Death of the Author basically then?
Not entirely. The biographical and contextual information about an author is important; its their intentions that are less so. Subtext has a lot to do with who an author is, but not what they say it means (because what they say it means and what the combination of the text and the author's context reveal are often two very different things) Tolkien insisted to his dying day that The Lord of the Rings was not meant to be in any way allegorical to the Great War and Second World War and their toll and losses incurred, yet arguments are routinely and quit successfully made that the books are indeed allegorical in practice, and that has much to do with Tolkien's personal life experiences.
I'm skeptical that literary critics writing after the fact, viewing an author's work through their own attitudes and biases, can determine the true meaning of an author's work more accurately than the author themselves can.
Why shouldn't they be able to? I'm speaking here as someone firmly in the author camp.
I'm not denying that authors might have written some works under certain subconscious influences, or made certain logical/writing errors which crippled their works' intended messages, which they were not conscious of while writing. I suppose I also won't deny that some later literary critics might discover those influences or errors, and therefore be able to undermine the coherence of the work's thematic argument, or relate the events of the work to historical or contemporary circumstances in a way which the original writer did not intend. If the author's attempt to promote theme X was flawed/hypocritical/incoherent, then it is more academically valid to point out that their argument was flawed because they missed point Y/contradicted their own theme with event Z (not to start a debate on this, but, say, any modern JRPG/anime where the protagonists achieve their goals through constant use of violence, even though the work itself narratively promotes a message of peace and understanding.) Such a less-ambitious attempt to prove that a work has failed at conveying its intended message, or can be viewed differently in regards to contemporary events, is (while not always accurate) easier to academically substantiate and constructively debate than a statement that a work was
really saying something else entirely.
What I do object to, though, is the death-of-the-author idea; that later critics' own subtextual interpretations of a particular work are as valid, or even more valid, than the theme/themes which the writer themselves was trying to convey in the work. Given a sufficiently complex work of fiction, any particular critic can form numerous different personal "subtextual" interpretations of it, inevitably derived from their own preconceptions and biases. Without a highly specific and objective standard for literary analysis (something which the modern academic community certainly does not try to establish), it is difficult for any one critic to prove that their own analysis is more or less accurate than the analysis of any other critic working in the same milieu of subtextual criticism; hence, discussion of subtext will likely descend into unresolvable arguments like this thread's debate over the meaning and artistic integrity of Bioshock Infinite. When literary discussion has left the common ground of the work's plain text behind in a search for subtext, all debaters involved will be forced to fall back on "subtextual" connections which only they and like-minded individuals can see, and academic consensus becomes impossible. If one critic says that Shakespeare's
Tempest is really about, say, colonialism, even if Shakespeare probably never intended to write anything of that sort, then they will find it difficult to convincingly refute someone who says that it's really about, oh, feminism. Hence, modern subtextual analyses are only "true/accurate/meaningful" to their own proponents, so the whole field of subtextual criticism is decidedly solipsist and impermanent. Such broad subtextual interpretations are merely one individual or group's attempt to derive
their own meaning from a particular work of fiction, and cannot be said to be
the meaning of that particular work of fiction, especially if the author was trying to say something else entirely in their work.
If you are quite willing to give people a wide range of subtextual latitude in interpreting your own writing, I'll respect that. However, I, for one, can say that I'd be irritated if I wrote a story that was plainly about (say) the nature of justice and personal relationships, as I took pains to thematically convey through the writing and gameplay, and some literary critic then came along and said that, "no, it's REALLY about supply-side economics, and my opinion is as valid or more valid than yours is, even though you wrote it and say that it's about justice and personal relationships, even though you can plainly back that up from the text."
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I understand that subtextual interpretation is popular on the internet, and criticism of subtextual interpretation less so, but I thought I'd share my $.02 here.
