How seriously should we take an author’s intent while reading a book?
The answer is: very seriously, but his or her intent is not the only consideration in reading a text.
Evidently, this statement is easy to misunderstand.
In a student it often elicits (over the years) one of two immediate reactions. The first is a fairly harmless misunderstanding that is easy to clear up. The second is not so good.
Usually a good student will tell me one of many versions of a story that shows the folly of listening to any voice but the author’s when reading a text.
In this story an author (names vary) is attending a learned paper on his book. The learned paper is wrong about his book. Furious, the writer of the book objects that he had no such nonsense in mind when he wrote. The foolish academic ignores the author and goes on with his paper.
Everyone then has a laugh at experts.
This is always a good thing.
However, the story turns out to be more complicated than it appears.
If the paper writer claimed to know author’s intent and then ignored the author’s claims . . . the paper writer is on shaky ground. I am no fan of “psychological papers” that try to use some weird literary alchemy to guess what an author was thinking, but if one must write them then the author is going to be just about the best expert on what he intended to say.
Of course, he is just about the best expert . . . memory is a tricky thing and many author’s memories evolve. Tolkien’s certainly did.
The author comes (honestly) to believe that their fifty year old self believed what their seventy year old self now believes.
This is common enough. . . . and does not even consider author’s who simply lie or are unaware of their own feelings (common in non-authors too!). However, it would take very powerful evidence to shake a statement of “author’s intent” from the author.
If the paper writer of the joke just ignored the “problem” of contradicting the author about his own intent, the academic deserves ridicule.
There is a problem with the anecdote, however. The paper writer could have been writing a second kind of paper . . . one that deals with the text (as we have it) and makes no claims about knowing the author’s views/opinions. “The text of Republic suggests the following interesting ideas. . . agnostic to whatever Plato’s views were.”
It is no remarkable thing to state that an artist (such as a writer) may say more than he knew or less. Saying “more” happens to even bad writers . . . but genius accomplishes it more often.
The poet picks a word with care (”It just felt right.”), unaware that her selection was part of a long history of creating that word and its set of meanings. She uses a color or an idea in a work that for most of her readers creates natural associations. She may not be able to articulate this association, but it is there. (Using purple in a scene feels right to the designer when creating a court, who might be unaware that he is playing into centuries of ideas about “royal purple.”)
Intention may not always be simple. It depends on a complex series of motives known and unknown over time.
A different though easier example may help us here.
A man may hear a joke which is deemed funny on two grounds. The joke may be funny in a non-racial way, but it also may be even “funnier” to some cruel folk because of some (fairly subtle) racist overtones. The joke has been told in the past by racists.
Suppose a man hears the joke and finds it funny for the first, non-racist reason. Assume the man is a non-racist totally unaware of the racist overtones or history of the joke. He writes the joke down in his book. His intention is to be non-racist, but he has used a joke (unintentionally) he did not fully understand.
A commentator then questions the racist nature of the joke.
If the commentator claims the joke shows the author is a racist, he has gone too far. Charity demands (barring further evidence) that the author be acquitted of the serious charge of intentional racism if he denies it. Author’s intent seems most important.
That is not the end of it however. The book as an artifact says more than the author intended because he was using images, words, and “laugh lines” he picked up from the cultural air.
The judicious commentator might write that the joke (as written) says something about the culture in which the book was written and introduces (unknown to the author and beyond his intention) a worthy discussion of the institutional racism so deeply entrenched in a culture that personal innocence does not protect against passing the virus of racism along.
The joke is racist/racial to many readers (given the cultural context) and the book is not spared that analysis by the author’s ignorance of this.
This example demonstrates that an author may do things, or start conversations, that she did not intend. She is (after all!) different from her book!
A student will often leap from this discussion to the more extreme conclusion that author’s intention does not matter at all. The text is whatever the student wants it to be.
The Reader is King and the poor author does not matter at all. This is more dangerous than the earlier error.
The author’s intentions actively created the text. While he or she may not have been as “in charge” (we have beliefs we don’t know, use images we only dimly understand) as one might think, the author is still the single most important element in creating a text (obviously). Plato is the main (overwhelming) reason we have “Republic.”
Ignoring the fact that the text is not just about “the reader” damages the ability of a book to jar us out of our own prejudices.
The author’s view of the world shaped every syllable as he or she was writing. During the moment of creation (I believe) he or she had almost total freedom to write what he or she wished. (She was after all limited by language and culture at the least, but these are very broad limits.)
