Outline of a Defence

Outline of a Defence

When we consider approaches to interpretation, we face multiple paths. One path may be affective, leading us to discover emotions that the text evokes and their consideration. Another path may be psychoanalytical, asking that we estimate the psyche of the reader or author, perhaps of the text.

That there are multiple paths seem to suggest:

1. All paths are equally valid, or
2. All paths are partial, contributing to a whole that seeks some combination of these perspectives.

These suggestions betray the act of reading, where contradictions abound, where adherence to an approach is constantly under fire, not only from other approaches but also from the text itself. Thus, I find myself oddly discomforted by LeGuin to become aware of my latent consequentialistism, however much I pore over neo-Kantian ethics. Or be enraptured by Alice Munro, where the sentences in their muted motion waver my philosophy of gender.

Reading a text, sometimes, is where Le Guin puts you in at the end of Omelas: walk away or don’t. Simple choices, yet over the years when I heard people arguing why the characters won’t stay in Omelas and fight, I felt a point has been lost — of a contradiction so great that one is forced to choose, to shift one’s identity one way radically. To stay or to walk away, like to be or not to be, of one or the other — not a ghostly, borderly existence. There are, remember, good reasons for both; that much ethics tells us. There is then just the weight of a choice that hangs upon the reader, the actor, the hero proper of Omelas.

And there open more possibilities:

1. All paths are not equally valid
2. All paths are not partial and do not combine effectively to a sum greater than each individual path
3. There is, in reading, a moment of choice between paths that seem equally valid or partial, but which we effectively endorse as the more valid or the complete option

Houston, We Have a Problem!

In a recent discussion, someone (say H) posed an interesting question. I will forgo a discussion of the question’s context in favour of reconstructing some relevant points. This runs the risk of dimming H and dumbing their critique. I can only hope that such a situation does not arise. The alternative is too detailed for this forum.

Here on, I will use ‘H said’ for the more cumbersome, ‘I am reconstructing what H said as’. While I have tried to stay close to H’s language, I have categorised his views where structure might be wanting.

We were reading Octavia Butler’s Dawn. I endorsed the view that we can understand Butler’s racial / gender politics — we can situate Butler politically — by a (close) reading of Dawn. This simply means that interpreting the pages of Dawn, its words and sentences or the arrangement of its contents or the many other qualities of the text can be studied to tell us how Butler thought about gender and race.

H made a few interesting observations in this regard. He said that:

1. This view is wrong.
2. This view is wrong because of a contrary view: “Texts (stories) should be interpreted from within their fixed universe: why characters and social structures are the way they are and why they act the way they do.” I have posed this contrary view as normative — it might not be H’s intention to argue such strong terms. H’s original formulation was about his enjoyment, which they are the best judge of. My point is to ask whether his enjoyment of a story this way is proper and whether such enjoyment contradicts my view.
3. The contrary view is supported by reasons specified below.

H proposed 2 classes of reasons. I am adding one for completeness.

1. Wilful deterrents: H asks if we have some unexamined assumptions. For instance, are we assuming wrongly that readers and authors are self-aware? Are we assuming wrongly that the author or reader are not “conning themselves”? Are we assuming that they are not misleading any analysis: that they intend to reflect their correct states of mind when reading or writing?
2. Ethics of judgement: If the reader interprets Dawn and says that Butler is being racist and Butler denies that she is, but the reader insists that their interpretation of Butler is correct, is the reader not patronising Butler? H stops here but let us proceed further: in describing what they think Butler is (a racist in this example), are they not removing Butler’s autonomy: her ability to define herself, to ‘name’ herself?
3. Possibility of interpretation: I will add this as a counterargument to my view here. Is the move from interpreting a text to analysing an author allowed? In other words, can I say, “From an analysis of Dawn, I know that Butler is upsetting conventional considered-universal gender relations from her racial position”? Or should I claim that, “From an analysis of Dawn, I figure that Dawn is a text that upsets conventional considered-universal gender relations”? After all, I have not specified how I can lift a claim that is attached to the text and make it about the author, as if by magic. Note that this is different from the ethical question — even if it were morally ok to do this, is it still sensible to do this?

