the poem off in autumn and what that signified. My mom said she listened to the panel analyze her poem for half an hour before they awarded her the prize.

When she got home, she confessed that she didn't have the heart to tell them that none of their literary interpretations were relevant - she started the poem in the fall because that's the first time she had ever gone to the lake.

As with all forms of critical thinking, it's best to find a middle ground rather than going to the extremes.

Stories are sometimes written to entertain. They feature a series of interesting events. They impress the audience with the masterful use of words.

Other stories are written to make a point. Because the authors feels strongly about something. That issue X, Y, Z, needs more attention.

And more often than not, it's a little of both.

The key, really, is to figure out what kind of literary work you are reading. And base your literary criticisms from there.