meta: if authorial intent dies in a fire, does anyone even notice?

[angearia]

I have this button called "Authorial Intent" and whenever someone pushes that button to dismiss a reader's interpretation or to question the value of even bothering to offer interpretation, it sends me off into a tailspin of discourse on the value of authorial intent and the reader's participation in the process of creating meaning in fiction. So,

Comments

[beer_good_foamy]

Yeah, saying it gets no say was a bit harsh, perhaps. I just meant that in the end, the fiction has to stand on its own; the worst piece of shit won't be more interesting (though the discussion of it might be) just because the author claims to have had some brilliant ideas, and vice versa. The director of the remake of The Wicker Man tried to sell it as a feminist work, and Groucho Marx was ashamed that he'd "wasted" his life doing comedy. Guess what? The Wicker Man is still blatantly misogynist, and Duck Soup just gets better every year. Discussions of authorial intent can be incredibly interesting, they can add a lot to one's appreciation of a work, but it doesn't get to trump the actual work, I should have said. (You might even argue that the stated authorial intent, like with Commentary! The Musical, is a work unto itself.)

I am not sure I trust my reactions to be constant

I get that, though for me, that's part of the fun. My favourite books, movies, albums and TV series age and change with me. There's the work that exists independent of me and is unchanging*, and there's the one that's part of me (the blood in my water, so to speak). Basically, what you say about the text being a relationship.

* Unchanging in the sense of the nuts and bolts of it, the actual words on the page or the actual takes**; but since every consumtion of it is a dialogue, it's still a different work every time I read it.

** Anything by George Lucas is an exception, but then nothing by George Lucas shows up on my list of favourites anyway.

...Basically, there's a metric fuckton of layers to this and the author's hypothetical intent is interleaved in there somewhere, but it's not the reason I care about it in the first place. There's a paradox here: if I don't care enough about a work on its own terms to bother finding out what the author intended, the author's intentions are ~moot anyway; if I do care about it enough, then the author's intentions are ~moot anyway.

Bob Dylan was once asked what his songs were about. His reply: "Oh, some are about three minutes, some are about four minutes..."