> Shel Belinkoff wrote:
> >
> > A lot of people
> > like it, and accept it at face value ... some people have
> > seen a lot more in the photo than I ever did or ever
> > intended to be conveyed.
I just realized I was heading off somewhat tangentially from
where I'd started...
Several years ago I wrote my first piece of erotic fiction
(which I no longer have an archived copy of, so I need to
get around to re-typing it from a printout one of these days
... if you look on my website now, you'll find a rather more
disturbing story than the one I'm talking about). I posted
it to alt.sex.bondage (which, if you know how the map of
Usenet has changed, tells you how long ago it was). It was
not explicit, and really only made sense as erotica if the
reader shared a certain combination of kinks. The central
idea was the old "virgin being sacrificed to the dragon"
theme.
Then a friend I hadn't heard from in a while emailed me and
asked me what I was up to recently, and I mentioned that I'd
posted this story.
That's not a newsgroup she read, but she went poking around
for my story, "Feeding Time", anyhow. She read it. And she
forwarded it to her college lit-crit mailing list without
mentioning where she'd gotten it. Then she forwarded their
comments back to me.
There was _all_sorts_ of stuff in there that they saw that
I hadn't been thinking of when I wrote it! Some of it I
could say, "Uh, no, I can see how you got there, but that's
really something you're adding." But others I had to say,
"Gee, now that you point it out, that _is_ in there! But
I wasn't thinking of that when I wrote it ... can I really
say that 'I put it there', or should I say 'it sort of fell
in when I wasn't looking'?" And there were one or two
concepts where my reaction was, "Okay, I was making use of
the other side of that concept to say something else, so
what you're seeing is _present_, but it wasn't the _point_."
A bunch of different agendas got mentioned, with my story
being held up as an example supporting an agenda or being
disagreed with on the basis of the agenda of the speaker.
And some agenda-less critics mentioned what insights they
had learned from the story.
I wrote it as a specialized-audience stroke-story. I didn't
have a message beyond, "This mythological image turned me
on and I wanted to look closer at what aspects of it did
so and share them." But the thing is, borrowing someone
else's eyes to read it with, some of the other things were
_there_, I just hadn't intentionally put them there. So
I wound up learning things I hadn't known about my _own_
_story_, which felt kind of odd to experience.
So there's my little adventure into the realm of
intentionalism and the "intentional fallacy".
Some people argue that it's the room for reading in extra
meanings that makes art interesting. Or worthwhile.
I'm not ready for such a sweeping statement yet, but I
see where that view comes from.
-- Glenn
