On authorial intent

NOTE: this is another one of my “RANT RANT RANT RANT AND DON’T SPELLCHECK OR HIT BACKSPACE” things. Please forgive any reading difficulty.

on autorial intent and the validity of literary analysis.

While I wouldn’t mind talking about the feminist masterpiece that is Portal, I’ve decided to take out my laptop during recess and instead spend the next 30 minutes ranting a little into this wonderful thing we know as MS Word (which sometimes isn’t so wonderful) about something else that came up in random discussion- Authorial Intent.

Any student of literature would be familiar with the issue. Surely as you’ve been slaving away picking apart Robert Frost’s words for imagery and meaning while trying to comprehend what kind of an allegory Orwell set up in the famed dystopia of Oceania, you’ve wondered- is there any point?

Well there are points. Marks, obviously. But no matter how much one may love literature (heh), how many of these clues you’re picking up are actually clues? Was Harper Lee writing nothing more than a rather odd story, was Animal Farm Orwell’s idea of a fairy-tale— imagine if the authors were here to read our CRs and essays today, would they scoff and laugh at our overanalysis?

Well we all know that Animal Farm, at the very least, isn’t such (a thinly veiled allegory that one can easily draw paralells to real life from- Stalin, the Catholic Church, the Boxer Rebellion). But what about other works? Gulliver’s Travels? The Little Prince? Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Lolita, the Catcher in the Rye, Catch-22, the aforementioned To Kill a Mockingbird?

The answer is we can’t. The author intends something when he sets pen to paper, and certainly we see something when we read it- but is it what the author intended?

By my guess?

No.

But this bothers me little, if at all.

I am unlike many people in many ways, the relevant one being that I do not treat language as a technicality. Thanks to rigid school systems and demanding textbooks and across-the-board standardized marking of creative essays (a rant for another time- how the hell does one standardize something like creativity?), most people do. But I do not speak of writing technique, I speak of style, I do not speak of punctuation and paragrah, I speak of flow- I do not speak of the writer’s science, I speak of the writer’s craft. Language is not a science, to me, but an art.

How does this apply?

When an artist puts his brush to the canvas, he has a message in his mind. He paints with feeling, paints with emotion, and strives to convey whatever he has into that precious little space of canvas- every color choice, every brush stroke, everything counts and his carefully considered (even abstract works, even those based in improvised spontaniety have had excessive thought and planning behind them- exercises in simplicity).

So a writer is an artist, but not of images but of words.

The one thing an artist risks is putting his work out to the world to let the world behold it, from pompous art critics to the uncultured youth of today. But notice the mindset artists hold, the nightmare of young SOVA (study of visual art) students worldwide?

“I am an artist, and this is my art. What I think is irrelevant. My art speaks for itself.”

Artists talk about how they have no real control over their creations, that their ideas and muses drive their hands- I am no artist, I am no writer, but I know the feeling all too well, plotlines and characters pulling at the reins for the right words to be set free across the paper. Classes teach that we should control these to suit conventions, whether they be marking schemes or social taboo. I believe that we let them write their story.

So artists put their creations out into the world to be judged- it is in the intepretations, in the different opinions and discussion- never mind what I made it to be, what does it mean to you? The lyrics of a song speak of specific events, but can you not relate to them in other ways? How does my art, how does my creation, speak to you?

A writer’s craft is easy to learn but difficult to master, like any art- words are tricky, tricky mediums, and we work with everything from their sound to their meaning to their tone to their feeling to their context in society to the spaces inbetween. I have a purpose behind putting words to paper, but while I will share my intentions, in the end I’m curious as to what you have to say- writers write for their own sake, people say, and while it may be true every man lives off feedback, strives on critique and praise.

(So lets do away with “What did the author intend?”.

Let the words speak for themselves- they are words, after all.

You- the reader- your mind, your heart, is what lends them voice.

So what do you hear?)

And well, to quote Chandler,

“Welcome to the end of the thought process.”

The bell just rang. My timing is awesome.

See ya.