[I imagine this will all go into the eventual PDF, along with the Right of Reply I asked my friend ChatGPT to write.]
[Who said "I do not have time to make this shorter?"]
Stephen Brohan
I do read your articles on Lewis with interest. So let's start with the conversation about a waterfall.
If I say to you that a waterfall is sublime I am telling you little that is factual about the waterfall. Maybe I make you curious to look, but you have learned slightly more about me, maybe that I am the sort of person who gushes about waterfalls. In any case, the payload of the message is communication between you and me. Maybe I will share my feelings about the waterfall, maybe you will think that I am a pillock.
When I read Burroughs' description of a swordfight, maybe he will communicate to me a feeling of excitement, maybe he will share his vision of the struggle to live on Barsoom, maybe I will get an insight into his enthusiasms, maybe I will think he is a worthless hack writer.
In any case, he has exposed himself to me to some extent and the potential value of the transaction is tied to communication between him and me (communication may be limited to us sharing a vision, I don't have to be interested in the speaker as a person for communication to take place, though it does enrich it).
To take a different angle on the same thing, and to comment on a question you ask elsewhere. Suppose I read a comic, and enjoy the story in a superficial way. Then I read it again, getting a different angle on the story by seeing how the text and graphics interact. Then, having got interested in the story, I look at some panels in detail, seeing things I hadn't noticed, wondering what the author means by them, how they relate to the story. The story has become part of my imaginative life.
Suppose I then realise that the author only wrote the text, the pictures were generated by AI. I feel cheated. The channel I thought was open into the author's mind isn't there. I was looking at details of a panel I thought the author had left for people like me to see, but now I think maybe those details were generated by AI. I still have the superficial reading of the text that I started with, though even that is diminished, but I'm not going to pore over the details any more
I think what we are discussing here is
1: The intentional 'fallacy': Does a work of art have a meaning in itself, or does it only mean what the writer intended it to mean?
2: Formalism: Is the main thing we ought to pay attention to when looking at a work of art its shape, or should we be more interested in its wider context?
I think both positions can lead to absurd conclusions. At one extreme, the song “Let it be” is reducible to a dream that Paul McCartney had about his mother. Once we know this, any other ideas associated with "Mother Mary" magically vanish, or are prohibited. Or as my English teacher said (I am not bitter about this), I am not allowed to think that Fanny Price is self righteous prude, because Jane Austen didn't intend me to think that. But at the other extreme, you end up talking about geometrical arrangements of lines and contrasts between specific colours on the canvass, without actually mentioning whether you are looking at an icon of the Virgin Mary or a portrait of Winston Churchill (and certainly have to pretend you don't know who Winston Churchill was.)
If I am faced with a choice, I’d go for formalism. If you say “Have you noticed how a particular word keeps being repeated?” and “Notice that the meter changes in line three?” you are actually talking about the poem. When you say “I think that he is writing about daffodils to express the grief over the death of his pet Spaniel” you are often not talking about anything at all. (Even if you can prove the spaniel thing from the guys' letters.)
1: Lewis and the waterfall.
I think you have summarised very well the opinion that Lewis (unfairly, in my opinion) attributes to the bad-wrong post-modernist school teachers. They draws a distinction between, as you say, factual statements (“The fire is hot”) and value judgements (“The fire is beautiful.”) Lewis’s claim is that if “The fire is beautiful” means “I am experiencing emotions connected with beauty” then you have effectively denied that value judgements can ever be true or false. In which case, why not raise children to think that waterfalls are ugly, or that murder is beautiful, or that empathy is a disease?
Lewis’s view (seems to be) that waterfalls have an intrinsic quality of “sublimity” and would have had even if there had never been any human beings to appreciate them. He doesn't directly say "because God put a little nugget of a substance called sublimity" inside them, but this seems to be what he's driving at.
I agree that if you say “The waterfall is sublime” then we are communicating with each other, and the very fact that you chose to say it is telling me something about you. And perhaps I might reply “No, it’s a piddling little stream, come with me to Canada and I will show you something truly sublime” -- which would tell you something about me. But we would not be talking nonsense or disagreeing about nothing. (“The waterfall is Tuesday” or “The waterfall is pahootle-snurdle-ptang-ptang”)
2: Sword-fights
I think that when we are reading an adventure story then the first, second, third and fourth things that we care about are the story: the thrill of the actual situation (two men sword fighting on the edge of a chasm in the middle of a desert) and the overall narrative (will our hero get back to the city in time to warn them of the impending invasion?) I agree that literally any story will also have additional meanings — for example “Men should be honourable”, “It is okay to fight with lethal weapons over points of honour” (or “marriage is desirable” or “pink things are the best things”.) And I agree that a book that you only read to find out What Happen Next is not a good, or a great, or literary book. Edgar Rice Burroughs may not be sufficiently bad writer for my example to work!
Two people are sitting in tavern, and in return for a drink, the first person tells the second person a story. Is the main thing which is happening an interaction between the two people; or is the main thing which is happening a story is being passed on. Is what I take away from the encounter “the man I once met with a beard and cloth cap, who told the most fanciful stories about djinn and dragons, with a look in his eye that said he didn’t believe a word of it”; or is what I take away “the tale of the young man who sold his mother’s cow for a handful or beans…”. As a critic, is what I pay attention to the odd little hand gesture the story teller makes when a new character is coming into the story, or the indefinable accent he gives all the baddies? Or do I say “notice the clever way the story seems to be about the relationship of the naughty boy to his old mother, and transitions into one about giant slaying...”?
