then there are blackbirds

So, at one point during Mammothfail, sartorias hosted this discussion about the relationships between the reader, the author, and the text. One of the discussion topics was this statement:

For the longest time at school we were told that the text existed in isolation. That what the author said about the text might be interesting, sometimes was laughable, occasionally insightful, but always it was irrelevant: the text must stand alone.

It took me some time and consideration to figure out exactly why I was uncomfortable with the idea of an "isolated text," but eventually I came up with this response [comment here]:

My problems with the "text in isolation" are these: First, yes, you can read a text without reading all the associated commentary, criticism, author's notes, etc. In that sense, one might consider it "isolated." However, I don't know if the author's thought processes, the influence of the author's social contemporaries, or the inherent biases of the author's point of view or identity, can ever be divorced from a text. Is it ever truly possible to divorce the storyteller's voice from the story? I don't believe it is. Even if you ran a thought experiment by, say, removing the authors' names from different pieces of work and reading them all together, you would at least be able to discern the ways in which they viewed or examined women versus men, people of various races, people of various ages and abilities and sexualities and countless other markers.

Second, and no less important: the very act of readership makes the text a dialogue, between the author and the reader, between one reader and another, all the social contexts of the former and the latter colliding. Isolation is quite literally impossible, because to isolate the text would be to remove the reader from the story. What use, then, for the text? What kind of intellectual conversation would there be if the author was simply shouting into a void? There would be no value in writing, in telling a story, without someone to pick up the conversation at the other end, even if it is only the writer, several years down the road.

Given the current debate about warnings, I am starting to think that more people ought to be considering their ideas about writing & readership, and their positions as readers & writers. I think we've all heard countless things about "artistic vision" and "authorial intent" by now, so I'm just going to get to the point: If you are going to write a story and post it on the internet, you are starting a dialogue, no less than an author does when publishing a book. (In fact, posting it on the internet makes the dialogue even more immediate: a published author can presumably avoid reading fan mail, whereas feedback on a story posted on LJ, IJ, DW, etc. goes straight to the writer's inbox.)

When you are having a conversation, it is common courtesy to take the opinions and concerns of the people you are talking to into consideration, and to treat them with respect. You are not, as the initiator of the conversation, owed anything from the people you are talking to, nor does your status as initiator grant you some sort of power or authority over those people.

There are more things I could say, but you know what? Lots of other people have said them [warning: triggery subject matter in posts & comments]:
- impertinence: Sexual Assault, Triggering, and Warnings: An Essay [Warning: Very explicit discussion of sexual assault and the nature, anatomy, cause & effect of triggers. Is itself triggery.]
- such_heights: A little warning would be nice
- giandujakiss: The warnings thing
- thingswithwings: again? we're having this debate again?