It doesn’t matter what an author intended - only what they’ve done.
As a writer or creator this is a terrifying prospect: once you’ve sent your art into the world you lose control of it, and it becomes a collaborative project with an audience you don’t know.
But there’s no one way to understand a text, either. Sure, there may be accepted readings or interpretations, but if a reader can support their understanding with the material then their reading is “right.”[1] This idea is best understood through the lens of the “death of the author.”
In 1967 Roland Barthes published “The Death of the Author,” investigating - and rejecting - the primacy of authorial identity. He calls the concept of the AUTHOR “capitalist ideology,” and notes that a modern understanding of literature is “tyrannically centered on the author,” whose personal history and experiences are used to explain a text (Barthes, 1967, p. 143). This fosters a mathematical approach to criticism, Barthes suggests, establishing a “correct” answer or analysis or understanding based on verifiable facts of the author themself, rather than the experience of the text itself (p. 147). He contends that the birth of the reader requires “the death of the author” (p. 148), liberating the reader from the rigorous examination of the creator over the creation.
It doesn’t matter what an author intended - only what they’ve done.
What this means is that readers and critics should consider their own experience with the material over a biographical account of the author - that a text is a whole artifact and not just an extension of the author, and can be read and understood as its own thing. In other words, as I would tell my college freshmen, it doesn’t matter what an author “meant” or “intended” - what matters is what the reader sees and understands. That if a point of analysis can be supported by the text then it is correct, and several conflicting points of analysis can be “right” at the same time, if well-argued.
This was a particularly difficult concept for my math and science majors to accept. Surely there must be one “correct” answer, and the creator is the ultimate authority on what that answer or analysis may be. But just as their essays should take care to explain their ideas, I told them, so too must authors take care in their craft to lead the reader to the ideas they are sharing.
And if a reading is different than what an author “intended,” then that’s a “failure” of the author, not the reader.
For years my example was this: “Did you think Dumbledore was gay?”
“Did you think Dumbledore was gay?”
At the time (in the 20teens) Dumbledore’s sexual identity was one of the more controversial questions related to Joanne Rowling (ah, better days). In an interview after the final Harry Potter book was published her answer to a fan question about Dumbledore’s love life was that she always thought of the wizard as gay. But this retroactive assignment of identity does not change the reader’s experience of the character in the published narrative. My students would consistently respond that no, they had no idea the character was “supposed” to be gay.
“If the book didn’t give you any clue that he was gay, then was he actually supposed to be? Or is the author attempting to retroactively change the story, perhaps because she’s dissatisfied with readers’ responses to her books?”
It wasn’t that my students missed it - it was that the author “failed” in her intention, or was trying to direct the reading after the story was published. But like I said above, a novel is a complete artifact, and the reader’s experience with that artifact is more legitimate than the author’s attempts to control the text after its release.
The death of the author is a concept that liberates audiences from the draconian control of the writer. Media consumption is not a test or an exam, but an experience, and the audience’s experience is valid regardless of what the creator has to say.
The death of the author is a concept that liberates audiences from the draconian control of the writer.
And the death of the author is a concept that liberates critics and scholars, allowing them to analyze the text as it is offered, and share their conclusions. So, for example, no matter what Lee Cronin intended in The Mummy, the audience’s experience of the film is what matters. And thus audiences and critics write analysis and reviews and build a dialogue and shared understanding around a work or a franchise or a genre.
This concept was easier for freshmen to understand when we read Shakespeare, but more difficult when reading living authors. After all, they’re still speaking and interacting, and in an age of increasing connectedness, when the public has greater access to creators - and vice versa - the death of the author is increasingly tenuous. Sometimes an author refuses to “die.”
I experienced this first-hand many years ago when I wrote a review of a popular nonfiction book written by a living author. In 2009 historian Marilyn Yalom responded to my criticism of History of the Breast on a now-defunct blog (also posted on LibraryThing). I’ve lost the post and can no longer quote her directly, but I can say that she argued with my reading of her work, to which I responded that if her intent was different then it did not translate in my reading.
At the time I was flabbergasted - both that the author had found my review on a blog read by approximately five friends, and that she would take the time to respond to it.
Yalom’s response did not change my experience of the text, nor my analysis; I was not careless or thoughtless when I wrote that “Yalom's historical analysis at times appears to be overly-hostile to her subjects (specifically those of the Renaissance) while providing no academic basis for such hostility within this individual work,” and Yalom’s anger with me did not change the fact that I found no basis for her tone within the work as it was published. It was not up to me to seek out clarification from the author, but rather the author’s duty to fully articulate the research and experiences that brought her to this conclusion.
This is no different for creatives, who make specific choices in the development and publishing of their work. Art and literature do not happen passively - they are actively constructed, and each choice serves purpose. And while a creator may change their mind later, and even rectify their “failings” in subsequent publications, what they say is then a separate text to be considered - one that may influence a reading or understanding of the first, but nonetheless does not change what has been put out into the world.
And that’s terrifying, sure. But it’s the nature of art. A work begins a conversation, and the creator cannot end it.
This doesn’t just apply to the written word, and sometimes we have to literally distance ourselves to offer thoughtful responses. When I leave a live performance I save my criticism for the ride home, so I’m sure the creative team won’t overhear me; I mean what I have to say, but I’m not trying to be mean to the living people actively involved. The work exists separate from the person, and so my critique is separate from the individual and reflective of my experience of the whole.
But what happens when the creator figuratively follows audiences home? This is the double-edged sword of the social media landscape and cultural criticism: creators may attempt to “tyrannically center,” themselves once again, extending their platform beyond the creative text to argue with public reception of their work (Barthes, 1967).
What an author or director or painter or actor has to say on Instagram or TikTok or the platform formerly known as Twitter should not be taken as the penultimate authority of meaning, because the work itself -the primary source- is complete once it is in the hands of the public. Which is not to say that the discourse is without value - authors can participate in the conversations around their work, and can lend insight and offer arguments. But in that space their voice is part of a collective, another reflection on the primary source, and not an authoritative change. What one says and what one means are not always the same thing, but words cannot be unspoken and the conversation cannot be shut down because one person wants it to be.
So: if you did not read Dumbledore as gay then he isn’t gay in your reading. You’re not wrong.
If an author disagrees they can craft another work to influence the whole, but it doesn’t wipe out what they’ve done, or what you’ve understood.
[1] Of course, there will always be those who willfully misrepresent or misunderstand a text, but more often than not these “readings” can’t be supported by a logical understanding of the primary source. Which is to say they can’t back up their ideas, no matter how loudly they shout (the example that first comes to mind is when movie-goers complain about the race of an actor being antithetical to the story – i.e. Hunger Games).