this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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Oh, Heinlein was definitely not writing satire.
Then you read the next book, and it's about space being a Libertarian utopia. And then the next one is about a free love cult.
He might not be writing satire, but if he wasn't, then I don't know how to make anything coherent out of his writing. The only commonality is a very obvious self insert mouthpiece character.
There's a line of criticism on Heinlein's work that tries to defang the unsavory themes in his stories by pretty much declaring them all satire. Fascist themes in Starship Troopers? Satire. Racist themes in Farnham’s Freehold? Fourth-dimensional chess level satire, you can see it if you look real carefully. Incest in To Sail Beyond the Sunset? A big joke!
And maybe it's true? He definitely became more libertarian over time -- but he was a professional writer, so his output is bound to be a combination of what he believed and what he thought would sell. Personally, I have no idea what the mix is. Would be nice if the people who enjoyed his stories didn't also feel obligated to puff up his moral bone fides though. So much bending over backwards isn't really good for a person.
I'm a big proponent of the "death of the author". Even if the author is still around to give their reasons for writing something the way they did, it doesn't really matter. All that matters is what the audience sees in the work.
Every interpretation is equally valid as long as they're sincere. The drapes were blue. The drapes represent depression. The drapes represent Democrats. The only invalid deconstruction is one delivered in bad faith.
Edit: typo
I hate death of the author because it destroys art as a form of communication. You end up with Orwellian art: Whoever controls the present narative, controls the past.
I can imagine a fascist future where Guernica is taught as a pro-Nazi work of art.
Death of the Author enables the most absolute shittakes to be valid. John Carpenter felt the need to make a public statement decrying the neo-nazis who were promoting the idea that They Live was a critic of Jews.
I don't think it destroys art as a form of communication any more than the possibility of being misunderstood over texting or even in person destroys those media.
The chance for miscommunication exists in every form of communication, it's the consequence of letting an idea out of your own head and into the world. And art is inherently less clear a method for communication than something more straightforward would be.
If you create a work that nazis can see a bit of their worldview in, congratulations! They see their worldview in the world, so you've created a decently accurate facsimile of reality. Shitty people seeing their own shitty ideas in your art doesn't say anything about you, y says something about them. The same "death of the author" that lets them have that take insulated the author from that take.
But the reason I like it is that it also allows decent people to come to decent conclusions about art made by shitty people. Even if I didn't like it, I know it exists. Art can speak to someone about experiences the author didn't imagine, and that can be powerful and significant and beautiful, even if it can also be shitty.
The fact that you used the word misunderstood means you understand that an interpretation can be wrong.
Death of the author means there is never misunderstanding. If you send a text and I misread it, you are wrong, not me. I can ignore any attempts that you might use to correct the misunderstanding because my interpretation is just as valid.
If you are attempting to use art to communicate, then that can be understood as you intended or understood differently, i.e. misunderstood.
If you send me a text that says "Take the frogs over to the bank" and I take some amphibians to the river, that isn't a wrong reading of that sentence even if you wanted me to take some roads over to the money storage location (a valid, if unusual, way to parse that sentence). I misunderstood you, but my reading is not any less valid than yours.
The difference is that I couldn't correct the misunderstanding because you believe your interpretation is valid no matter what the author says. What I intended is irrelevant to you.
The interpretation is valid. But that doesn't mean communication hasn't broken down. In the case of a text message, the "true purpose" isn't to entertain or to elucidate deep truths about the world (usually), it's to convey a message.
Art with the goal of covering a single message is, in a word, propaganda. Propaganda that succeeds at being art may or may not succeed at being propaganda, but as art, the message intended by the author is not as important as the interpretation of the audience. Tolkien said he hated allegory, but it doesn't make Lord of the rings not allegorical, it only makes it not deliberately allegorical.
Guernica is propaganda? If you remove the "misleading" part of the definition of propaganda then all communication is propaganda. A Maths textbook is propaganda.
You state that as a fact when this is the problem being discussed!
The author is trying to tell you something and you are saying, "I don't care if you try to correct me. You actually meant amphibians go to the river and your attempts to correct me are wrong."
I'm using sense 1, here, and yes, Picasso's Guernica is propaganda. It was commissioned explicitly to raise awareness and funds for a war. It is also, and separately, art.
I don't think all communication is propaganda, but I also don't think all communication is art. If you're choosing to create something and call it "art" while also trying to push a particular message, it is (at least almost) certain that you are also intending to convey an emotional and influential message. Perhaps there need not be an agenda, except your own desire to send the message you hope to.
Edit: formatting
And even more importantly is that people are gonna "teach" the making of art how they teach it regardless, but the teacher experiencing it one way doesn't make any of the other readings invalid.