Why every book has meaning: Reader-response theory
So I had a conversation recently that went something like this:
Me: I’ve never really been able to get into [insert author of your choice], the whole [insert overarching theme of the book] thing just distracts me.
Guy: Yeah, but how do you even know that’s what the author meant? I mean, couldn’t he just have been sitting there and decided “Let’s put some daffodils in!” and they were just supposed to be daffodils and pretty and not mean anything?
Me: But it doesn’t matter whether the author intended something to have meaning or not. Something can still wind up with meaning on its own.
Guy: But if they’re just daffodils…daffodils don’t have meaning. What if he just wanted them to be pretty for the scene? Not everything is about something.
[Rinse and repeat as necessary until phone rings and Guy wanders off]
No, not every single thing is about something. But yes, everything can have meaning. Everything.
It does not matter whether you’re writing the greatest literary thing of the year, or the most flat, shallow, stock-character-filled piece of tripe to walk the face of the earth. Meaning can be found in it. I think perhaps we draw the arbitrary Value Line between literary fiction and genre fiction to distinguish between authors who intend to put meaning in a work and authors who accidentally put meaning in a work, but that’s a whole other rant.*
Instead, let me introduce you to the Reader-Response theory of literary criticism.
[To avoid eye-glazing, the long-winded description of our theory has been replaced by a happy, smiling comic! Full eye-glazing details can be found here.]
Basically, the author writes the text and he or she has whatever intent while writing it, but the text alone is just a text. It doesn’t have meaning, it doesn’t hold on to what the author intended. Meaning comes when the reader interacts with the text, bring his or her own perspectives into what they are reading.
What matters, essentially, is how you form your own individual interpretation of the text, based on what you bring to it and what you can find within it. A reader with a background in Marxist theory will find something completely different than a science fiction fan who can totally see what you’re trying to do with those western stereotypes in your work. The key is there has to be something in the text. You can’t just say a work is about whatever the heck you want and no one can prove you wrong because it’s your interaction with the text and not someone else’s. There’s got to be something in the text you can identify (“Cite your sources! Cite your sources!”), otherwise it’s just you reading a book while thinking about a completely different topic.
This is why all those high school English courses that asked you to discuss what the author “was trying to say” are horse shit. Absolute horse shit! Sorry Ms. Stenson. What matters is what you can find within the text as you explore it. No one knows what the author meant to say, or if the author meant anything at all. Yes, maybe Wordsworth just stumbled upon a host of golden daffodils one day, and he thought it was a really super experience, and he wrote a poem about it. If he comes along and smacks you for thinking it’s about the fleeting beauty of the mortal world and how we are all dying, that doesn’t make you wrong. In fact, he’s dead, so maybe that might make you right!
And the same goes for living writers. I can pour all my time and attention into crafting a cohesive story arc exploring abuse and owning of one’s own sexuality that’s free from unfortunate implications, but that doesn’t mean my utter lack of creativity in sticking a king in a fantasy setting means my book toots the Pro-Monarchy horn and says lower classes shouldn’t have power. Hell, the whole abuse thing may backfire on me too! Authors with the best of intentions have gotten attacked in reviews for things they didn’t think about that start going on in their texts. A wide selection of criticism for Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga comes out of implications I highly doubt she was consciously trying to infuse into her work and spread to numerous readers.
Meaning can be found in everything, regardless of an author’s original intent or complete lack thereof. Search as deep as you like or skim the surface and see what accidentally happens to emerge. It’s just as good to read a book you enjoy for a good, gripping plot, and let the rest go on in your subconscious.
What do you think? Can a thing in a text ever JUST be a thing? Do some books have absolutely no meaning, message, or deeper content to dig out? Do you bother to look at such things when you read?
*This blog post was actually supposed to be about that rant, and then I made a cartoon, and now it’s about literary criticism. I’ll try again later.
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This reminds me of Suzanne Collins' "Mockingjay" when the character Peeta keeps asking:"Real or not real?" to understand the world around him. What has meaning and what doesn't? Do things matter only if we care about them? If we don't care, they don't matter. So it seems. Real or not real?
See, for example, the recurring tendency to analyze anything and everything from a marxist, feminist, freudian, etc. perspective, and come up with all sorts of meanings that were rather obviously not intended by the original authors.
Which is related to the point that meaning is personal. What something means to you is not the same as what it means to somebody else… which is why all the complaints about Twilight will never change the minds of it's fans.
Daemon, don't forget everything ever written being about death! ;)
There's definitely a need for an extra moment of separation between author and work when some of the big theories come into play. That an author never in a thousand years intended a story to be about, say, Marxism, doesn't make someone wrong for finding it about Marxism, but we get lazy with language sometimes. We say, "This story is about Marxism and that means this!" as opposed to "Everything in this story points toward Marxism to me" and not making a blanket statement of the only thing a book could possibly be about.
Especially when a work was written well before or after a school of thought was considered relevant, the author must absolutely be cut from the situation. That's why I love reader response criticism, it takes the author out of the picture anyway so we don't have to struggle around ridiculous phrases like "Faulkner uses the bright lights in The Sound and the Fury to signal this!" Because, absolutely, Faulkner wrote somewhere that he totally intended that, as opposed to be finding it at work in the narrative and it still doing the same thing regardless of intent.
Still, a work can find renewed life gaining relevance beyond what was intended in its own time, and that's typically one of the marks of something truly literary (the dead author kind, not the published-this-year kind), that it contains meaning across generations.
I should never talk about literary analysis… it makes for long comments :)