Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!
In 2023 YeahWrite’s free workshop is going back to the basics with a focus on tropes, the sometimes imperceptible and often underrated building blocks of writing. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).
The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.
Death of the Author
It’s impossible to talk about tropes without talking about the media that we love. And it’s impossible to talk about the media that we love without talking about some stuff that’s, well, problematic. And honestly we are not here to judge you over what you love to read, or what you loved and identified with when you were younger. Whether it’s Holden Caulfield or Harry Potter, we all consume problematic media and identify with problematic characters. Maybe that’s because you didn’t have other options for media where you could see yourself, and you were so hungry for representation that you seized on the crumbs you could get. Maybe you’ve just outgrown being the person who identified with that person or position.
But what if the media itself isn’t the problem? What if it’s the creator (or the actor, or the director, or)…?
One way people “protect” the media they love after finding out things that make them feel icky about the people who participated in making that media is a trope (you knew we’d get there) called Death of the Author. Maybe you know what that is already, and maybe you’ve even seen this thing going around:
[for text-readable version / source: this link]
But what do all these things mean for you, and can Death of the Author really work? Keep reading!
I didn’t know the author was sick?
So why, again, do we need to engage in death of the author? Well, a media experience has (at least, depending on your method of consumption) three meta-characters: the author (director, screenwriter, etc.), the story itself, and the consumer (reader, viewer, listener). All three can be considered active participants in the experience, every time. And when one of those characters is fundamentally tainted for you in some way (looking DIRECTLY at you, Jo Rowling) it can really sour the experience.
And also, we really really identify with the media we consume. Enjoying similar media can mean we have common interests with friends and with strangers. It can be a bonding experience. A well-written story can teach us things about ourselves. So finding out that the author of that media holds views or principles antithetical to our own doesn’t just mean we might stop enjoying the story, it might mean we have to question whether enjoying the story means that we, too, hold problematic views.
Sidebar: holding a problematic view doesn’t inherently make you a “bad person” – we’re not perfect or terrible, there’s a lot of middle ground, and we’ve been trained since we started consuming media, and even before, because our adults consume media and discuss it with or in front of us or give us media-themed toys, to adopt and hold these views without examining them. So if you’re examining some problematic media that you enjoy, and you come to the conclusion that the thing you enjoy about it is one of the problematic things… that doesn’t make you a bad person, it just raises the question of what you’re going to do about it now. And there are a lot of options. One of them is just saying “I know it’s got a “all the Chinese trappings and none of the Chinese people” problem and Joss Whedon is terrible, but I’m still very fond of Firefly and there are things I’m going to continue to enjoy about it.” Another is, well, what we’re talking about right now.
Is it ok to enjoy things with terrible authors?
We love that you thought we were going to answer that question for you definitively. But we’re not. Ultimately, it’s going to depend on all three metacharacters in that media experience, and on one other inquiry, which is does the living author still profit from and do terrible things with your support. So yeah it’s not in fact ok to buy those Pottery Barn Slytherin sheets, because you are giving money and visible support to a person who is going to use that money and support to endanger the lives of trans children. But what about just reading Harry Potter, out of books checked out of the library or borrowed from a friend? That doesn’t give the author any new money or visible support, right?
And that’s what we’re here to talk about.
The author-reader compact
For convenience, and because this is turning into a lot of words, we’re going to refer to readers and authors. If you like to consume your media in some other format, go ahead and substitute that in your head, ok? Thanks!
As the author of a work, you make a series of deliberate (and also accidental) decisions about what to include in your work. Some authors (coughannericecough) are very protective of that work, to the point where they heavily police fanworks to ensure that only what comes from their head and gets published is considered canon. Other authors take a more relaxed attitude to the business of derivative works, but they’re still making decisions about what to include.
Usually, the idea the author has is that the reader will take away from the work what the author has chosen to put into it, and not much (if any) more. That’s the point of writing, isn’t it? To communicate ideas and feelings, to share a vision of who a character is and what they look like and how they think?
Death of the Author (and similar tropes, like — well, if you’re a lawyer, think of Constitutional interpretation. Is it what the framers intended? Or do we interpret the plain text of the document? And if so, do we use the rules for when it was written, or for now?) voids this compact by removing one of the parties from the communication. That is, the reader reads what no-one is writing. Which is totally cool, right? You can enjoy things written by really really terrible people, as long as the thing itself is ok.
