Comment by snet0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snet0 | Hacker News Reader

I hate this sentiment. The book isn't "about" a thing in particular, neither does it "mean" any specific thing. It may have been written with some ideas in mind, and there may even be overt indications as to those ideas. Everyone has their own relationship with each and every piece of art, and may sometimes choose to include the artist and/or their intentions, but may also choose to exclude them.

The article even discusses certain readers' developing relationship over time! The book hasn't changed, the text is static. Even within a person, the understanding of the text is fluid. To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!

A certain subculture of online males have fallen in love with Patrick Bateman. Now some of them might not have read or watched American Psycho, so to say they misunderstand the art is nonsense as they haven't actually seen it. For those that have and still choose to worship the obviously awful character, I see a lot of people say they haven't "understood" the film/book. They have! They just disagree with author's own interpretation!

I don’t agree. Yes, every work of art is open to interpretation, but that interpretation has to be informed by the art. There has to be supporting evidence and you have to consume the art holistically.

You can’t, for insurance, conclude that the meaning of The Princess Bride is that Sicilians are dangerous when death is on the line by focusing solely on a single character’s words, ignoring the fact that he is outwitted and dies, and ignoring that the book is primarily not focused on that character. I mean, you can; but then you definitely haven’t understood the film/book.

> To say it could possibly be misunderstood is to say that there is a wrong way of understanding, but clearly there are at least multiple correct - or at least not incorrect - understandings!

There are multiple correct understandings but there are also understandings that are completely incorrect, no? You’re saying any interpretation is valid, even ones that are clearly nonsensical?

At some point we have to bound our terms, obviously if someone interprets The Great Gatsby to be making commentary on interplanetary space travel they are incorrect but if someone was to interpret The Great Gatsby as containing some meaningful commentary that can be related to interplanetary space travel, that is within reason.

If your definition of "interpretation" involves making claims about the author or empirical details, it is clear you can be incorrect. Otherwise, I think everything else is permissible.

If the meaning of the book and the intention of the author diverges then the author has done a bad job.

If you can interpret a book however you want, what's the point of reading? I can just reject the author's intended meaning and substitute my own, but I can do that without reading at all, so why bother?

This is essentially why I didn’t do English Lit at uni (which had been my initial thought).

Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.

In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.

I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?

I mean the fact is that it's easy to fake because the permissible space of interpretation is almost infinite. That will always be the case, and the only thing people demonstrate when they create fake analyses is that they can't be bothered engaging with the art honestly. That's fine, but it's no mark against the interpretation of art.

The real question is: who are you fooling? In a field where there's no right answer, the only person being fooled by you avoiding an honest reading is yourself. If you can make the right noises to trick someone into thinking you've considered the story, why not expose yourself to art and actually consider the story?

I don't think you believe this, honestly.

The point, in my view, of art is to form personal relationships with the artwork. I can read Notes From Underground with no background on the era or the author, and pass my own judgements on the characters. I can read the thoughts of the Underground Man and feel them in any which way that strikes me. The point isn't that Dostoevsky is telling me something, rather he has presented an opportunity for me to explore something I've not explored before. How guided and directed that exploration is remains mostly in the hands of the author, but sometimes all it takes is a presentation of a character and the rest of the work is the reader trying to integrate that character into their own worldview.

The most boring art is the art where the author stands next to it and describes what it's about. That's the art where I think "what's the point of reading": the author has summarised the intent of his work, presented the canonical reading and disparaged other readings. You might as well just have the intent summarised on a post-it.

The most powerful art can be the most "meaningless", the art where most of the work is by the reader, searching for connections between what's on the paper and what's in their head. Have you never spent hours with a poem or piece of music, and each retread sparks some new attachment to an experience or feeling? Perhaps the author never even considered their work to relate to how you related to your friends as a child, but I see it as totally wrong to claim that either you or the author have erred in that reading.

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