> I think everyone, even dedicated lit crit advocates, know that we can't know what the intent of the author is.
I've personally had discussions with lit crit advocates who argue not only that they can know the intent of the author, but that they can know the intent of the author even when the author contradicts their interpretations.
I'm glad you're not one of them, but they very much do exist, and rejecting the notion that you can know the intent of the author with any reliability was the main point of my original reply.
> But we can see the purpose it serves in the writing, and with a decent author be moderately confident that the important elements here are not complete accidents.
Depends on what you mean by "moderately confident". There are enough cases of authors completely shooting down claims of critics about the meaning of paragraphs that it's clear it's often not at all obvious you can have much confidence in it. (I'd love to see someone try to quantify the accuracy of critics by surveying authors; that'd be fascinating)
Nobody here is objecting to you setting out your theories. My objection was solely to the notion we know the authors intent.
> OK. I don't really like reading massive amounts of exposition drivel, where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting and makes sense without example.
To me the most interesting parts often are the parts where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting by telling me about the world. I often find myself skimming past dialogue and descriptions of the characters actions to get to the part that lets me see the world with a birds eye view in exposition because I find the world building and the concept far more interesting than characters that are usually insignificant in the grand scheme of things (and most characters are). I've done that with many fantastic pieces of highly renowned literature because I know it's not the characters I remember once I'm done with a book - often not even the story - but the world and the concepts. Often I find the focus on showing to result in overwrought drivel that is contrived because the author is afraid of just telling us something and need to concoct contrived conversations etc. to show us instead.
We clearly value books for very different reasons. That's fine.
> Authors have a whole lot of freedom, but what makes a cohesive story is already a highly constrained sequence of events compared to what could be written on the page. If you want that story to hit with maximum impact, there's yet fewer good choices.
The problem with this is that you're presuming a specific, fixed story. But absent a statement from the author you have no direct knowledge of the set of possible variations over the story the author might have considered. Some outline in great detail, but that just introduces a step of regression. Others let the story unfold from nothing. For my part, I recursively iterate until I have about 1 line per 1k-2k words. At that point I've somewhat constrained myself, and so there won't be 4000 word digressions, but there sure as hell can be and are multiple paragraphs that I hadn't thought about and that just ends up there without any particular purpose because it felt right when I wrote it.
Back to the point: You won't know whether a given section was a result of that, or was something deeply meaningful to me without asking. You can speculate, and you're of course free to do that.
> OK, so--- you detest hidden and layered meanings, and assert your writing doesn't have many. That's OK, but assuming that this is representative of most literature isn't valid.
This, to me, is an illustration of why you can't presume to know the authors intent, as you here infer an intent behind my words that was not there. It's not strange - I did not elaborate. But it does show how easy it is to think you know the intent behind something and miss it.
To start with, I don't assume that this is representative of most literature. Nowhere did I say it was. That's an inference you made without support in what I wrote. I do assume that given there is a significant number of works for which this is true, and statements where it is true even in works for which it is not for the work as a whole, there is no reliable basis for drawing conclusions about the intent of the author unless they've spoken about it.
That does not mean you can't present possible interpretations and discuss those, of course. The two are entirely orthogonal. It doesn't matter what Golding intended with the pigs as long as it can be read in a given way, to bring it back, and you can discuss to what extent it contributes to the readers interpretation. That remains possible whether or not Golding just happened to be eating bacon when he wrote it or planned it out.
I also did not say that I detest hidden and layered meanings. I said that I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about it and "encouraging [making unsupported guesses]". What I meant was not that there can't be purpose, and layered purpose behind decisions, but I don't like it when it appears the writer is intentionally trying to make it hard to get at the intent of a passage in ways which encourages overwrought interpretations or leave people hanging.
To take a concrete example, in my novels one of the characters have had her eyes replaced by artificial eyes. On purpose. It serves a direct and very overt purpose in the story in that it allows for abilities that are used and directly impacts the plot. As such there's a very obvious surface purpose there. I'll concede that in those cases there's a case to insist people can know my purpose, because there's a direct causal link to the plot.
But for my own part I also liked adding them rather than e.g. giving her wearable tech to achieve the same purpose because I hate wearing glasses and love the idea of being able to use tech to replace the need entirely. So there's a hidden meaning there to me, but not one I've dropped hints about in the text. I don't object to writers doing that at all, as it doesn't affect me as a reader.
If I do feel the urge to reveal that purpose in the text, however, I'll be direct about it rather than drop hints. I won't have her react negatively to someone wearing glasses or talk about how annoying it must be, or otherwise be coy about it by implying there's another layer to that choice but leave the reader hanging. I'll have her give someone that as reason for having made her change. I might well do that at some point. I fully get that some people love it when the writing is all mysterious and the writer isn't giving up their secrets. For my part I find that just about as annoying as if they'd ended a book on a cliffhanger. I want to dive into the reasons and what lies beneath them, not be stuck speculating because the author refuses to tell me after they've teased it by dropping hints. If you prefer the mystery that's fine, that's your choice. To me it feels lazy - you avoid having to find ways of giving an answer without it being contrived or disappointing. This does also tend to make me dislike symbolism embedded in works that are external to the work and can't really be revealed "in world" because it feels gratuitous.
> For most books, sure! But -why- is it a compelling read?
The why is separate from the writers intent. So we're back to my purpose with my initial response on this thread: I don't object to people exploring why it's a compelling read at all. On the contrary. What I object to is the idea you know the authors intent. By all means, explore why it's a compelling read.
> As Chekhov said -- "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Every word is a chance to create tension and to play with readers' expectations for what may happen next-- and then fulfill or subvert these expectations. Good literature does this a lot.
I find it fascinating that you first give this Chekov quote here and then argue for subverting expectations after a quote that tells you explicitly to excluding objects unless you're prepared to meet the expectations their presence creates. For my part, I strongly disagree with Chekov there. I get the why - it creates a strong focus on the story. If you want that, then it's the right thing to do. But to me it leaves the resulting worlds cold and barren in a way that strips it of interest to me. I want to know about all of the details that do not matter to the story but tells me about the world and creates an atmosphere. A book where a rifle on the wall means it will be used, to me is one stripped of wonder and mystery.
> This can be a beautiful thing. Reading Mending Wall by Frost, and all of his ambiguity --- wait, does the author like walls or not, and why won't he tell me? Realizing that the first couple sentences were talking about frost not liking a wall was a pure hidden delight. Perhaps this was an accident, but I doubt it... and the meaning's there whether he intended it or not.
You don't need to know or claim to know the writers intent to be able to take delight in that. You're free to imagine whatever interpretation you choose. I'm not arguing you shouldn't. I'm arguing against assuming you know the writers intent, and only that. I used to write a lot of poetry, and more than once ended up in arguments with people who claimed to have found some hidden meaning I'd supposedly inserted. I had to explain to them that I had no objections to them finding those meanings in it, but those were not mine, they were theirs. That's not at all to say that others don't insert all kinds of hidden meanings in what they write, but I would not presume to know, that's all.