In 2007, J.K. Rowling rather shocked the world when she announced that one of the biggest characters in her Harry Potter books, Albus Dumbledore, was gay. Up to that point, there was nothing in the text that explicitly mentioned his sexuality one way or another. There were barely any hints at all. But, her wording was interesting in itself. She said, "I always thought of Dumbledore as gay." She didn't say he definitely was. She didn't say that's the only way to see things. She said it was just how she saw him.
This raises one big issue in the philosophy of literature and in literary interpretation generally: to what extent can an author determine what their work means, especially after it's published? Do they have a special authority on how and how not to interpret a work?
Broadly speaking, the debate falls down into two camps: intentionalism and anti-intentionalism.
Intentionalism: What the author says, goes
Intentionalism is the idea that by creating the work of literature, the author has a special say over how to interpret that work. The strongest form of this is that the author has the only say. One is reminded of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass as he says, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." This applies especially to poetry, allegory, and metaphor. When a poet uses the word "moon," who determines what this might stand for?
If intentionalism were true, it would somewhat destroy the entire discipline of literary criticism.
In practice, few philosophers or critics hold this strong view. It's ridiculous to assume an author can say "dog" actually means "pineapple" and for that to be true. What's a more compelling case is a form of weak intentionalism that says an author has a privileged interpretation of their work. For instance, if there are two compelling interpretations of a work, the author has the final say. If some people see Narnia as a Christian allegory and others see it as a Marxist one, then C.S. Lewis saying it's about Christ would resolve the issue. So, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then so long as that's a reasonable interpretation, that's the final word on the matter.
The intentionalist view seems plausible, if we consider how knowing an author's plan changes our reading of the book. If we know that Fydor Dostoyevsky intended Prince Myshkin in The Idiot to be a near perfect moral exemplar "with an absolutely beautiful nature," this colors how we see the book. Knowing that George Orwell intended the characters of Animal Farm to be stand-ins for figures of the Russian Revolution sets you up to read the book in a certain way.
What's more, readers seem to love asking authors questions like, "What did you mean when such-and-such did this?" or, "What were your intentions in this scene?" Clearly the author's intentions do matter more than we think, at least to some people.
Anti-intentionalism: The author has no special authority
Interpretations are up for grabs.Credit: WANG ZHAO via Getty Images
On the other side of the debate is the idea that once a work of literature is "out there," the author has no special jurisdiction or power over how the reader should interpret it. As Philip Pullman wrote, "The meaning is what emerges from the interaction between the words I put on the page and the readers' own minds as they read them."
This "anti-intentionalism" is represented best by a seminal text, "The Intentional Fallacy," by William Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley. In it, they provide various counter-examples that aim to show how what the author thought or intended cannot affect how we read their work.
For instance, the 18th century poet Mark Akenside used the word "plastic" to mean a very particular thing (which was "to be capable of change"). Today, of course, that word has come to be much more commonly associated with something else entirely. The word has moved on from Akenside's day, and so we can say his poem means something new. Likewise, in Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, many of the passages are references to other poems. Many readers might not know this but still are perfectly capable of finding meaning in the poem.
In both cases, the anti-intentionalist view can be summarized by the philosopher Jacques Derrida's line, "There is nothing outside the text." Or, put another way, the author loses control over their work once we read it.
Intentionalism would destroy literary criticism
The biggest issue, perhaps, is that if intentionalism were true, it would somewhat destroy the entire discipline of literary criticism.
For example, John Milton's Paradise Lost explicitly opens with the words that his poem is about "justifying the ways of God to men." Yet, Percy Shelley and William Blake reinterpreted the entire thing as actually having Satan as the hero! If the author were dictator of their work, this kind of reimagining would never be possible. If an author claiming, "This is what the book means," were the final say, it would disallow any kind of fresh perspective or exciting re-readings. There would be no psychoanalytic interpretation of Hamlet or feminist perspectives on Tennessee Williams.
But most of all, if the author's intentions were all that mattered, no one would be able to find their own interpretations of a work. The beauty of literature is how we all project ourselves into what we're reading. We find answers and truths in there that are specific to us. In a way, the book becomes part of you, the reader.
So, Dumbledore can be gay but not because J.K. Rowling thinks so. It's only true if you see it, too.
Jonny Thomson teaches philosophy in Oxford. He runs a popular Instagram account called Mini Philosophy (@philosophyminis). His first book is Mini Philosophy: A Small Book of Big Ideas.
