Who wrote that? It's the first question, after the title and subject matter of a book that we typically ask. Before we will accept a recommendation from a friend, teacher, family member, or stranger we like to know three things about a book. What is it called, what is it about, and who wrote it? It makes sense. After all, reading a book is a huge investment of time. With so many books floating around out there, of course we want to make sure we aren't wasting our time reading something uninteresting or subpar n quality.
So the question itself is valid. (Besides, we have to find the recommended book. The simplest way to do that is with author name and book title.) What I think is perhaps a little bit less valid are the things we say immediately after we hear the author's name. "Oh, I haven't heard of them." "What else did they write?" We immediately try to situate an author within the context of the other books they have written, the things we have heard about them, the back cover blurbs we've seen. We try to put a literal and figurative face to a name. Then we decide if the book might be worth our time. It is a lot harder to convince somebody to read a book by an unknown or new-to-them author than a book from one of their old standbys. I understand this. If you know an author is good and you know that you will enjoy their work, you will simply be more predisposed to reading their material.
But the material you read is tainted. It is tainted by your own associations of the author's subject matter, style of writing, common themes, the personal history he or she brings to the writing, and so many other things. This gets into author function and how we ought to read books.
Does author intent matter when one is reading and interpreting a book? I think that author intent is interesting to know, but not the end all, be all in book interpretation. No one text has just one meaning. Even if the author wrote the piece with one message in mind, the reader may glean from it something entirely different. This was certainly the case for Laura Bohannan, author of Shakespeare in the Bush. Bohannan visited the Tiv in Africa to do some ethnographic work. While there, she ended up recounting the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare. Everything she thought she knew about the text--Hamlet's insanity, King Claudius' awful deeds, Ophelia's suicide, the function of the ghost--was flipped as she told the Tiv elders the story. Because of their backgrounds and beliefs, Hamlet (with the same plot points and characters) became an entirely different story. I don't think that the Tiv's unique interpretation of Hamlet made the story any less for them though. They still connected to the story and so Shakespeare still did his job as an author.
In reading, it is reader takeaway that I believe is most important. If the reader gets something completely different from the author out of a text, it does not invalidate the reader's experience. If they connected to the text, the author can still feel accomplished in crafting a relatable, resonating story.
So how is meaning derived in a text? We talked in class about how, in today's literary culture, it is understood that the author is only a part of the whole meaning to be had from a text. I agree. I think we limit what a text is when we try to say that there is a finite number of interpretations that can be made. I'm not advocating for a world of literature where somebody can read The Three Musketeers and say it is really about alligators, and how alligators hate that they are always confused with crocodiles. I am saying that we can look at context from a perspective that is historical, current, political, social and so on for each interpreter. If the text and interpretation within a context match up, then it is valid. Perhaps, instead of discussing the author's context and speculating about an intent the author themselves may not even know, all literary criticism should come with a footnote delineating the critic's context. This is what allows for the constant reinterpretation of texts.
Hi Allana, thanks for the great post about meaning and authorship. I love the Tiv/Shakespeare story! Different cultural contexts will create different meanings and interpretations. I think it's ludicrous to say that there is only one interpretation of a text. Meaning is always relative to context. I tend to agree that reader takeaway is significant, though maybe not the most significant. Meaning is always arrived at by the interaction of two different contexts, that of the reader and that of the author. And sometimes even agents and publishers are involved. Great post.
ReplyDeleteI think we have to consider this question of authorship and how meaning is inculcated into a text, especially in instances when the author is not known (Beowulf). In fact, in some cases how can we even be sure that the assigned author is actually the writer? What if Mark Twain, the alias to a real person, was created to disassociate the author from the being? I am sure there are endless examples of this invention. Assuming that authors inject meaning into their work, we still have a problem in that each person, culture, etc. creates meaning in an active way and the meanings of a given work will change over time.
