When I'm up on stage, I'm in ***PERFORMANCE MODE*** thinking up the next line, setting up the next segment, whatever...and combined with the fact that despite what I cobble together in my JMS "persona" I'm actually very shy (as KAL will confirm)...I don't hear the applause. I'm so riddled with anxiety that I don't hear it. [4-1]
-- J. Michael Straczynski
As noted in the Introduction, one of the major ways in which the author is constructed in this process is by means of self-revelations. More than any other author in television history, JMS has been willing (perhaps eager) to share details of himself, his private life, his beliefs, and his thoughts with fans. And yet, as the quotation above shows, he is aware that it is to some degree a construct, a selective excerpt of things chosen from all that might say about himself.
One of the longest-running themes in the discussion of JMS-the-person has been the issue of religion in Babylon 5. The show has repeatedly addressed religious issues, and religious figures have featured prominently in many episodes. JMS, however, consistently characterizes himself as an atheist. Additionally, he strongly resists interpretations of the series as being anti-religion or anti any particular religion:
Regarding how I present myself here [in the newsgroup]...I don't think about it one way or another. I honestly don't much care how I'm perceived. Who and what I am, if I'm annoying or a saint or just another Joe, is utterly and completely irrelevant to the work. Fifty years from now, when I'm long gone to dust, no one's going to remember me for being a swell guy, or a rotten guy. All that matters, all that remains, is the work...if I did a good job, the work will live on. If not...nothing matters. [4-2]
Here JMS again seems to be wanting to have it both ways, as it were. On the one hand, he claims that the revelatory details are not important, that what matters is the text itself. But that begs the question of why personal information is brought into the discussion in the first place.
Even if fan examination was confined to the text and never sought meaning outside, this dual model would be problematic. JMS has repeatedly indicated that characters bearing the initials J.S. (as both the station commanders have done) are special. The degree to which the writer can be identified with any particular character or characters is always uncertain. It is common for fans to select one particular character in a text and identify him with the author; for example, the science fiction author Robert Heinlein was often identified with the words and actions of Lazarus Long, one of his recurring characters; however, Heinlein created hundreds of characters in his career and the identification with one character is somewhat arbitrary.
JMS has resisted identification with any particular character, including the eponymous station commanders: " [...] often I slice off parts of my own character (what there is of it) and invest it into all of my characters. There's a lot of me in Ivanova, Delenn, G'Kar, and the others." [4-3] This construction allows fans to read the words and actions of any character in the text in the light of JMS's self-revelation.
At the same time as he is putting himself into his characters, JMS has repeatedly claimed to be avoiding promoting his particular views on issues. This has been his defense several times in the religion discussions: his views as an atheist are not per se represented by any of the characters. Yet in other cases, JMS very clearly promotes his particular views. For example, the issue of having a gay character or gay relationship has been raised a number of times by fans. JMS has resisted the notion of having a specifically gay character:
Let me put this as simply as I can...in the year 2258, nobody *cares* about your sexual orientation. It doesn't come up. No one makes an issue out of it. There are no discussions, no proclamations, no inquiries, no "how will they react?" It's like being left-handed or right-handed; no one really cares one way or another. [4-4]
Here JMS has taken a major social and political issue in modern American society and projected his own particular view of it into the series. No one character speaks these lines (or anything specifically like it), but it is reflected in the characters' dialog and actions -- in what they do not say as much as in what they do say. Again, JMS's choice of when to deny his own points of view and when to promote them acts not only to shape the story told by the text, but also acts to shape the view of the storyteller constructed by the fans who search for the author.
My use of the term "storyteller" here is not accidental. The new media and JMS's self-revelatory interactions through them give us a chance to get a glimpse of the process used in authoring the text. In effect, the auteur's comments make the writing process a valid topic of discussion, one that fans pick up on.
A discussion of the precise production details and their implications is outside the scope of this paper; instead I wish to examine an aspect of JMS's revelation of his thinking behind the process. On many occasions, JMS has spoken of his activities in terms of story-telling and in particular of his attempts to work within the framework of a traditional storyteller:
We try to emphasize the voice of the storyteller as much as possible, that we are creating...well, I don't want to say creating new mythologies, because I don't think they are really created, they stretch back to the foundations of civilization, and show up repeatedly in works of literature...but reinterpreting and reinventing and clarifying the structure of myth for a new generation. [4-5]
It is not surprising to see that someone who considers himself to be operating in a traditional story-telling mode would turn to using traditional story-telling mythic structures, in particular those described by Joseph Campbell [4-6], whom JMS has noted as an influence:
I knew that the best series set up places where the stories come to you, in a police station or a hospital or a law office, and decided in an SF environment a space station would work well for that...added the backdrop of myth and archetype, constructed a Hero's Journey, and took it from there. [4-7]
Here JMS specifically references the Hero's Journey, an archetypical form of story described by Campbell as being present in virtually all story-telling cultures around the world. However, despite clearly being a student of Campbell's writings, he does not seem to subscribe to Campbell's belief that these archetypical forms belong to no one and that their particular instantiations are less important than the presence of the prototypical elements which resonate with our experiences and expectations.
Bakhtin reminds us (see for example [4-8]) that authors do not create stories out of whole cloth; rather they draw them from the fabric of the society around them. JMS seems to want to acknowledge this interpretation of authorial inspiration. As noted before, he is quite aware of the possible place of Babylon 5 in the tradition of science fiction television. In discussing archetypes and myth he shows his awareness of the larger structures that society, history and language bring to bear on the text he produces.
However, the implications of that awareness seem to be different for him than they might be for other critics. Logically, a commitment to Bahktin-style heteroglossia and its attendant inexactitude in meaning would seem to be fatal to a project of absolutist recovery of authorial intention. JMS, though, seems repeatedly to deny that others could take the existing text and constitute different meanings from it than the one he imposes.
As I showed in the previous section, fans are extremely active in detecting elements, structures, and parallels between Babylon 5 and other works both inside and outside the science fiction genre. However, JMS is often quick to dismiss these parallels, as in this exchange:
Is Babylon 5 supposed to be a parallel world to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings?There is no 1-1 corrolation [sic]. No. Why should I want to do that, instead of telling my own story? [Tolkein] and I used the same tools in our writing; archetypes and mythic structure, and the hero's journey, so some tools are reflected, as in sagas going back to the Illiad [sic] and the Odyssey and Sir Gawain.... and Camelot and endless other mythic stories. [...] I constantly get mail from people saying, "Oh, you're doing WW II, or you're doing ancient Babylon, or you're doing Kennedy, or Camelot," and they're all sure they're correct, and they all find evidence...but they can't be all correct, and they're not.... [4-9]
And yet, in some sense, both Campbell and Bakhtin tell us that they are all correct.These stories belong to no one, in just same way that they are also JMS's story.
Each reader brings to the text his or her own backgrounds and associations and each sees within it a different story. Even within the project of recovering authorial intention, evidence can be found to support a number of different (perhaps mutually incompatible) hypotheses. For JMS to categorically state that these fan interpretations are "wrong" can only be seen as furthering the notion of an auteur, one with absolute voice to determine the associations and meanings derived from the heteroglossia of the text.
Finally, we will examine in detail three incidents which brought the established models of interaction we have so far discussed into conflict and momentary crisis.
Copyright © Alan Wexelblat