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Wankers - Is it art, or poop?
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Yes, it does.Evil Multifarious wrote:All this "the author didn't intend that meaning" crap is....crap. Just because an author didn't build a certain interpretation into his work doesn't mean that interpretation is invalid.
If you can interpret a piece of literature any goddamned way you please, then literature no longer has any real meaning and we might as well all just go back to communicating by grunts and gestures.
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What the hell is "real" meaning? Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby to be about the spiritual emptiness of the Roaring Twenties, but if I see within it some relevance to current times (hypothetically), then is that meaning invalid?
Good writers don't just have one meaning or one message in their work. They bring up themes and ideas that can be applied to many interpretations.
Another example is The Wizard of Oz. I think it's a pretty obvious allegory for the gold standard, but other people adamantly claim that it's just a children's story. Both interpretations are valid, because they both make sense.
At the end of one of my favorite books, The World According to Garp, John Irving talks about this:
" Anyway, while Colin was off in his room reading the manuscript of Garp, I found myself agonizing over what the novel was "about." To my horror, and full of self-loathing, I jumped to the conclusion that the book was about the temptations of lust--lust leads just about everyone to a miserable end. There is even a chapter called "More Lust," as if there weren't enough already. I was positively ashamed of how much lust was in the book, not to mention how punitive a novel I thought it was; indeed, every character in the story who indulges his or her lust is severely punished.
"It had seemed at one time, when I was beginning the novel, that the polarization of the sexes was a dominant theme; the story was about men and women growing farther and farther apart."
" I used to think the novel was about marriage, specifically the perils of marriage--more specifically, the threat of lust to marriage."
"And, at another time, The World According to Garp began with Chapter 3 ("What He Wanted to Be When He Grew Up")--for isn't the novel also about that? Garp wants to be a writer; it is a novel about a novelist, although almost no reader of the book remembers it as such."
"To my surprise, Colin didn't ask me what the book was "about"--he told me. "It's about the fear of death, I think," Colin began. "Maybe more accurately, the fear of the death of children--or of anyone you love.""
"It is a novel about being careful, and about that not being enough."
A novel can have many different meanings, such that even the author doesn't know what it is "really about".
Jeez. It's like you don't want English professors to have tenured jobs.
Applying literature to everday life is the only way it has any meaning outside of pure entertainment. There are no rules as to how you can apply it. If you want to do Marxist/Feminist readings of Shakespeare, you're entitled to (although that particular example is pretty stupid).
EDIT: flamebroiledchicken said it better.
In the case of Gatsby (which *is* a good, enduring work), spiritual emptiness is not a theme that's confined to any one time period. It is most relevant contemporary to its writing, but it's not unique to the 20's. Nobody's going to call you on it if you say it could apply to shallow, idle rich people today.
If you had instead said that your interpretation is that Fitzgerald was, oh, was pro-convertible and against hardtops (because covered cars kill people in the book), it wouldn't hold up. I can't think of a better example, sorry. Maybe saying A Separate Peace was about the repression of homosexuality or something just because there are no female characters that matter and Gene and Finny aren't checking each other's tonsils. There are different degrees of 'valid'.
Now, I've never heard about this 'Oz as gold standard' thing. Do elaborate! It sounds interesting.
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Into The Woods is another one. A lot of people think it's an allegory for the AIDS epidemic.
And to TP: unless an author outright explains what his work means (which is actually frowned upon by the literary community), then all interpretations are equally valid, because there is no way to figure out which interpretation is in accordance with the author's. That's...one of the fundamental realities of literature.
Uh?
Are you talking about the play? Because I LIKED that play.
Yes, I'm talking about the play.
Sorry, Wizard of Oz put me in "stage thinking" mode. What did that exist as originally? Movie? Play? Book?
Book. Frank L Baum
And it apparently isn't an allegory for AIDS, even though they seem to be somewhat obvious.
I'm not going to claim there's no room for interpretation, but when you start bringing in ideas that are obviously outside the realm of the author's experience (like, say, applying Marxist motivations for the actions of a Shakespearian character), you are no longer "interpreting"; you are holding up the mirror of literary criticism and reflecting it on yourself.
Marxism, as in (in a very general sense) class issues? Are you saying that Shakespeare didn't live in a world divided by classes? Class issues are not outside of the realm of the author's experience. Just because Marxism as a theory didn't exist doesn't mean that the issues that Marxism deals with didn't exist.
I could be misunderstanding you, though.
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Perhaps.
But, take The Giver. Perfect example. Most people don't even know that The Giver has two sequels. Anyway, the author refused, when the book was published, to give her own interpretation of what happens in the end. I think the popular interpretation is that one that obviously is NOT correct given the next two books.
I consider it a valid interpretation nonetheless, and I think Lois Lowry, the author, does as well if she hadn't written the other two books.