Each of these reasons is important. Let us consider them one-by-one, sketching a possible outline of how they can be addressed.

The Moral Conundrum

Suppose that it were possible to connect the analysis of a text with the bent of its author. Should we do it: should we judge that Butler has one worldview or shies away from another because we happened to glean that from a reading of her text?

Here, H posits a quick claim: if Butler says that she is not someone we think her to be, we should not judge her so. The evidence is suggested by a reading of Tiptree’s biography. Tiptree, the pseudonym of a woman author, Sheldon, was judged by certain critics, possibly experts, as possessing some essence of a man. Clearly, these critics were misguided — they did not have access to Tiptree or the fact that she was a woman and in this blindness, their analysis was clearly mistaken. Thus, H argues, generalising rapidly from this particular claim, all interpretation where we move from the text to the author is incorrect.

Further, H argues, it is a sort of patronising attitude with which we say, “Tiptree is writing as if she were a man” if Tiptree claims, “I am not writing as if I were a man. I am a woman after all.” H is not very clear why this is a patronising attitude — perhaps H believes that we must not claim to understand someone better than they claim to understand themselves. When this commonly happens, one imagines a towering adult over a puny child, the adult taking stock of the child’s intent more carefully than the child itself can. Here, therefore, we become patrons for the author, an act that is despicable because authors are fully formed humans in their own right.

It may also be that we are denying the author the ability to choose their own definitions. Tiptree, for instance, might want to be identified as a woman but the clout of a mistaken expert makes speaking of her as a man commonplace. This faulty ascription describes Tiptree as what she is not. Worse, it perhaps rids her of being able to speak what she truly thinks she is.

This is a compelling argument indeed. A response to this, however, can be constructed using the following outline:

1. First, I will argue that the argument against patronising is the same as the argument against autonomy: it is precisely because autonomy is threatened that we feel the sting of patronising. It is enough, therefore, to argue that my view does not reduce Butler’s autonomy.
2. Second, I will argue a strong claim: it is not a reduction of Butler’s autonomy (if my view is correct) because Butler’s autonomy is enhanced. The argument follows a strategy of blunting the blade: yes, I will argue, that I am claiming to understand at least some aspect of Butler which she might not claim to know about herself, or deny about herself, but no, that is not the same as patronising her.
   This argument rests on how we understand critique itself. Consider, for instance, a man who has written a story that I deem sexist. The man claims in a public appearance that his views are not sexist, that it is indeed quite feminist as evidenced by the book. The man may also genuinely believe this to be the case. If I offer the man a reasoned view of why he misunderstands his own position, based on our differing judgements of the book, I do not therefore patronise him. I offer to him an option to reflect upon, to determine if he is indeed what he conceived of himself or if his views about himself were biassed, were sexist.
   We can only level a charge of patronising if we assume that our views about ourselves are final and fixed, not open to change. I find that an ill-conceived argument — to increase autonomy is to widen one’s range of choices, to put myself in situations where my actions and those of others reveal myself more and more to me, for greater and greater consideration.
   In short, a critique is not to say, “I have totally estimated Butler”. It is to say instead, “My views of Butler have given her an option to engage with a view of herself that she now has the option to affirm or deny”. What is important in this calculus is that neither my critique nor her affirmation be arbitrary, the latter being a particular clause that is violated if we throw the charge of patronising indiscriminately.
   Note that this is not to say that a particular critique cannot be patronising, or wrong. It is possible for a critic to be biassed. In Tiptree’s case, the critic, for instance, was definitely wrong to assume that any evidence from the text: its content, its form, its language, could be evidence proper for whatever gender conception he held. He was also patronising, perhaps, in the specific comments about Tiptree’s gender. But he was not patronising necessarily because he tried jumping from an analysis of the text to a judgement about the author. Had he done it better, the criticism could have been more appropriate, not patronising, correct.
3. Third, I will argue a weak claim, one that may be more palatable for H. My view is not a reduction of Butler’s autonomy because to make a claim about an author is not to make a biographical claim but a literary one. This means that we are not trying by our analysis to estimate a person but a literary construct: an author-construct.
   To argue for this claim would require a definition of what I mean by an author-construct and why we even need a concept like this. I will argue that an author-construct is useful under certain views of a text, where this ghostly presence maintains a certain unity in the text that is otherwise loosely bound. A necessary function of this construct is that it maintains a unity of intent, which we then trace from the text.
   This view argues that when I say, “Butler said P in Dawn, so her position is X”, what I really mean is “There exists a Butler-construct who said P in Dawn, so her position is X”. Or even, “Butler has written Dawn, especially P, as if her position were X”. Of course Butler can reject that X is her real position but all we are claiming is that she is writing as if X is her position. In thus weakening her statement, we dismiss the moral case against us. This takes the following shape.
   I will argue that I only patronise Butler if I claim to estimate her better than she can estimate herself. But I am not estimating Butler; I am rather estimating a construct that is reflected from the text, who I am offering the position of an author, driving textual intent. This is a third party, as distant from Butler as it is from me. Neither of our views, therefore, are prematurely more valid — we can now have a more equal reasoned argument about ‘authorial intent’ with this construct.