He introduced idiosyncratic concepts such as the free spirit, the Übermensch, eternal recurrence, ressentiment, the ascetic ideal, the revaluation of values, and the affirmation of life. He shifted allegiances: writing books, for example, in support of the composer Richard Wagner and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, but later delivering blistering critiques of both. Not surprisingly, scholars range widely in their interpretations of Nietzsche: was he a poet or a philosopher? A nihilist, moral relativist, or Nazi sympathiser? A critic or a system builder? Anti-Christian or Christian? Answers frequently depend on which portions of Nietzsche's work a reader deems most important.
In the face of this complexity, Nietzsche offers an interpretive key: his references to dance (Tanz). Taken together, these references light a path that begins in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and wends through every major work into his final book, the posthumous Ecce Homo (1908). These references not only link his ideas and styles, they also shed light on Nietzsche's enduring motivation: to teach readers how to affirm life here and now on Earth as human bodily selves. Nietzsche's dance references call attention to the sensory education that he insists is necessary for creating values that 'remain faithful to the Earth'.
When Nietzsche wrote his first book, he was unaware of the significance that dance would have for his philosophy, in part because he was deeply enamoured with Wagner. The musician had begun composing a cycle of four operas – his now-famous Ring – intending to revive the tradition of Ancient Greek tragedies. In so doing, Wagner hoped to realise the power of music that Schopenhauer described: to save humans from the cravings and suffering of Will.
During visits paid by Nietzsche, Wagner and his wife Cosima encouraged the younger man to write a scholarly book to justify these claims. Yet, as Nietzsche later admits, in his rush to laud Wagner (and Schopenhauer), he shortchanged one of his own insights – namely, that, in the tragedies of Ancient Greece, the dancing of the chorus was essential for ensuring that stories of madness, suffering and death nonetheless produce in spectators a rousing affirmation of life.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche analyses this paradoxical experience. He explains that the dancing and singing of the chorus move spectators to identify viscerally with what the chorus represents: elemental rhythms of an endlessly creative Nature. As they are moved by these rhythms, spectators feel joy. They know their bodily selves as members of an endlessly generative whole. And from this sensory vantage point, they are not devastated by the tragic death of their hero, god or ideal; instead, they perceive this death as a mere moment in an ongoing flow of appearances. Nietzsche calls the effect a 'magic transformation': spectators' sensations of suffering and terror yield to feelings of 'metaphysical comfort' and the notion that 'life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable'.
Later, in Human, All Too Human (1878), Nietzsche elaborates that all human symbolism – even music – is rooted in the 'imitation of gesture' at work in ancient tragedy. He writes that the human impulse to move with others 'is older than language, and goes on involuntarily … [even] when the language of gesture is universally suppressed,' as he observed among Christians of his day. When humans don't learn how to move their bodily selves, Nietzsche insists, their senses grow dull and they lose the capacity to discern what is good for them. He asks: where are the 'Books that teach us to dance'? Here, dance assumes a role it will play throughout Nietzsche's writing as a litmus test for any value, idea, practice or person. Does it dance? Does it catalyse a joyful affirmation of life?
On the heels of Human, Nietzsche's poor health forced him to retire from teaching, and he began to conceive plans for writing his own tragedy – a book designed to awaken in his readers a sensory vantage point from which they might experience the death of a god – in this case, the Christian God – as good for them, and a reason to love life. A book that would teach us to dance.
Nietzsche began writing his tragedy only after breaking off relations with his friends, the psychologist Paul Rée and Lou Andreas-Salomé, the woman they both loved. Nietzsche believed that he had found in Andreas-Salomé the one person who understood his quest for a radical affirmation of life. He made plans with her and Rée to live together in an intellectual society that she called their 'Unholy Trinity'. However, due primarily to suspicions planted by Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth, the trio's plans did not materialise. A despondent Nietzsche wrote to his dear friend Franz Overbeck: 'Unless I can discover the alchemical trick of turning this – muck into gold, I am lost.'
Nietzsche's own 'magic transformation' appeared a month later: Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). Three more parts soon followed. In this story, Zarathustra is a man who has lived alone on a mountaintop for 10 years, and comes down to teach people how to love themselves and their humanity. All four parts are saturated with references to dance, dancers and dancing. Zarathustra is a dancer, and dance is what he admonishes others to do. As Zarathustra exhorts: 'You higher men, the worst about you is that you have not learned to dance as one must dance – dancing away over yourselves! What does it matter that you are failures? How much is still possible!' And when Zarathustra states: 'I would only believe in a god that knows how to dance,' he confirms that even our highest ideals must encourage us to affirm bodily life.
