Being prepared! stay tuned...
Being prepared! stay tuned...
I’ll break this down into 3 parts but basically: Authorial Intent is an incorrect abstraction which holds that there is a true unchanging narrative and that an author has it at all times.
First, this doesn’t work on a functional level because it goes against how the brain works. When we recall something, it is reconstructed then converted into the desired form of internal perception. Our brains change over time and so do our memories, even if we don’t notice. Additionally when trying to speak to another person we do not directly pass our reconstructions from our brain to theirs, and instead must further alter it to fit into spoken or written language of some kind. Like with works of fiction, the meaning of words in a language differs between people and changes over time. Lastly for this section, when we create a work of fiction we leave many things unstated, which must then be filled in entirely new when they come up. There is no certainty that those ‘fill-ins’ or frankly any statements about a fictional world are internally consistent with logic because the world we are talking about doesn’t actually exist to have had those things happen. You can say something happened and that it didn’t in two different writings which are both considered true and that is perfectly acceptable, it just doesn’t make any sense.
Given the myriad of issues above, it is incorrect to say that the author actually knows all things about a work which is attributed to them, though we may plausibly say they know about their own copy of it at the moment of its reconstruction (though this may not be the same as what they reconstructed previously). Categories don’t actually exist, they are abstractions used to simplify the world, and basically just glorified long term memory chunking.
Second, when we say someone is at fault for missing a part of a story, this is incorrect because it is based upon that absolutist story idea brought up at the top. Stories aren’t equal in complexity to the world around us, and as such when we attempt to reconstruct them we make assumptions to fill in things we are uncertain about, even if unconsciously. This act isn’t a failure because there is nothing that it is failing, each ‘instance’ of a story is unique to the individual who produced it. Perhaps we can say it is the fault of an individual if their construction contains a logical impossibility, however there is a lot of nuance to this which typically puts the fault on the author if we are to entertain logic as possible for fiction.
If a reader sees something in a book then combines it with an unconscious fill-in which results in a logical impossibility it isn’t their fault because they can’t control their assumptions, they are unconscious for a reason. If a reader sees two logically conflicting statements in a work then it is the author’s fault because they put them both there, not the reader. If the reader lies about the content of a book then it implies they know both the meaning the author wanted and then consciously said something else regardless, which is their fault. The problem is that it is much harder to determine if a reader has lied or simply did something unconsciously because they themself may forget or remain dishonest after questioning. Now we might say the same thing of an author, that perhaps one of the two conflicting statements was a lie, but it is on the author to make that clear because otherwise why are we reading their work at all? To me, the author is more at fault for perceived logical failings because they created the tool to communicate the story, and so if that tool has logical inconsistencies then they ought to have created it differently (assuming either party cares about logic).
I will also add that by calling someone an author we are putting them on a pedestal with respect to what they have created and as such it should be their fault when they believe their readers have misunderstood their work, it is their goal to convince readers of an idea, not the other way around (usually).
This leads into my third point which is that the role of the author from my perspective isn’t to provide laws but instead to convince a person to assemble beliefs a certain way through communication. If the author is dissatisfied with how someone has assembled ‘their world’ then they could try to convince that person to change things, but at the end of the day it isn’t the author’s world, even if what was used to construct it can be attributed to that author. In truth, just as that person has constructed an idea of the fictional world, they also have constructed a version of the author which is almost certainly nothing like who the author really is. In this way the author themself is as much a story as their work, and the two often overlap when we attempt to understand ‘authorial intent’.
That’s not quite what I wanted but it’s alright for now.