I agree with Pharra's point on Tatar's argument on censorship. To begin with, an author's original intention does not come across, because their work becomes interpreted from another point of view the second it is read. People assign their own meanings and interpretations from the given medium instead of realizing what the author intended. Therefore, once censorship occurs, this miscommunication gets further elaborated upon so people can never understand the author's original intention.
To discuss an example from the syllabus, I would like to draw upon All Fur, a tale that would most certainly be censored to an american audience. After a three-trialed themed obstacled plot line, in the end, the king finally gets the fair maiden, but the reader is supposed to forget that the fair maiden is indeed his daughter. In the Grimm's version, the story is set up for a daughter to escape her crazed father who wants to marry her. But after the tale unfolds and a series of events unfolds, the dad marries her and "they live happily ever after." I was confused about how the reader was supposed to feel upon finishing such tale and I would think that if All Fur was to be intended for an American audience, it would most certainly be censored according to Tatar.
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ReplyDeleteI can't tell what you think about the misunderstanding of the author's intention. I totally agree with the way you set it up as basically inevitable, but is that a bad thing? Especially combined with censorship - if the author's intent is already lost, what harm is done by censoring stories?
ReplyDeleteI guess the answers to my questions rely on what we believe to be the purpose of these tales, and how they should be used in society. We can probably all agree that they serve multiple functions (Bettleheim stressed their use for education, Darnton focused on the historical significance, Disney used them to build an empire, I use them for entertainment), but how do these uses relate to the author's original intent? Darnton would probably tell us that we cannot know the intent of the original until we look at the stories in their historical contexts. But history aside, I'd say that people our culture has grown accustomed to using fair tales for our own purposes (especially once we went from oral to written culture - check out my blog, "So It Is Written"). The original author's intent, lost or not, hardly matters to us any more.