After Zarathustra, Nietzsche continued to evoke dance as a touchstone for life-affirming values. In his critique of western European Christian morality, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), dance appears as an activity practised by the strong to preserve their ability to digest their experiences; those who dance are not burdened by ressentiment, or need for revenge. They have the sensory discernment needed to resist pernicious applications of the ascetic ideal. In Twilight of the Idols (1889) and The Antichrist (1895), dance appears as a discipline for training sensory awareness and cultivating skills of perception and responsibility, so that one is able to participate responsibly in the creation of values, conscious of what one's movements are making.
Nietzsche's ubiquitous references to dance are ever-present reminders that the work of overcoming oneself – of freeing oneself enough from anger, bitterness and despair to say 'Yes!' to life – is not just an intellectual or scientific task. An ability to affirm life demands bodily practices that discipline our minds to elemental rhythms, to the creativity of our senses, and to the 'great reason', our body, 'that does not say “I" but does 'I".' Only when we engage in such practices will we have the sensory awareness we need in order to discern whether the values we create and the movements we make express love for ourselves and the Earth.
Kimerer LaMothe
This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons. Read the original article.
It's really remarkable how seriously we take the fortunes of fictional characters. We care what happens to the people that we know perfectly well are simply words on a page or a screen. That they exist only in a writer's—and then in our—imagination somehow makes little difference. The best fictional characters stay with us, and we miss them when their stories end. We're weird.
Scientists from Ohio State University have published a study that describes just what is going on in people's heads when they invest in fictional characters. According to lead author of the study Timothy Broom, "When they think about a favorite fictional character, it appears similar in one part of the brain as when they are thinking about themselves." It would seem what's going on is that we identify with these characters to the extent that we—at least somewhat—become them.
This kind of identification can impact our real lives, too. As the study notes, there are undoubtedly more educators in the world because of Robin Williams' Mr. Keating in "Dead Poets Society," more doctors thanks to Ellen Pompeo's Meredith Grey in "Grey's Anatomy," and more than a few attorneys who got the idea for their careers from Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird."
The study is published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Conducting research in Westeros
Credit: HBO
The researchers used characters from HBO's "Game of Thrones": Bronn, Catelyn Stark, Cersei Lannister, Davos Seaworth, Jaime Lannister, Jon Snow, Petyr Baelish, Sandor Clegane, and Ygritte. They chose the series due to its massive popularity and because the personalities of its characters were diverse enough that participants in the study would be more likely to find one they identified with.
The study took place over the course of GoT's seventh season. There were 19 participants in the study, all fans of the show, ranging in age from 18-37 years with a median age of 24. Ten were female, nine male, and all were right-handed and deemed to be good fMRI candidates — an fMRI shows changes in blood flow that indicate activity.
This is your brain on fiction
Credit: Judeus Samson/Unsplash
The study had two phases.
First, participants responded to questions asked in two well-regarded questionnaires: the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI) and the Transportability Scale. They were asked to rate their level of agreement with statements such as, "I really get involved in the feelings of the characters in a novel."
Next, each participant's brain was scanned in a functional neuroimaging (fMRI) device as they were shown a series of names: their own, any of nine pre-selected personal friends, or a Thrones character. Beneath each name was a descriptor such as "smart," "trustworthy," "lonely," or "sad," and the individual was asked to state whether the attribute was applicable by saying "yes" or "no."
The researchers were most interested in activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC). It's known from previous research that when we think of ourselves, activity in the vMPFC increases.
As the researchers predicted, those with lower scores on the IRI and Transportability Scale had the greatest activity in the vMPFC when they thought about themselves, somewhat less when they thought about their friends, and the least activity of all when they thought about the characters.
On the other hand, people with higher tests scores—those who had reported that they often identified with fictional characters—were seen as having higher levels of activity in the vMPFC than other participants when they were considering the characters, especially when they were thinking about characters they liked or related to.
Co-author of the study Dylan Wanger suggests that our identification with fictional characters may be a kind of pleasurable role-playing: "For some people, fiction is a chance to take on new identities, to see worlds though others' eyes and return from those experiences changed."
"What previous studies have found," Wanger says, "is that when people experience stories as if they were one of the characters, a connection is made with that character, and the character becomes intwined with the self. In our study, we see evidence of that in their brains."
