“All fiction can be profitably regarded as argument.”-Ronald Sukenick

            We can indeed profit a great deal by regarding fiction as argument.  Fiction is an intentional object.  That does not mean we need to be beholden to intentions.  But what it does mean is that we can read with an eye toward intention, toward what stance the text is arguing.  I’ll stick with the text as the agent here, not to kill authors, but to acknowledge that some prefer them dead.

            I think the calculus is simple here:  If texts are discourse, then they are acts of communication, and acts of communication are intentional.  They have purpose.  That purpose does not have to be grand.  It does not need to be a firm ethical stance on some political or social issue.  But it can be.

            To keep things as nerdy as possible, I offer the Star Wars Prequels as a case study.  Despite their massive box office success, these films are largely regarded as a disappointment, and I think that is in some ways fair.  The acting is terribly wooden, and some of the digital effects have not aged well at all.  More significantly, they often seem at great odds with what was established in the original trilogy.  Fans have identified numerous “plot holes” or discrepancies between what Obi Wan and Yoda tell Luke about Anakin, the Jedi, and the Republic and what the Prequel films show the viewer about them.

            But if we view these discrepancies as intentional choices instead of mistakes, we can then consider the intention behind them.  Instead of saying the films failed because we see a different version of Anakin than the one Obi Wan tells us about, we can discuss why the films show a different Anakin and why Obi Wan effectively lies to us about him (in short because lying is Obi Wan’s magic force power—“these aren’t the droids you’re looking for).  I suggest that the reason the films show us a different Anakin than the one Obi Wan told us about is to point to the inherent ethical flaw in seeing Anakin and Darth Vader as two separate individuals.

            My point here is not to say that reading the Star Wars prequels intentionally is a path towards enjoying them, but it is profitable in the sense that it opens ground for a conversation we were not having before, and it might just lead towards a greater appreciation of them.