Authorial Intent
“What was the author’s intent in writing this passage?”
That question always infuriated me as a kid. How could you know the author’s intent? Did you ask them? I was an author, too, or at least a writer—I’d been writing stories since before I could write—and I knew instinctively that some people would misconstrue my message. To make matters worse, the teachers never really taught us how to ferret out the underlying meaning of a passage. Oh, they taught us symbolism, but the implication was that the symbols were somehow universal, something everyone knew, which meant the exact same thing in every circumstance, regardless of the author’s background or level of education.
In college, I wound up arguing with a teacher about authorial intent, and I still believe I was correct. But the tables had turned; I thought I knew what the author had intended, and the teacher didn’t agree. The specific scenario was Catullus’s poems about his girlfriend’s sparrow. My argument was, and still is, that Catullus crafted his poems very carefully, so he would have known that at least some of his readers would think he was talking about his penis until the very end when that interpretation became impossible, that he intended the double entendre and the gotcha moment at the end. I thought at the time that my understanding of authorial intent had evolved and expanded when teachers stopped telling me what and how to think, just like my skills at essay writing had suddenly bloomed the moment I got to college.
Now, looking back, I don’t think that’s the case. My argument about Catullus’s intent was based upon my understanding of his writing style; in the case of high school English, we studied books out of context, with no knowledge of how those authors typically expressed ideas. It wasn’t that I was no longer being told how to interpret the passage; it was that I was being given the full framework upon which to base my interpretation.
Perhaps what was covered in high school was enough for neurotypical students. I can’t say, because I’m not neurotypical. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and am almost certainly autistic as well. What I can say is that what I was taught did not work for me. Instead it left me with the firm belief that authorial intent can’t be left to vague textual evidence and unknown symbolism, but must rather be based upon how the reader interacts with the text.
If the author intends for the text to be open to interpretation, that’s fine. A recent example is the Good Omens TV show. Neil Gaiman has stated that it’s a 6000-year-long love story, but anyone’s headcanon as to exactly what type of love story it is, is equally valid. We can debate about whether this is a cop-out, but it does mean that arguments as to what the author’s intent was are rather pointless.
When I read The Giver, I was among the 2% of people who thought it had a happy ending. Most of the other 98% were satisfied with the belief that the main character died and went to Heaven at the end, although some were disappointed. From what I understand, the sequel indicates that my interpretation was the correct one; but the author has never come out and said that the majority of readers were wrong.
As vindicated as I might feel to learn that my interpretation is correct, it’s rather worrying when the majority of readers misinterpret a text. When that is the case, somewhere, something has gone wrong. The point of a story is to communicate between the writer and the readers. Of course some aren’t going to understand exactly what you’re trying to relate, but if you’re doing your job, most will internalize your point in a way that mostly resembles what you intended. The percentage who interpret it correctly might decrease as time goes on, or among those who are not your target audience, but for the most part, people should understand what it is that you meant to communicate.
The further people get from the source, or the less familiarity they have with the context of your works, the less accurately they will interpret your story. If you only intend your symbolism-heavy work of high literature and satire to be comprehensible within the current canon and political climate, that’s fine. Not everything has to stand the test of time. And it’s always possible for future readers to familiarize themselves with the context in which the work was written, as we do for books like Animal Farm and the Greco-Roman canon.
This is, of course, a completely separate issue from simply including themes and references that not everyone will pick up on, but which aren’t vital to comprehending the main intent of the work. We can appreciate Shakespeare’s plays for the dick jokes without being experts on the political climate of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
But if you want your readers to interpret your work in the way you intended them to be read, it's important that you include the clues inside the text itself. JK Rowling has become somewhat of a joke with the way she retcons her works to be more inclusive than the way she wrote them. Dumbledore is gay, but Remus and Sirius aren't. Hermione can be black, except there's no basis for that in the text.
In my own stories, Kerry is autistic and demisexual. I didn't consciously write her that way, but I'm autistic and ace-spec myself, and that came out in my writing, even though I didn't realize it at the time. Hel is non-binary, which again is hinted at in the text despite the fact that I didn't realize it when I was writing her. It may not have been part of my intent when writing the characters, but it's a valid interpretation of the text--in fact is the author's interpretation of the text, upon re-reading what I wrote.
There's a lot of controversy over death of the author and how readers interact with a story, but any fully-fleshed fictional world leaves a great deal up to the imagination, and the author can only control what words are put to paper in the canon itself. If the stories leave themselves up to interpretation, that's on the author, not the readers. You can't control what other people do with your words once they've been released to the public.
