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Re: Ender's Game - Chapters 13 through 15

Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 1:49 pm
by Mr. P
HA! I think I have that edition. This is where my skipping the Introduction is a bad thing!Thanks Greg!Mr. P. The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.Once you perceive the irrevocable truth, you can no longer justify the irrational denial. - Mr. P.The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Re: Ender's Game - Chapters 13 through 15

Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 3:30 pm
by blue lily
I more or less agreed with you until this:Quote:The only valid meaning any work of art can have is the one that its creator puts there.I don't believe there are valid and invalid meanings to art. One of the points of art is that it's interpretive. There can be valid and invalid statements about the creator's intent, though. ***************The Gimp Parade

Re: Ender's Game - Chapters 13 through 15

Posted: Wed May 10, 2006 3:43 pm
by Mr. P
I agree with Lily. Art is not totalitarian!Mr. P. The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.Once you perceive the irrevocable truth, you can no longer justify the irrational denial. - Mr. P.The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Re: Ender's Game - Chapters 13 through 15

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 7:19 am
by Greg Neuman
Quote:I don't believe there are valid and invalid meanings to art. One of the points of art is that it's interpretive. There can be valid and invalid statements about the creator's intent, though.If the artist has intent, then the meaning of her work should be the expression of that intent. Good art is not merely pleasing to the senses, it conveys a message. How can a message be conveyed if everything is always open to any interpretation the viewer cares to give?Far from being the point of art, too much interpretation actually ruins art.Now, that said, an artist can certainly create a work that is purposefully left open to some interpretation. There can be subtlety, layered meaning, allegory, and the presentation of ideas that will intentionally provoke different reactions from different viewers. But 1) that is not the case with Ender's Game, and 2) even when art is open to interpretation, the meaning is still put there by the artist. It's just that she's included more meaning than what might be immediately obvious.Interesting discussion.Gedited for a typo "Dear Buddha: Please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket."- Malcolm Reynolds, SerenityEdited by: Greg Neuman at: 5/11/06 8:37 am

Re: Ender's Game - Chapters 13 through 15

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 7:37 am
by Greg Neuman
Quote:HA! I think I have that edition. This is where my skipping the Introduction is a bad thing!I wonder, could we get Card as a chat guest? I'd certainly like to hear him elaborate on much of what he says in that introduction, especially seeing as how I largely agree with his views on writing fiction.First and foremost, tell a good story. Add meaning and depth where you can, but never forget: The reader is there to enjoy himself by getting lost in the world you create, not to have you proselytize at him for an hour or two. If an author is sacrificing most of his readability and entertainment value for the sake of making a point, he'd probably be better off as an essayist or an op-ed reporter.G "Dear Buddha: Please bring me a pony and a plastic rocket."- Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity

Re: Ender's Game - Chapters 13 through 15

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 4:46 pm
by MadArchitect
riverc0il: This often happens with great works of fiction. For example, The Lord of the Rings, a book in which the author, Tolkien, specifically wrote in a preface/forward to the book that despite what people think, the book is only a story of fiction and has no larger meanings.That Tolkien did not intend it to have larger meaning is not proof that it has no larger meaning. Tolkien's work is a particularly lucid example. He intentionally drew from a very large number of traditional and classical works, and it's almost unimaginable that some of the themes of those works failed to carry over.To understand what I'm getting at, you have to stop looking at literary meaning as a kind of cypher or secret code. Writing a meaningless work of fiction is a bit like writing a meaningless sentence. If it were truly meaningless, it would be nonsense and no one would pay much attention to it.That's not to say that all literary works are on equal footing, and some are certainly more compelling than others.Greg Neuman: But any meaning - moral or otherwise - that survives writing, revision, editing, and publishing is meant to be there.I can point to at least a dozen instances in which reputable, published authors have betrayed their own political or philosophical biases when their stories were meant to be nothing more than stories. And there have been plenty of writers who have gone on record as saying that their novels contain meaning that they haven't meant to put there. Even the simplest of stories yield up material that the author didn't intend to put there. That is, among other things, just the nature of language, which survives in large part because its ambiguity allows it to communicate across lines of denotation.The only valid meaning any work of art can have is the one that its creator puts there.Then for the vast majority of works of art, we can have no idea what its valid meaning is. We have no statement from Sophocles saying what the intent of his plays may have been. Does it therefore valid that they're of no use to us?Meaning is something that arises in the relationship between the work and the reader. The author produces the work, but he has ultimately no control over his audience, and therefore may determine only half of the relationship.But regardless of the nature of the work, the person reading or watching it does not actually add anything to it; the best they can hope for is to be astute enough to grasp 100% of the artist's meaning.I think you may have let your ideals concerning your profession blind you to the reality of the situation. The reader brings their own experiences, biases, intelligence, feeling and cultural associations to the table, and those dictate, for better or for worse, at least half of the relationship, and therefore the meaning, which arises in the appreciation of a work of art. And most working artists realize this, whether they like it or not, when they consider what sort of audience they're working to.The problem is that they're seeing intent that doesn't really exist.If they didn't see authorial intent as the end-all be-all of artistic meaning, they'd likely not bother making assumptions about the author's intent.If authorial intent is the only measure of a work's meaning, then why don't more artists provide prefaces or running commentaries on what they intended? It would sure help us poor, unnecessary readers.Blue Lily: I don't believe there are valid and invalid meanings to art.I'd say that there are -- Greg's example with Michaleangelo's David illustrates the point -- but that the key to distinguishing a valid interpretation from an invalid interpretation is whether or not there is a logical consistency between the work and the interpretation. Any time an interpretation makes its argument by reading into a work events or facts that are not referenced within the work itself, you can count that interpretation as an allegory or commentary making use of the work, rather than as an ellucidation of a valid meaning within the work.Greg Neuman: Now, that said, an artist can certainly create a work that is purposefully left open to some interpretation.... But 1) that is not the case with Ender's Game, and 2) even when art is open to interpretation, the meaning is still put there by the artist.Unless he's been more explicit on the matter, Card's having stated his intent does not mean that he isn't happy to see other people interpreting Ender's Game according to their own experience of the work.