JMS: Interpretation and Authorial Intention (WWE Spoiler)

[B5JMS Poster]

Subject: JMS: Interpretation and Authorial Intention (WWE Spoiler)
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 No. | DATE        |  FROM
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+  1: Jul 10, 1996: schroeder william r <wschroed at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
*  2: Jul 11, 1996: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)

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From: schroeder william r <wschroed at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Lines: 93

JMS,

This may seem like a hopelessly academic question, but it has a lot of 
personal importance to me.  Though it may take me a lot of words to 
clarify the question, you are welcome to answer as tersely as you wish.  

The question is about interpreting a narrative/dramatic work like Babylon
5.  (I mean to distinguish *interpreting* from *describing* and from
*evaluating* in everything I say here, though of course there are complex
relationships between all three processes.  By *interpreting* I mean
articulating the meaning (which includes intellectual, emotional,
volitional content) of the entire work.  The completion of this process
would be an enormously complex set of statements, not something reductive
or simplistic--really an entire book.) The most common view on this issue
states that the meaning of the narrative/dramatic work is what the author
intended it to mean.  So, on this view, anyone attempting this process is
engaged in an effort to reconstitute your mental processes as you
developed and wrote the episodes. 

Another view, which I dismiss out of hand, is that the meaning of the 
work is what anyone does or even can take it to mean (regardless of how 
intelligible or defensible such an interpretation is).  

Still a third view is that the interpretation of a narrative/dramatic work
is the most coherent system of hypotheses that integrate the various
elements exhibited by the work.  Conceivably there can be ties, at least
for a time, and this allows for several equally justifiable
interpretations.  On this view the author's view of the work can be
informed by an unusually astute interpretation of that work.  But, of
course, the author's awareness of all the subtleties of the work would
enable him or her to indicate various lapses or incoherencies in proposed
interpretations quite well. 

An amazing amount of heat has been generated over this issue in literary 
theory.  You can probably discern which position I favor.  Do you favor 
either of these three positions, or do you have still a fourth position?  
Or do you simply not find this an interesting question?

(Spoiler Space for WWE I and II below:)
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An interesting (but tiny) area where this issue becomes important 
concerns allusions.  For example, many noted the allusion to Citizen 
Kane when Delenn dropped the glass enclosed lighthouse in WWE (in the 
flash-foward scene).  And of course there is the direct relationship 
between a *lighthouse* and the army of *light*.  So far I have seen no 
one suggest any relation to Virginia Woolf's *To The Lighthouse*, in 
which the lighthouse seems to express something like order and 
goal-directedness in the midst of all kinds of chaos.  On theory 1 above 
there is a genuine or true allusion to Woolf's novel only you consciously 
thought of that reference while you were working on the script.  On 
theory 3 above, a case could be made for Woolf's work as a genuine 
allusion if a lot of interesting defense could be supplied linking 
Woolf's work to the concerns of Babylon 5, even if you had not 
consciously thought of such a reference.  (Here we are talking about the 
meaning of one event within the work, not even the meaning of the whole 
episode, much less the whole work; so it provides one interesting type of 
test case for the various positions, one that most people think refutes 
theory 3.)

Anyway, sorry for this long-winded question.  The reason I ask is, like a 
few others on this list, I am interested in producing an interpretation 
of the whole work.  I happen to work under the aegis of theory 3.  Thanks 
for anything you have to say on the matter.  

Bill Schroeder




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From: jmsatb5 at aol.com (Jms at B5)
Lines: 62

Without giving anything spoilerish away....

When I wrote the script, I wanted there to be a snow globe not because of
any allusion to Citizen Kane, which really hadn't occured to me, but
because I knew I wanted something to smash, to shatter, to visually convey
the emotional content of something that just happened.  A snow globe not
only breaks, shatters, it splashes...nicely visual.

When time came to prep that episode, the art department went around and
tried to find a good snowglobe.  They brought back, I think, 3 different
ones we could use.  Of the three, the lighthouse one seemed the most
appropriate given what was going on in the story.  I file this one under
ABA, Art By Accident.  (This is the one area academics never get into,
because it's totally random, not easily reductible...a nasty little
X-factor in their literary equations.)

For me, the interpretation part of the viewing experience is a synthesis
of what happens on either side of the screen.  There is the author's
intent on the one side, and what the viewer perceives or responds to on
the other; art is what happens in the space between those two.  For
instance, an artist can say, "The ball is blue."  That is a simple
declarative sentence, theoretically accurate about the ball in his hand. 
The viewer sees it, and if all conditions permit agreement -- a good TV,
not color blind -- says yes, the ball is blue.  

The author's intention is absolutely clear, the interpretation either
non-existent or in simple agreement of fact (whichever way you want to
phrase that)...but is it art?  Does it *resonate* or simply *inform*?  A
news item about 17,000 more homeless people in a given city this week
*informs*.  An interview with a homless mother, her child beside her,
crying...*resonates*.

The key is to communicate your statement as clearly as possible; you must
know what you intend to say, and to a large extent judge your success or
failure on the degree to which the audience correctly perceives your
intent.  But to do so in an artful fashion.  To somehow tie emotionally in
with the viewer, so that it causes a sympathetic vibration, the way a
tuning fork can make a champagne glass vibrate at a similar frequency. 
The viewer should feel what YOU felt when you wrote it.

This is why I tend to gauge if my script works by whether or not it
affects me; if it makes me laugh out loud, I'm reasonably sure it's funny.
 If I start to mist up at a scene, then it's probably going to do so to
others.  It's the only yardstick I've got.

(On the other hand, there will *always* be some who just Don't Get It. 
There are some who look at certain kinds of modern art and just weep for
the beauty of it.  I see a triangle and a ball and a black smear, shrug
and move on.  You just have to hope that you're sufficiently In Tune to
get the majority of people who are exposed to your work.  As another
writer once said, "A book is like a mirror.  If an ass looks in, you can't
exactly expect an apostle to peer out.")

Someone else once said, of art, "To define is to kill, to suggest is to
create."  That part, the suggestion, the interpretation, is the place
where art happens.


 jms



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