ruined by interpretation

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Originally Posted by varnish7

Personally, I've never had too much use for overanalyzing a book. AFAIC, if an author is writing a novel because he wants to make some sort of statement, that statement is going to be fairly obvious. I realize that in some places and times, a writer couldn't just say straight out that the church or the government was corrupt or anything like that with impunity. However, it seems like they would try to make their point fairly obvious.

I just don't like it when someone will twist every single word to uncover some hidden meaning to a novel. In high school, we read Grapes of Wrath, and apparently the minister or whoever he was is a "Christ" figure because his initials were "J.C." and he ended up getting killed. Maybe Steinbeck really intended it that way, but I find it hard to believe that anyone would actually do that on purpose.

Another thing I didn't like is when we were studying Shakespeare in high school and college. The teacher once spent an entire class going over the first scene of Hamlet where the guards are changing shifts and saying "hi" to each other. She kept interrupting every other line for analysis. It just really distracted from the play. I mean, just because it's Shakespeare doesn't mean that every line has to have a deep profound meaning. Weren't Shakespeare's plays aimed at the illiterate masses? I mean, it's this or watching a public execution. I can understand that Shakespeare might have included some inside jokes or hidden messages or whatever. But would his plays have really strained the mental limits of someone watching or reading them when they first came out?

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With all due respect I think you are missing much of the point. The meaning doesn't lie with the author, but the reader. It is far from being about the author inserting hidden codes within a work. It is much more about the reader-critic arguing for a particular positon or series of positions within a text or texts.

If you read the thread through maybe we covered that the first time.

I think it is wrong to say the meaning lies with the reader. It also lies with the author, even because the author is also a reader, writing is a form of reading, but I will not wander so far from here.
Anyways, literature (or art) all happens inside a communicative context, so the creator do give a meaning also, now, the multiple readers are not obligated to understand or be limited by this meaning. It is necessary creation while reading, otherwise the artistic experience will be lost.
Also, we have to mention that for real using words for communication is trully impossible. We can not write exactly what we are thinking, so everything I said was blablabla...

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Originally Posted by Neely

With all due respect I think you are missing much of the point. The meaning doesn't lie with the author, but the reader. It is far from being about the author inserting hidden codes within a work. It is much more about the reader-critic arguing for a particular positon or series of positions within a text or texts.

If you read the thread through maybe we covered that the first time.

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OK, I can understand what you're saying. I have no problem with the reader-critic believing that the author is trying to make a particular point and then using the author's work as evidence of that point. I just don't like it when people try to find some deep hidden meaning in every single aspect of a piece of literature. I mean, it's one thing to say that "I think the author is trying to get across this idea, and that might explain why he, say, named a character what he did." It's another to say that "I wonder why the author chose this name for a character. I'm sure there's some deep literary significance to it that I can find if I analyze the work enough."

Here's what I wrote earlier, which I still stand by:

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Originally Posted by Neely

I don't believe that any piece of literature can be over-analysed to the point that it ruins the work itself. Different points of analysis are merely different viewpoints that can be taken or leaven at the door.

The only way that an analysis can possibly be harmful is if a teacher/critic argues that a piece has only one possible meaning, or restricts the free interpretation of a work of art for their students. Either way this is trying to reduce the art, and the students' appreciation of it, which is simply a fault of the teacher/critic and not of the object of analysis itself.

There is no such thing as over-analysing literature.

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You are perfectly free to disagree with any interpretation which someone makes regarding minute details of a text, but it doesn't make that interpretation wrong. Writing is vastly more complex than we can ever give credit to. "Hidden meaning" as you allude to, is far from something which the author slots into the text like a cryptic crossword, literature doesn't work that way, it's far more complex and can't be reduced to "what does the author mean?" Writing takes on its own life, free from the construction of the text and the author who wrote it.

Authors can intend something and then realise it's metamorphosised into something else. In one of the plays I wrote, I wrote a character intending for him to be enigmatic and able to have anybody he wanted- a power he didn't use because of his moral scruples. But when I looked back on it, I realised he was puritanical and disgusted by all that attention- possibly from a repressed desire for a colleague. A reader could read it either way; if the character was unambiguous, the assertion that he's attractive to most people he meets wouldn't hold up.

the literature teachers were all women and fell into two categories:young women looking for a husband or old maids. I was completely turned off from reading any literature for a number of years. I imagine that the teaching quality of high-school teachers has not improved much. But if you are analyzing books, that is more than I had. The teachers filled their class time with mediocre pursuits, such as having each class member memorize a section, then repeating it to the class as they stood in front of the class.

I never plan on reading Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm again. Thanks, 10th grade Honors Class!