There’s just one problem with that. So maybe in the case of a classical music composer you can find someone who didn’t manage to put the terrible parts of themself into the work, like, say, the classical anti-Semite Wagner…
[Rowan, didn’t he write Ride of the Valkyries? /ch]
[Yeah, and white supremacists love that song and fetishize the Norse pretty hard, huh? /rbg]
[Maybe pick a different example! /ch]
[OK Beethoven “adopted” his nephew and treated him so poorly he tried to unalive himself… /rbg]
[And wrote Ode to Joy! /ch]
[Well, that hits different now. /rbg]
The point is, creators put something of themselves in their creations. It’s the essential thing we bring to our art that AI can’t duplicate by simply guessing the most likely pixel or word that comes next to a given one. Our work, whether or not it’s memoir, contains autobiographical moments. It’s about things we find interesting, ideas we want to share and explore. So to truly experience the Death of the Author you’d have to somehow take all those things out of the work, and pretend it’s the same work that it was when they had plugged in all their objectionable thoughts. And that specific expression of that trope? That’s a problem.
It says that readers are not only free to take what they want from a work, they’re free to call that thing they’re taking away the same as the original work.
And that means that the original work, with all its warts, is likely to get recommended to others without any tags or content warnings. It’s a trained forgetting, the idea that you can keep the WORK while taking just what you needed from it. That it only means what you needed it to mean.
Now let’s extend that: Someone decides that your work supports a point of theirs. Their point is not just the opposite of what you tried to put into the work, it’s actively harmful to you and to people that you care a lot about. How do you feel about that? Is that Murder of the Author?
How dead is the author, anyway?
This is actually a fairly important question. Is the author alive and ready to contradict your reading of the work? Is the author profiting off the whole work, not just the parts you want to love, and could they construe that consumption of their works as support for the whole work? And is it actually possible that the author has only one objectionable viewpoint?
Let’s take that perennially low-hanging fruit, Harry Potter. It’s pretty well established that the author is a TERF. So let’s assume that you, like many young queers of the time, identified with a character in the books and want to keep loving these books as part of your identity. To do that, you decide well, I can love these books without loving Rowling. So let’s edit all the TERFiness out of the books and see what you’re left with!
First of all, there are no explicitly trans characters in HP, so let’s add one. Let’s pretend Ron is trans. He’s got a big family and they’re cheerfully ready to be found family for anyone, so now we have trans representation and the books are fixed, right? RIGHT?
Oops. They’re still anti-Asian. Whether you take the representation of the Patil sisters from the books or the movies, you’ve got a problem. Also that thing about Cho Chang. But surely if we just eliminate those characters we’ll be ok?
Except maybe that little thing about slavery. Oh, and the antisemitic caricature that is the goblins. And … really what’s left of the books after that? Oh right, fatphobia (see this author’s attempt at Death of the Author? we do!).
See, it’s extremely unlikely that an author has a singular problematic belief that can be extracted from a work, leaving an intact work that can be enjoyed unproblematically. And if there’s problematic material in the work, it’s because the author wanted it there. [Am I saying that Jo Rowling is explicitly and consciously antisemitic? I’m actually not! I am, however, saying that she’s so fundamentally unaware of what antisemitism looks like that she missed that she lifted an entire antisemitic class wholesale from prior works and shoved it into her books. At the end of the day, that perpetuates the stereotypes too, doesn’t it? /rbg] So rather than the author being removed from the work, this trope places the reader in active conflict with what the author wanted.
In the end, it’s not so much the death of the author that results, as the death of that third metacharacter: the work.
Is that such a bad thing? Well, on the one hand, maybe if the work is that problematic it doesn’t need to be around. But that’s not what happens; what happens is instead that the work remains, misdescribed and taking up the place of the work it could be, the one that readers wanted so badly that they were willing to pretend both the author and the work itself out of existence.
In conclusion…
So authors are maybe a little more durable than you expected, huh? That’s good news for you as an author, though. Less great for the way you’d love to justify enjoying media from problematic creators. But don’t worry – our panel of experts will be discussing and expanding on this theory as well as talking about problematic media they love and how they talk about it and keep the parts they adore!
Your turn!
Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society.
Join the Scarlet Quill Society!
Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. This month’s meeting is still in the negotiation stage because one of our panelists just had surgery. Don’t worry; we’ll keep you updated when we lock in a time! (Not on our mailing list? Sign up here!) Future dates and times TBD based on member and guest availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Yeah. We know. It’s best to have a fixed time. But we think it’s even better than best to be able to accommodate a diverse slate of exciting and qualified panelists, and we hope you’ll agree.)
You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.
- $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session. (The January meeting is free, but please use this link to RSVP!)
- $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
- $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!
A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.
