Author's intention vs. reader's interpretation

Excellent topic pyro! May I ask what sparked your thoughts regarding this?

Who has killed the Author?

What author?

The narrator of My Name is Red, of course.

Oh, no, now the narrator's dead, too!

Did the author kill him?

6: I had to read that essay for a Spanish Lit course in college. As I remember it was the seminar on Mario Vargas Llosa.

Barthes sure is a better writer than most of those postmodern literary theorists, isn't he? It's a fairly convincing essay. I like the idea that my interpretation is as valid as the author's. I was thinking about this issue today while reading Paradise Lost because Philip Pullman's note to chapter 6 was discussing how unlikeable he thinks the God the Father character is, and how he agrees with Blake that "Milton is of the Devil's party without knowing it" with emphasis on the "not knowing it" part. I sort of agree with Pullman (and Blake). Not done with PL yet though.

I like to take the "author is dead" mindset when I read books (considering that the two dead-tree books I'm reading are by recently dead authors, it's fitting!).

It's a quagmire, though, as the publisher of the book may edit out certain passages (albeit, with the author's acquiescence, I would hope!), so the author does not always get to have his/her words, verbatim, appear on the page. However, assuming that the author is pleased enough with the intended publication of his/her work, then we may assume that anything left unsaid should be open to exegetical interpretation by third parties, as if the author were TRULY intent on conveying some piece of information, such would have been done through the work (or a related work, if part of a series) itself instead of declaring some fact fact, and being done with it.

So, yeah, when I read books, if the author hasn't SAID something, or very strongly indicated something as being true, I feel free to make my own assumptions, provided I can justify them through examples, both in works that may have inspired the author, and within the text itself.

My own 2 cents, though.

If you never have to choose between competing interpretations I guess its fine. Also, if you are not reading a cook book.

But, seriously, the value of trying to get at what an author intends cannot be discounted by a serious reader. Even if you believe the author is totally deluded (thinks s/he is writing Horatio Alger stories but is really telling us about class warfare and social control or whatever) that is a useful exercise.

Barthes writes: "To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text." Readers must separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate it from interpretive tyranny.... I suppose if the mistake be limiting a text to a single interpretation - the author's intended - then its a problem but who is creating this problem? I was not an English major but I don't read old literary criticism and find a bunch of yahoos trying to limit interpretations of texts to questions of an authors intent. Educate me!

11:
You might find more of those yahoos if you read a bunch of New Criticism. Granted, New Critics liked ambiguity, but they also worshipped the author as the architect of a world whose rules he alone determined--the ambiguities were the author's own, and used to specific effects. And New Criticism was a big part of what Barthes was reacting against, so his concern about the limitation of potential meaning makes sense.

13: I am finding this discussion VERY interesting. But I don't necessarily have a strong opinion on these topics.

I've often read critiques or reader opinions on various works that delve into the author's psyche and attempt to show how the author had issues about sex, women, authority, whatever, based on his/her experiences. Sometimes I find these very convincing and sometimes I think they are completely silly. I think sure, an interpretation can be "wrong" or "overread," particularly when it's not the text you are evalutating per se but the author's state of mind, based on the text.

We were discussing censorship elsewhere on LT yesterday and it occurs to me that censors make decisions to ban stuff, based on thought processes like these.

You might find this verrrrrrrrrrryyyyy long article interesting pyro (and perhaps others): http://nickm.com/vox/blood_oranges.html

We'll be reading a book by this guy in December.

I find this stuff interesting too, and I know I have something to say about it, but it's floating out of reach at the moment. I'll lurk until it comes to me.

Well, something did come to mind, while editing and rewriting "Digging Deeper" today. I made notes, while out of electricity, on fifteen chapters, of the thirty-five in the book, decided I had to completely redo the epilogue, and came up with a paragraph, a sentence, sometimes just a phrase that I wanted to insert in the other fourteen chapters.

I reedit and rewrite as much as I do because there's a demon in me that isn't satisfied until I get it exactly right. But I know of course that perfection is impossible, that even when I think I'm absolutely satisfied, I can always find something else to add that will make it better, deeper, more accurate, truer.

So if I step back a moment and pretend that I'm not me (I can often do this without pretending; I am, after all, the author of I Think, Therefore Who Am I?), it's entirely possible that I'll read "my" book and say, "This is what I think he was getting at." Meaning the stuff the author didn't add, or perhaps some extraneous stuff that he or she didn't subtract, thus fuzzing up what they wrote.

A good critic (and there a lot less of them than you might think) will see that and point it out--in a novel, a movie, a painting, whatever. They might be seeing what the author didn't, or they might be seeing the fruition of the author's work if he or she had gotten it exactly right.

I am very interested in this discussion, but have not much time to participate. (it's probably too late now as the thread seems dead, but I'll chuck my two cents in anyway fwiw). Barthes is one of my all time great saints, and I have also done a lot of reading in reader response theory which includes the intentional phallacy.

Part of the problem is in the very nature of language. Words have very personal meanings (apart from their denotational meanings): echoes, memories, colours for the sysnaesthetically inclined, so that a reader's interpretation is always coloured by their individual response to the words chosen by the author. The author, of course has no control over how readers react to words, and these reactions can effect the author's intention.

Another problem is that some authors are better than others in making their intentions clear. "There's many a slip betwixt mind and lip", as the saying goes.