The moral conundrum has a few more implicit assumptions which I will try to tease apart when I detail out my argument.

Possibility of Interpretation

If I were honest, I feel that this reason is only hinted at by H and the argument is never fully developed. In what follows, I have decided to include my views of what I think a good argument might look like.

The argument is straightforward. All that I have analysed as data is a certain string of characters that comprise the book, Dawn. All that the analysis should refer to, therefore, is the book Dawn. It seems inconceivable that an analysis which has not stepped outside of a certain boundary can have consequences outside that boundary.

Consider, for instance, a text floating in space that you chance upon. Its brilliant story leads you to conclude that the text has been written by a progressive individual, in all manners beautiful and morally upright. What individual, you do not know, though you are convinced not only of its existence but also about many of its defining features. And all from stimuli that might not contain enough information for you to conclusively admit to either of these conclusions.

Why not though?

What this argument does is separate, almost completely, the text from the author. It makes the author unavailable in the general vicinity, so that all attacks or appraisals of the author are shouts into the void. This ‘authoricide’ proceeds, I feel, slightly against common sense, though I understand that this might be demeaning to the view itself — we should find a better argument against it, one that presumably explains why we think of authors in ways that we conventionally do.

It is perhaps easier to conceive what a weak claim might look like:

1. I will argue for an author-construct.
2. I will then argue that all I claim is that the text reflects a ghostly presence, an author-construct because we want a certain something to hold a unified intent for the text. It is to this construct that we refer when we say that the author’s politics is such and such.
3. Because we do not posit any external entity, we do not posit any existence in a ‘real’ sense. We do not need any extant information outside the text to argue about the author. All we need is a meta-concept that coheres with the text.

A stronger claim is more difficult. I shall begin, as indicated above, by common-sense practical observations to motivate a response. We engage in practice, for one, of awarding authors for their views: nobel winners, for instance, are spoken of highly in what they do for literature and the literary community, indeed for all of humanity. The prize goes into the account of a person, not in the name of a book or an oeuvre of books. It rewards genius accorded to a person, but the evidence of said genius exists in the tomes that the individual has produced.

What makes such practice possible? There seems to be an assumption that the text points to a creator, presumably human, who is considered the prime mover of the text. The text is so good that we need to award someone and who better than the person mentioned conveniently on the cover page? And if we feel that this is arbitrary, consider a case where a text has moved us to act irrationally to an extreme, say to conduct genocide, and we want to know who to hold responsible. How convincing would it be to hold a book responsible for a genocide, a mere object that might be seen the means and not the origin of what was said within it. This then, is the point that we can pick up: that the Author is the Cause of the Text.

