Trust the tale, not the teller

[thuviaptarth]

Thank you to everyone who responded to this.

I really do think this is the oddest meme. I don't even know how to express what strikes me as so odd about it. The phrasing seems to depend on assumptions about how fiction writers relate to writing, and fiction readers relate to reading, that ... are just so far from the way I have always thought of these things that I don't even know how to say what's off about them. Maybe also about how people present themselves in particular circumstances versus what they really think or feel, too.

Also, either some of you are much better at stripping out what you know of people than I am, or else I haven't made clear things about myself that I think are perfectly obvious. I haven't been able to respond to posts by people I know even a little because I do know them even a little, and unless I remember very clearly my impression of them before talking to them, it's ... no, I can't make it go away.

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

I agree: there's something deeply strange in the way it asks for you to guess social/political positions based on somebody's fiction. Which probably explains the degree to which people who try to respond to it find themselves talking about stuff that has nothing to do with positions on pressing social issues.

I do think that a large enough body of work is going to say things about the writer beyond what her artistic interests are, although not in a straightforward way, and not to the same extent that a body of nonfiction would. But what we say and how we say it, how we present characters, what we show to be important to them and whether or not the narrative supports their own evaluation of that thing's importance, how other characters respond, what kinds of stories we tell -- all of that, and indeed everything in a story, is shaped by the assumptions about the world and the people in it that we each carry around with us. Some of that shaping will be invisible, because anyone who can read a work in such a way that it's intelligible will have been shaped by the same culture, and will share some of the writer's assumptions on a level below consciousness. But not all of it's invisible, and there are readers who'll be aware of a great deal of it, either because they're wired that way or because they've had training that inclines them to it.

Which isn't to say that any reader can't or won't get her reading totally wrong. But I do think that there's a lot more information there in the text than people necessarily give it credit for.