After creation, however, her text left her. It became something “not her.” If she did not say it, then it was unsaid. If she failed to communicate an idea, then it is not communicated. If she used an image that set up tension in her reader she did not anticipate, then so it is.
She cannot ever really change the text . . . . since an edit (beyond the typographical?) creates a new work. (This is why I think every performance of live music or theater is a different work of art.)
Compare Coleridge’s two versions of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” They are the same, but not the same.
The author’s intention is (almost totally) determinative of what she meant to say. Intention can be allowed to limit our readings and shape them when we know it. However, in classical literature we often do NOT know it . . . and “divining” it can be futile. There one is stuck reading a book by normal rules of exegesis and seeing what it means as best one can.
With a living author, there is the dread possibility that he or she will keep revising or adding to her work (sequels of any kind are rarely improvements!) until death. In that case, the reader is free to prefer the early work (Star Wars before it became Star Wars IV!) to the later. He or she is also free to prefer the early work where the back story was left (intentionally) to the reader and is not (in the text) controlled by the author.
I think Tolkien’s notes are interesting . . . but I am glad he did not include all of them in LOTR. I prefer the original Tolkien open ended story (with the back story only dimly guessed at) to the I-now-have-every-detail-determined-for-me reading that can come from reading all his notes.
Since Tolkien originally left his story without stated explanations my doing so is true to his intent.
What about J.K. Rowling, who seems determined to answer every fan question ever?
In Rowling’s case, if I ignore her (by now weary) explanations of everything (”Hagrid did not get married.” and other imagination killing trivia.) . . . then I am following her early (literary) intention to wisely leave some things to our imagination in reading the books.
Can’t future readers choose the experience of reading the books as we all did . . . with some questions unsolved? Must the reader bow to the tyranny of the author in preventing this liberty?
Once the text is fixed we are much less interested (though not uninterested) in what the author was thinking but did not say (or say well enough). Readers love the book . . . and the author (like many musicians or film makers) often has a literary sense/musical sense/film sense of “rightness” which abandons them when they try to talk about what they did.
Listen to a great film maker try to articulate what made his film great, if you don’t believe me.
If film makers could tell us their vision, they might have written books or made speeches instead of making films.
This is true of any great art . . . or even small arts like my Nana’s meatloaf. She could make it, but not articulate what she was doing. In fact, if you did what she thought she was doing, you got something like her meatloaf (ketchup swirled on the top nicely), but not her meatloaf.
She was a greater cook than she knew. My Nana was the mover and chief cause of the meatloaf, but what she meant to do was not what she did.
She (like many an artist) did not totally understand her own genius.
Creation is a complicated thing and author’s intent cannot be ignored, but neither can the hunches of a craftsman that are unarticulated in the mind of an author.
That post-modern Christian Rowling is always going to be part of the Potter world. . . just as we are stuck/blessed (depending on your point of view) with the Roman Catholic Tolkien as the parent of LOTR.
The child (the text), however, is not just Rowling’s anymore. It has grown beyond her.
The reader is not king, but a friend to his beloved text and to the creator of that text.
Now of course a hastily written blog post cannot do justice to all the complexities of an issue about which one can (and has!) read volumes. The middle way of taking author’s intention seriously, but only to a certain point needs much more discussion . . . but it is a discussion worth having.
It is what is really interesting in an enduring sense (at least to me) about the fuss over Rowling’s “revelations” about the Potter story.
Finally, such a sensible view (which I learned in grad school) of dealing with books is perfectly compatible with Christianity, but not particular to Christianity. One need not be a Christian to hold it and I do not hold it for uniquely Christian reasons.
One Warning
There is a bad habit in sloppy thinkers to attribute every view a person has to some other (obvious) view or disposition that person holds. (”Well of course Plato would say that, he is a . . . “) There is no way not to cast pearls in front of such a swine . . . since whatever view one has makes perfect sense given that one is “x.”
One sees this in politics when everything a man or woman does is related to their political views. (”Well of course Bob is a golfer . . . he is a Republican.”) Though everyone wants their views to cohere some things are decided for one set of reasons (”I like golf.”) and other things for a different (compatible) set of reasons (”I vote Republican.”)
In the same way, Christianity is (given my best thinking and experience) the framework in which I live my life, but (so far as I can tell) it has little to do with my love of the Green Bay Packers. I formed my adult view of texts working with classic texts and make no special rules for reading Scripture (as a reader).
Of course, once I (as a reader) decided Scripture was true, then I acted on its message, but I did not come to that conclusion in a way unique to reading of Scripture.
