system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The author is the final authority on any of his or her stories and the only true interpretation is the one they intended

I often hear sentiments like "every story can be interpreted a thousand different ways", implying that any and all interpretations of a given work are equally valid. As a writer, I wholeheartedly disagree with that. 


If I were to write a story about wizards trapped on a rock in space, and a reader interprets it as them being stuck in limbo after dying tragically while that wasn't my intention, their theory is simply wrong and holds no water. They either just misread my story or didn't like it and decided to change it up so that they'd be able to stomach it better.


Similarly, if I wrote a poem about jazz and 99% of my readers interpreted it as an allegory for suicide instead, that still wouldn't be the correct interpretation. It would mean that I failed at conveying my theme to my audience and that I need to do a better job next time. If people called the allegory brilliant and declared me a genius, it would be dishonest for me to accept their praise. 


I find it disrespectful to the author and the hard work they put into their writing when fans insist that their story means something that it doesn't. Of course speculation about literature and its intended meaning is integral to certain college classes and a pass-time for some (i.e. in a book club). I don't think that there's anything wrong with that, but I do believe that the goal of literary discussion should be to figure out what the author meant rather than what the reader wants a work to stand for. 


I have dropped an English lit class before because the teacher was into the whole "La mort de l'auteur" thing and I felt like I wasn't going to learn anything from him that semester. He'd encourage students to interpret classical novels as an allegory for social media, for instance, and I found it ridiculous and unhelpful. It was just make-belief and it didn't teach us any of the actual morals and themes hat the authors of the past had so carefully crafted and labored over, and put bits of their being into. It was disrespectful.
gpt
This approach always strikes me as kind of shallow as it relies on an understanding of literature that is deeply fixed and doesn't allow for any emergence or accidental brilliance to come out in the work or in people's individual relationship with the work.

This approach also denies analysis to huge portions of works where we have no understanding of the author or the social context of the work especially if works don't have one clear author. How are we to analyse the works of Sappho of Lesbos or the Epic of Gilgamesh or Beowulf or a huge number of oral storytelling traditions if we are limited to just the author?