ReplyDeleteHey Allana! You said some interesting things about our interpretations of texts through the frame of their authors. It is so true, at least in the way I've been taught literature, that we always try to find the "correct" meaning of a text, and many teachers see only one correct interpretation. Granted, I've been lucky to have had creative-minded teachers at my high school in Chicago that encouraged us to not only consider the author's perspective but also our own thoughts and knowledge. This topic reminds me of a book I read in middle school where the narrator basically tells her teacher that she is wrong in her interpretation of Hawethorne's "Scarlet Letter." Her arguement is that none of us could actually know for sure what an author meant unless we ask them, and even then, they may be playing with our minds. We can interpret however we want, but the meaning of a piece of writing doesn't always have to do with the author's life or historical context.
ReplyDeleteHey Allana,
ReplyDeleteThanks for writing another really interesting and insightful post! It is interesting how delicately intertwined the identity of an author and the content (and even perhaps the value) of a book have become. I think that the contemporary phenomenon of associating an author with their work is particularly fascinating in light of our discussions of the evolution of print and copyright laws. Prior to a few weeks ago, I had no idea that most of the books printed early in the age of printing did not credit an author with their creation, content, or intent. At first (and perhaps a bit even now), it seemed absurd to me—how and why would people go to all that trouble to write and publish something, and not even have a way to earn credit or recognition for it? I guess this just stems out of my modern, American mentality—I have grown up in a culture that prizes individualism, making a name for yourself, working hard and earning the respect and reward that you deserve. Because this mindset is so ingrained in my manner of assessing the world, I still have a hard time understanding how authors would not want or attempt to put their names on their works. I think the copyright law was an incredibly necessary piece of legislature, as it acknowledged writing as art and opened the door for it becoming a profession. After the passage of this law, and the international and more-enforced copyright laws of later times, the notion of the “author” undeniably expanded and morphed into what our current conception of it is.
(oops sorry here's the rest of my super long post. it wouldn't let me put the whole thing up at once! haha)
ReplyDeleteWhile I think that the points you bring up in your blog—such as our instant conflation of author with content, value, and intent—are valid, I could not help but think of another artistic medium that floods our society today: music. This functions in somewhat of a similar way, I think, to how you have described books, but also includes a few interesting deviations. When we hear a song on the radio or a friend mentions how “good,” a song is, we often want to know who wrote it. Granted, it may be easier to identify a song off the radio based on the voice of the performer than to identify a writer by reading a paragraph of one of their works, but the same sorts of associations you mentioned often apply. This is true, I believe: “We immediately try to situate an author within the context of the other books they have written, the things we have heard about them, the back cover blurbs we've seen. We try to put a literal and figurative face to a name. Then we decide if the book might be worth our time” (Allana’s blog). I think we often do the same thing with songs and musicians—we might think about their song, how it fits into their life experiences and their other productions, and what their motivation for composing might have been. I suppose we don’t have to think too much about whether it would be worth our time, as listening to a 2-minute song is much less of an investment that reading a 200-page novel, but we still have the option to turn it off or change the channel if we decide that that song isn’t our style, or even worth a few seconds of our attention. It is interesting, I think, the different connotations that songs and books have in our culture. Maybe it is our infatuation with getting things delivered to us quickly and easily and our love of being passively entertained that makes us more likely to listen to a new 2-min long song than a book recommended by a friend. But as reading declines, I hope we will not just be left with songs and films (which, I feel, lack much of what a good book can deliver). It is interesting how we feel the need to evaluate the “value” of a book—before we read, as we are reading, and after we have turned the last page. Even though the author has been given so much status and acclaim since the passage of the copyright laws, I do think we have begun to place too much weight upon their “intended meaning” and what they may or may not want the reader to derive from their text. Reading can be for pure enjoyment and entertainment, but it can also be for deriving insight into an author’s life, point of view, and manner of interpretation—we should not try to conform our concepts of book and author into too narrow of constraints!
Reading and interpreting a text is so objective, and everyone sees everything differently, which is what makes it fun and beautiful. I also think that recommendation or prior knowledge of a work makes us more prone to read them, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I try really hard to not base my selections on how credible the author is, or how well known. I get a lot of delight out of finding those random authors and falling madly in love actually. We don't always do that, though, that much is true, but as readers we should all make a conscious effort to look beyond the best sellers or Oprah's book club and pick a book because it has the chance of changing our lives.
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