I can’t find the link, but some student wrote a ton of famous authors asking if they intended their hidden meanings in the novels they wrote. I want to say Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to write back and basically said, “Hell no.”
Not sure on the details, but I’d love if someone could dig up the link for that story. I read it on reddit a few months ago.
It was college creative writing class; I thought my professor was full of it. So I wrote a short poem, and made every line so obscure that it made no sense at all. If I thought some smart guy could interpret any one line as allegory or meaningful, I rewrote it some more.
I can only remember one line, the final one, which was Among the leaves in the kitchen,
I sat down to observe the race.
I showed it to my prof, who read it over quite thoughtfully. When I asked him for a critique, he said, “It’s about sex, right?”
Isn’t that more or less the same process that resulted in “I Am the Walrus”?
Creative Writing classes were the worst! You could spot the pretentious weirdos from 100 yards away. This one guy I knew didn’t capitalization and for his final short story just pasted together a few descriptive writing exercises and called it a day. I still remember part of it:
*The chair sits empty in the room. This morning’s breakfast sits uneaten upon the table. The hitchhikers come upon the diner on the cold Monday evening. [five more pages of blah blah blah]
The chair is still empty.*
The professor thought it was so insightful, it infuriated me.
The professor is clearly not a New Yorker, because any New Yorker can tell you that a Three-l lllama is a big fire in Brooklyn.
That play infuriates me. It is always taught to high school freshmen, because they are supposed to relate to the teenage love story angle, and at the same time, the students are being sent to workshops and convocations telling them that suicide is “not the answer.” (No matter what the question is.)
Unless, apparently, you are being kept from your one, true love, whom you can’t live without. (really need that eyeroll) The kids ought to be reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream instead, or else, told what R&J is really about, which is the wastefulness of grudges. Romeo and Juliet didn’t die for the sake of true love-- they were victims of their parents’ hubris.
Grumble…grumble, rant.
Ha! That’s a good one. Did anyone pipe up and point out that we don’t get to [del]see Olivia Hussey’s breasts for a split second[/del] read about Romeo and Juliet having sex until after they’re married?
I’ve had English teachers who were delighted to get a paper proposing a completely goofy interpretation, as long as it was somewhat reasonably supported and entertainingly written. They’d read the same trite babble so many times that getting something weird was a relief. On the other hand, I’ve had a couple of English teachers who took offense if you dared deviate from the Holy Writ…which was generally whatever interpretation they picked up in college. To be fair, they usually didn’t openly mark it against you in your grade, contenting themselves with snide comments.
For what the anecdote’s worth, the dogmatic teachers were in small, rural schools and were dogmatic about pretty much everything in their lives. The ones who enjoyed oddball papers were mostly college professors, though one of my high school teachers liked them as well.
Different people have different hang-ups.
Nash was wrong, of course. A three-l lllama would be one hell of a big fire. 
pounds cochrane to a pulp
No! It’s about the dangers of doing things secretly and lying all the time. Every sit-com every written is also about the same thing. Just tell everyone your intentions and life will be uneventful and humorless.
William Faulkner wrote in run on sentences capping his career with many sales of books dropping a job as a postmaster eventually winning a Nobel Prize for literature.
Bingo. I can’t answer for everyone else but my English teacher described R&J as “stupid teenagers” prone to making rash, irrevocable, and ultimately fatal decisions.
I’m married to one, so… yes. 
When I feel like getting her goat I expound on my theory that there are certain books that are practical jokes. They only exist so English teachers can claim they are classics, but are actually terrible. These include The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, and Last of the Mohicans. I suspect nobody has actually read them in full because they are so awful.
I remember I had a Shakespeare class as a freshman and I asked the Professor why the families were feuding, she said in all her years of teaching nobody had ever asked that.
Gatsby, at least, is the greatest American novel of its time and I reread it regularly, including this year.
Huck Finn is the greatest American novel of its time. I had to read it in the 8th grade, 11th grade, and Freshman year in college. It was a different book each time. It would be a different book if I read it today.
The problem with exposing children to great literature is that great literature has depths and complications that children have no way of fathoming. It’s great when and if any book they’re assigned resonates with them, but not having one do so says nothing at all about the book.
This is really the same issue as what’s being discussed above. It’s trivially true that authors put meaning, themes, allusions, analogies, commentaries, and symbolism into their books. What’s not as apparent is that readers come to these books with a mixture of culturally imparted understanding of meaning along with a filter based on the totality of their personal experiences and understandings. Humans are a pattern-making people and being a story-telling people is a subset of that. We want stories to make sense and we will read them in ways that produces sense even if we have to force them to do so. Those ways may not be at all what the writer intended, but it’s equally true that no writers can see patterns outside their own lives. Musicat may have tried to make each line of a poem meaningless, but who’s to say that the words picked didn’t fall into a pattern meaningful to a different sensibility.
Trying not to fall into the trap of saying that therefore anything goes and any reading of any text is equally valid is the hard part. Creating the argument that convinces others is a skill like any other; some people have it and some don’t, just like writing ability. Not all writing is equal or equally deep either. Prose criticism is a deep field, but like philosophy or physics you can choose to live without it and not miss anything.
This is true. For instance, we read Moby Dick in high school. I had never read the Bible (still haven’t) so I wasn’t familiar with the Biblical Ishmael. If I was, I might have better understood why that’s the name of Melville’s narrator.
Oh yes, yes!
You’re obviously part of the conspiracy.
To my high school English teachers, every character in every novel who did anything at all out of the ordinary was gay. No matter what the conventional interpretation of a passage is, the subtext was always “homo-eroticism”. If a man shakes another man’s hand, its because he wants to jump his bones. If a man punches another man, it’s because he wants to jump his bones and his self-denial is making him lash out. If you could work some of that into your reports, it was cruise control to good grades.
I always did well in high school English but never took literature at a university level. I also did well at debating. Overall I was good at bullshitting.
Saying that “any interpretation is valid as long as you can support it” doesn’t really absolve the subject. To me that rather uncomfortably confuses the objective and the subjective.
Either you want to know what the text really means, in which case any post-modern “the author is dead” position must be rejected (since really, authorial intent is surely the only objective measure), or you’re more interested in subjective response, in which case evidence and argument are unnecessary. Why should anyone have to prove their own subjective response? You can’t say someone’s subjective response isn’t well supported, since subjectivity, by definition, needs no rational basis.
Still, if you’re clever enough, any interpretation for any text can be supported. All you need is sophistry.