Next Up: Author Intent vs. Reader Response

Recently, I was talking to a classmate who said that, regardless of the many different readings and analyses of stories that are made, the ultimate and definitive meaning of a story should be the one the writer intended it to be. I jokingly said that my classmate obviously was not a New Critic, because in my understanding they completely ignore author intent and focus only on the text as an end in itself (unless I understood Garry Sherbert incorrectly, which is entirely possible).

On this topic, I am working on an unrelated essay right now and came across an interesting quote by William Faulkner, about his novel ‘Sanctuary,’ that reads “Faulkner suggests that Popeye, the shining voyeur, is very real, that we can perhaps recognize his presence within ourselves: he is merely “another lost human being. He became a symbol of evil in modern society only by coincidence but I was still writing about people, not about ideas, not about symbols.”” William Faulkner himself has said that he wrote the book merely as a potboiler to make some money off a popular genre and that he did not intend for his character, who is now viewed as the epitome of evil, to be a symbol of evil. And yet, people go on writing essays about how Popeye is a symbol of evil. If even he can’t dictate the direction of critique with respect to his stories, I suppose there’s no hope for the rest of us. In this book of Faulkner’s, there have been essays written that say the main female character essentially brought on her own rape, and obviously other essays that violently refute that assertion. If I, as a woman, had written that book, I would be extremely disturbed to think that anyone would read my story as suggesting that a woman asked to be raped. But what if that kind of assessment were made after I was already dead and could say nothing to deny it? Then that might become a legitimate reading of my work, as it has of his.

I think that’s a difficult thing to accept about writing, the fact that once it’s out there in the world people will read it in whatever way is relevant to them and we have to accept that. It’s kind of like giving birth to a baby and then letting everyone else in the world just name it whatever they want to name it so that it has a million different names. One day you won’t be around anymore to call it by the name you gave it, and it will go on having perpetual multiple personality disorder for all eternity. It’s kind of like the way U of R MFA grad student, Mike Binzer, recently had his final portfolio on display at the MacKenzie Art Gallery -- a series of abstract representations of the human body – and my daughter walked in and said “This one is an otter, this one is a tree trunk, this one is a submarine (or a plum), this one is a snake, this one is a manta ray, etc.” Granted, she’s only six years old so he might not take her imaginative associations as seriously as an adult’s. But my point is that I think this is the nature of art, something that we as artists have to come to terms with. People will not always see our work the way we want them to see it and we have to find some way of being able to live with that and still sleep at night.