That reminds me of Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path." If anyone's read it, they know that a big question that is usually brought up is whether or not the grandson is, in fact, alive. Welty was repeatedly asked whether or not she intended the grandson to be dead. I found this:
Sometimes even the author wants to leave it up to interpretation. One of my classes had a pretty lengthy discussion about it. I said that, as a reader, it's more interesting, and more morbid, if the son is dead. But the son being dead leads to a psychological criticism that isn't really available if the son is alive. My point was that the child being dead pretty much focuses the critic to look at psychological criticism in an overpowering way -- whereas if the son is alive, it's much easier to focus on Marxist or feminist or what-have-you criticism.
Uh, that was a lot of words and I'm not sure if I said anything of interest/importance.
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even asuming that an author is capable of eliminating any subconcious elements from his writing, does it really matter?
is the value of a piece not greater for it's ablity to relect the modern world? Relfect the emotions felt by the reader regardless of what those emotions are? You are talking about art as if it were epistemology.
Yeah, I mean I like to leave a little to the reader's imagination myself. Not too much. An interpretative ending could easily be a copout for an author unwilling to strongly commit to an ending. But if an author knows what he/she is doing, there is little harm and often a lot of uhhh magic? in allowing the reader some flexibility in his/her interpretation.
I agree. I just really like how Welty's story really illustrates the fact that multiple interpretations are both possible and valid, especially since the author herself encourages it.
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Just because Shakespeare depicted the rift between the rich and the poor doesn't mean he was portraying class struggle.
Just because a character buys something he doesn't need doesn't mean it's a critique of commodity fetishism.
If readers were limited to interpreting works only in the way the author meant the work to be interpreted, then nothing would ever be interpreted.
OK, so what boundaries are people supposed to use in interpreting texts?
Some interpretations are silly. I'm not going to write up an essay on why I think The Art of War is really a cookbook. But those kind of absurd interpretations will be laughed at.
What is your suggestion? I suggest you laugh at silly interpretations. Interpretation, however, is never wrong in and of itself.
Wow.
Just FYI most artists and authors disagree with you, methinks. The viewer/reader is extremely relevant.
As far as I'm concerned, there's only one true interpretation: The author's intention.
Now, as you say, we often don't know or can't know what that intention is. But I think that it is at least possible to approach it by asymptote.
The lasting ones anyway.
One of the biggest lessons you have to learn is to respect your audience, which is something you can't do if you go the pretentious route and use "art for my own sake" instead of "art for art's sake"
OK, but I think you should know that your philosophy on this is not simply the opposite of what you call "academic stupidity." I'd say it's pretty offensive to both reader and writers, and all other types of artist and art aficionado, because it isn't just the readers and viewers that are forcing interpretations on the art world, but artists themselves that welcome interpretation.
That is not the same thing as art for the audience's sake.
Well too fucking bad for you, because every book you've ever read, every painting you've ever seen, and every piece of music you've ever listened to has been filtered through your own interpretations.
It is impossible for a human being to recieve "pure" information.
Whether or not it's good art is a different question altogether.
But you'll note I'm speaking only of interpretation, not quality.
WHAT?
well, I'm decidely not an artist, but I'm not too sure how true this is. Particularly the bit about creating art for an audience. If you look at... pop artists? the likes of kinkade, that create stuff for thier audence... well... it's shit.
Art for art's sake, and art for the artist's sake are probably a lot more closely related and art for the sake of the audience.
If you look at the greats, thier works outlasted the audience by centuries. Many of the greats, many of the the greatest pieces of art, were considered failures in thier time.
The great one were driven to satify something inside themselfs, so in many ways they were creating art for thier own sake. So they could express those thing.
Honestly not sure just how relevent this line of thought it to literature though. Shakespeare would have to be writen off as an exception. Probably playwrites in genral.
I can think of a few, who it would apply to. Dante for instance. None of the greek or romans though.
Would you say, then, that her poems were not "art" during her lifetime?
And that they suddenly bloomed into "art" afterward?
I'm not sure how to respond to any of this.
I think, however, that I prefer what TP calls "academic stupidity" to these fictitious boundaries he is placing on art and the interpretation thereof.
Roland Barthes. He's a bit of a dinosaur in terms of literary criticism, but you can learn a lot from fossils.
No, however not every painting, sculpture, movie, or story is art simply by its existence.
Here:
I just drew that. Technically it's a painting. Is it art? No. This comes from the artist (me) himself. It isn't art. It's crap. My intention, in creating this painting, was to create crap. It could even be interpreted by someone as art. It's still not art.
I don't think every single creation in existence is "art" simply because it was created.
Well, no, you see so someone to read at something you make, there has got to be a)respect for your audience and b)a "hook" that will get them to look in the first place.
If you write for yourself, chances are you will only read it yourself.
Perhaps many of the classics were failures in the time, and maybe those works were even published after their authors died, but just the fact that they got it out there means that they were writing it for an intended audience.
Well, considering that's not what he fucking said, I'd say that's a non-sequitur.
I think you are just interpreting them as art. heh
This is terible art, but art non the less.
Or you could try reading up the quote tree a little bit, numnuts, where he said exactly what I repeated.