Again: it is highly unlikely that you would exclusively take one line and completely reject the other. But when you find out that the story teller was actually an actor from the local theatre school playing the role of wise old traveller to get free beer, does that change the story? Or make it valueless?
This comes up all the time in folk music. Woody Guthrie learned the song Git Along Little Dawgies from an old cowboy in a saloon. But, says the ethnomusicologist, the cowboy very probably heard it on the radio, or on a 78 record. Does that spoil the song? There is a story that one of the old folk collectors, possibly Vaughan Williams, heard a fantastic old song from an old yokel name Mr Pittinger. Some time later, someone told him that it wasn’t really an old song, but that Mr Pittinger had made it up. “Well, so much the better for Mr Pittinger.”
3: AI Comics
“Suppose I then realise that the author only wrote the text, the pictures were generated by AI. I feel cheated….I still have the superficial reading of the text that I started with, though even that is diminished, but I'm not going to pore over the details any more.”
I think the answer to this is that it is probably the case, but not necessarily the case.
It is absolutely true that a lot of my writing about Spider-Man was focussed on “What was the relationship between the artist and the writer” — I argued that their artistic and political disagreements were playing out on the page. If I hadn’t already known about the posthumous reputation of Stan Lee, I might not have wanted to ask those sorts of questions. A very strict "New Critic" would say “You don’t actually need to know anything about Stan Lee and Steve Ditko to make the observations you are making: either the words clash with the pictures, or they don’t; either the narrative undergoes a change of direction, or it doesn’t — and in any case, Stan Lee is a public persona and Steve Ditko is a recluse, so you aren’t talking about the actual people.”
I have said occasionally that when a story “works” I don’t pay attention to its artistic merits or technical strengths. I saw the re-release of Avengers: Endgame last week, and forgotten how well it works just as a story. For 90% of the movie I was not thinking “I see what they did there” or “Isn’t Robert Downey Junior a skilled method actor”: I was thinking “Oh, god, no, that’s Tony Stark’s dad” and “Arrgh, Thor is going to have a drink and mess it all up.” Of course, as a critic, “why did that story just work” is a perfectly good question. (And I have noted that very bad artistic works can often be more successful than much better ones in this regard. The Henry Cavill Man of Steel was a much more sophisticated work of art than the Makers of Kellogg Pepp Present The Adventures of Sooooooperman but I know which version of Superman I believed in. And in fact, I have no idea who wrote the radio scripts.) But very often, my paying attention to camera angles and special effects is a sign that the movie has, at the more basic level, failed. One reason I often don’t review films I’ve really liked.
But on the other other other hand....there are movies which positively want you to pay attention to the technicalities and the artistic vision of the auteur. The director might think it very odd if you started to think that Antonius Block (I looked it up) was a real person. This is why people who like arthouse movies don’t see the point of superhero movies and people who like superhero movies don’t see the point of arthouse movies.
Why did the scene in which Obi Wan gave Luke Skywalker his father’s lightsaber make such a deep impression on me the first time you saw it?
I mean, there are lots of answers: because I was already aware that it was like scenes from the King Arthur stories and the Narnia stories. Because I was a boy and was subconsciously aware that swords represent penises. Because the scene conveys a humanly real situation about growing up and moving on from home and parents. Because of the incongruity of a device which is both futuristic and old fashioned at the same time. Because gadgets are cool. Because Carl Jung. Because Joseph Campbell.
Suppose it turned out that Star Wars wasn’t mostly written by George Lucas, but by Marcia Lucas? Not by George Lucas or Marcia Lucas, but by his script-doctor, Tom Stoppard? Not by any of those people, but by a Hollywood committee who hired an actor to play Lucas because he fitted in with the image of the movie they wanted to make?
Is that quite interesting? Yes.
Would it answer the question? Not really.
Would it spoil the film or make me feel cheated? I don’t think so.
We could push it to a further extreme: suppose the person who really wrote Star Wars was a toxic gender critic who thought that scenes with WISE OLD MEN and ABSENT FATHERS and PASSING ON THE TORCH and GREAT BIG GLOWY PHALLIC SYMBOLS would make boys grow into real men and stop them wanting to be girls…. ? Well yes, that would be interesting. (Every year we read of devout atheist discovering that the Narnia books have a not-very-well hidden meaning and feeling VIOLATED.) Would it change the movie, or spoil it? Maybe. Not necessarily.
And if it turned out that someone had built a machine and shown it all the great adventure movies there had ever been and all the great science fiction stories there had ever been and the complete text of Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God and then said “Write the biggest and best science fiction movie you possibly can?” Would that ruin it for me?
“Ah, but if someone had done that, it wouldn’t be the greatest science fiction movie ever made. It wouldn’t have been Star Wars. It would have been flat and artificial and lacking in the divine spark.”
I agree. I think we are talking about hypotheticals here. I don’t think AI has produced texts comparable to human texts, and I doubt if it ever will. My distinction is still between "Anything produced by AI is slop" or "Slop is the only thing AI can produce."