I think this argument overshoots our requirement, inviting the author in for more than they are capable of. It is almost as if we are giving them a free hand; as if their accountability for a supposed analysis of the text is traded with an aspect of authority, of control, that they can exercise over the text. “If you can hang me for the book,” the Author seems to ask, “why not let me be the final judge of what I mean by it? That way I know that I am not being hanged on a misinterpreted word.” In creating a strong defence, we seem to have conceded a basis of our initial position — that we begin from the text and speak about the author. So let us rewind slightly and see if we can stop ourselves at this point and admit no more.

To do that, again, will refer to the conventions of writing that allows us to build a common sense in the first place. The argument for this claim will run as follows:

1. First, consider the statement, “From an analysis of Dawn, I figure that Dawn is a text that upsets conventional considered-universal gender relations.” Note that we allow the text to speak, so to say, about things that we consider real. The text behaves as if it is reconstructing gender relations as is or as should be, pointing to something external to it. Similarly, a text about protests in India can be reasonably held to say something about protests in India that are true or false.
2. Second, while it may be wrong that “Dawn is a text that upsets conventional considered-universal gender relations” leads us to “Butler upsets conventional considered-universal gender relations”, it may not be wrong if we follow this particular chain of thoughts: “Dawn is a text that tells us that its author, Butler, upsets conventional considered-universal gender relations” to “Butler upsets conventional considered-universal gender relations”. This follows the structure of 1.
3. The question remains if we can ever make the first claim and I will argue that we can, in certain kinds of analyses. The outline of the argument is as follows: the text refers to multiple concepts; one of those concepts is the author, in the kind of ‘choices’ that we common-sensically ascribe to the author that would not otherwise be considered part of the text. I will argue that paratextual elements, for instance, and various paradigmatic choices can be attributed to the author, an analysis of which reveals the author to us.

At the core of H’s claim is an assumption that we cannot step out of the text into what we might call reality. However, this is a sorry view of a text and in maintaining this, we probably relegate literature to a field of indifference, as if it loses all its ability to act upon our world, to tell something meaningful about it. If we allow the text to be porous, otherwise, we will see that it refers to many things, including the author.

I am slightly wary of the strong argument because while the text may refer to the author, one can ask “In what way does the text refer to the author?” I feel a stronger counter may be wrought upon this argument but I will stop my discussion here.

Note that this critique of the author, again, is not binding upon the author. It is only a claim to an aspect of the author that should be weighed as evidence by everyone, Butler included, about their politics.

Wilful Deterrents

Of all the presented reasons, this perhaps is the easiest to do away with and the least interesting. That is because of a certain baked-in truth that the reason contains and partly because it makes us step out into philosophy and the discovery of the kind of people we are, a task that has been done at length by many other, better minds.

I will not argue completely against this reason. I grant that in the absence of self-awareness or with a tendency to con ourselves and others, the entire task of interpretation will fall apart. But notice that this is a strong view: all interpretation will fall apart in this view, including the contradictory view where we claim that “Dawn says X”. And that is because if we are not self-aware and have a tendency to con ourselves, reflection on the sense-data that impinges upon us, reflection that might lead to any kind of justification that interpretation or analysis presents, would be absent.

The outline of the argument against this position is to argue that in the best of situations, humans are self-aware creatures who do not con themselves. Further, even in the more average situations, humans are self-aware creatures who do not con themselves, evidenced by the proliferation of the social structures that we regularly move within, structures that depend on these attributes of humans. I will point to the works of a few philosophers who suggest to us this nature of humans. These philosophers have discussed the metaphysics of humanity better than I can.

And H is correct in pointing out that these are assumptions. These assumptions, however, are not unexamined. They are assumptions that I have assented to.

There is little else to say about this reason (since I have outsourced most of the heavy-lifting) except this: there is a certain symmetry which the weak stance that I have presented above claims, when creating an author-construct. It is a symmetry that allows a self-aware reader who is not conning themselves to posit a construct that is similarly self-aware and not conning themselves as a reflection of the reader’s self. This symmetry is an interesting one and it does not require arguing that the author, the real person, is self-aware and is not conning themselves. For even if they were, their writing has closely approximated the work of a self-aware, non-conning author-construct.

This, largely, will be the outline of the defence whose details I shall fill over the coming days.