That question always infuriated me as a kid. How could you know the author’s intent? Did you ask them? I was an author, too, or at least a writer—I’d been writing stories since before I could write—and I knew instinctively that some people would misconstrue my message. To make matters worse, the teachers never really taught us how to ferret out the underlying meaning of a passage. Oh, they taught us symbolism, but the implication was that the symbols were somehow universal, something everyone knew, which meant the exact same thing in every circumstance, regardless of the author’s background or level of education.
In college, I wound up arguing with a teacher about authorial intent, and I still believe I was correct. But the tables had turned; I thought I knew what the author had intended, and the teacher didn’t agree. The specific scenario was Catullus’s poems about his girlfriend’s sparrow. My argument was, and still is, that Catullus crafted his poems very carefully, so he would have known that at least some of his readers would think he was talking about his penis until the very end when that interpretation became impossible, that he intended the double entendre and the gotcha moment at the end. I thought at the time that my understanding of authorial intent had evolved and expanded when teachers stopped telling me what and how to think, just like my skills at essay writing had suddenly bloomed the moment I got to college.
Now, looking back, I don’t think that’s the case. My argument about Catullus’s intent was based upon my understanding of his writing style; in the case of high school English, we studied books out of context, with no knowledge of how those authors typically expressed ideas. It wasn’t that I was no longer being told how to interpret the passage; it was that I was being given the full framework upon which to base my interpretation.
Perhaps what was covered in high school was enough for neurotypical students. I can’t say, because I’m not neurotypical. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and am almost certainly autistic as well. What I can say is that what I was taught did not work for me. Instead it left me with the firm belief that authorial intent can’t be left to vague textual evidence and unknown symbolism, but must rather be based upon how the reader interacts with the text.
If the author intends for the text to be open to interpretation, that’s fine. A recent example is the Good Omens TV show. Neil Gaiman has stated that it’s a 6000-year-long love story, but anyone’s headcanon as to exactly what type of love story it is, is equally valid. We can debate about whether this is a cop-out, but it does mean that arguments as to what the author’s intent was are rather pointless.
When I read The Giver, I was among the 2% of people who thought it had a happy ending. Most of the other 98% were satisfied with the belief that the main character died and went to Heaven at the end, although some were disappointed. From what I understand, the sequel indicates that my interpretation was the correct one; but the author has never come out and said that the majority of readers were wrong.
As vindicated as I might feel to learn that my interpretation is correct, it’s rather worrying when the majority of readers misinterpret a text. When that is the case, somewhere, something has gone wrong. The point of a story is to communicate between the writer and the readers. Of course some aren’t going to understand exactly what you’re trying to relate, but if you’re doing your job, most will internalize your point in a way that mostly resembles what you intended. The percentage who interpret it correctly might decrease as time goes on, or among those who are not your target audience, but for the most part, people should understand what it is that you meant to communicate.
The further people get from the source, or the less familiarity they have with the context of your works, the less accurately they will interpret your story. If you only intend your symbolism-heavy work of high literature and satire to be comprehensible within the current canon and political climate, that’s fine. Not everything has to stand the test of time. And it’s always possible for future readers to familiarize themselves with the context in which the work was written, as we do for books like Animal Farm and the Greco-Roman canon.
This is, of course, a completely separate issue from simply including themes and references that not everyone will pick up on, but which aren’t vital to comprehending the main intent of the work. We can appreciate Shakespeare’s plays for the dick jokes without being experts on the political climate of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
But if you want your readers to interpret your work in the way you intended them to be read, it's important that you include the clues inside the text itself. JK Rowling has become somewhat of a joke with the way she retcons her works to be more inclusive than the way she wrote them. Dumbledore is gay, but Remus and Sirius aren't. Hermione can be black, except there's no basis for that in the text.
In my own stories, Kerry is autistic and demisexual. I didn't consciously write her that way, but I'm autistic and ace-spec myself, and that came out in my writing, even though I didn't realize it at the time. Hel is non-binary, which again is hinted at in the text despite the fact that I didn't realize it when I was writing her. It may not have been part of my intent when writing the characters, but it's a valid interpretation of the text--in fact is the author's interpretation of the text, upon re-reading what I wrote.
There's a lot of controversy over death of the author and how readers interact with a story, but any fully-fleshed fictional world leaves a great deal up to the imagination, and the author can only control what words are put to paper in the canon itself. If the stories leave themselves up to interpretation, that's on the author, not the readers. You can't control what other people do with your words once they've been released to the public.
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