Because I can’t resist commenting on the on-topic hijack: yes, anyone can consume art any way they want, but, considering there is text in the Magician’s Nephew that depends upon the reader being familiar with earlier published works, reading it first is the “wrong” or “unintended” approach.
You can read the chapters in a book in any order that works for you, but you are likely going to make the text less coherent. If the intent was for folks to read Magician’s Nephew first, it means there’s some really bad and incoherent writing in Magician’s Nephew.
And, in cases like this, I’d say the author’s stated opinion after the fact is more than irrelevant. If the author intended folks to read book 5 before book 1, they would have published them in that order. Unless they’re willing to say “actually, no one should buy or read my first book because it’s intended to be read after a book I’m publishing three years from now.”
STEM tends to be based on reality, where there is an objective right answer. But fiction is different. The only fact in fiction is what’s written on the page. Everything else is just interpretation of one type or another. Literature is about making good, well supported arguments using that text, along with various frameworks.
There are frameworks which elevate the author’s intent above all else. Others look at the author’s history and psychology to figure out what they meant deep down, at a subconscious level. But most frameworks are more interested in the text itself, and how it fits in with other ideas.
In literature, ideas are generally considered more important than people.
But, consider with a statement from the author about intent, doesn’t that supersede a third party interpretation?
Author: This is a story about my dog dying, and how it made me feel sad.
Critic: This story is about your unrealized romantic feelings for your mother, and her denying you became a dog dying.
Author: No, I’m sure its about a real dog. His name was Rusty. He died. I was sad.
What a story is about is not necessarily the same thing as what a story was inspired by. And if by “story” you mean fiction, a story is not an account of something the author actually felt or experienced, though it may well have its origin in the author’s own experience.
If the Critic in your little dialogue has some strong evidence for their claim, they may very well be at least partly right, even if the author denies it.
A guy invents a machine and shows it to you. He says it’s an automatic lemon juicer. You put a lemon in and turn it on, and instead of juicing the lemon, it sets it on fire and yeets it through your kitchen window. The inventor insists its a lemon juicer. You point out that, regardless of his intention, what he’s actually made it a flaming lemon yeeter.
Which of you is right? More significantly, if a third party is in the market for a lemon juicer, which description of the machine is more important for them to hear?
Critic: Well, for a story about a dog, you spend a lot of time describing what your mom’s tits look like.
Sometimes authors will say things in jest about their own works and the public will take them way too seriously.
For example, Bryan Adams was asked about “Summer of 69”, and he made a joking comment that it wasn’t about the year, but about the sexual position. But people have gone on to believe that’s for real. C’mon, people.
I don’t quite agree with this. An author can later make a work that they think is better read before an existing work. But they would need to write it in such a way that it would work without reading the first book. Sure, this means this experience is impossible for those who had read the first book before the other came out, but humans are very good at pretending. You can go back and deliberately try to look at it from the other perspective.
They still can’t control how the reader reads the books. Maybe they’ll decide the other order is better. Heck, maybe that will be the consensus of most readers familiar with the work. But I don’t see any inherent reason an author can’t write a book with the intent that it be read before another book they’ve already written.
There’s a difference between “This is what I wrote this about” and “This is what this means”
So much of this debate is about the fuzziness around the word “meaning” and “about”.
In your example, the critic could/should take the author’s word that their intent was to write about the simple dead dog-sad scenario.
However, people are not always self-aware about every thing they do. Sometimes the outside perspective can be wildly wrong, but other times it can see clearly things that we ourselves deny.
So, maybe there is some validity to the perspective that, to that critic, the story reads as they have said. However, it doesn’t mean that they’ve uncovered something that is true. It’s just their perspective.
Or take “miles to go before I sleep”. Frost didn’t intend for that to reference death. But it’s totally legitimate for a reader to imbue those words with that meaning. Or not. They are neither right nor wrong. The poem can be about death, even if Frost did not write about death. Again, the fuzziness of the word “about”. Can something be “about” something that a creator did not intend for it to be “about”? What does “about” even mean?
All that tells you is what the author is thinking when he wrote it, not necessarily what the reader would get out of it when reading it. And literature is all about the reader’s interpretation. Works in literature last much longer than the author, after all. There are many readers of a work, and one or a few authors.
Since none of it is objective reality—it’s fiction after all—why should the one author’s opinion override all the readers who see it differently?
It’s no different than when people argue that someone’s opinion in real life is not well backed by the facts (thus calling it “wrong.”) The same can happen with an author, saying that what they see as the meaning of the work is not well backed by the text of said work. At the end of the day, only the text of the work is “factual.” Everything else is interpretation.
Fair enough. I agree with that- but I don’t feel like that’s what we’re talking about in this C.S. Lewis example. The Magician’s Nephew assumes knowledge from The Lion . . . If Lewis’ intent was for The Magician’s Nephew to be read first, he did a really awful job of writing that book.
And, for me, this question is about intent. In your example, it’s reasonable for the author to state “I wrote this book for people to read before my earlier one.” It’s not reasonable for the author to state “I wrote the original book for people to read after the newer one.”
Right. I didn’t disagree with that part of your post. Just that it would be theoretically possible.
The text of The Magician’s Nephew definitely seems to assume the reader is familiar with Narnia and at least the first written book of the series. Lewis did not seem to write it with the idea that people would read Nephew first, even if he is okay with people reading it in that order.
Though, again, it’s not entirely clear what Lewis meant by “your chronological order.” Maybe the kid’s order was actually the chronological order the books were written in.
Author (to critic): I bet you think the Eye of Sauron looks like your mom’s vagina, don’t you?
Sometime, a critical analysis says more about the critic’s subconscious than the author’s.
It’s not that simple. You’re removing the author from the equation. You’re minimizing the author’s work. All that time they spent perfecting it, getting exactly the turn of phrase they wanted, making sure the metaphors were prefect, then along comes a scholar that says, “no, you’re really writing about the free coinage of silver!” The critic/scholar is presenting themselves as having a better understanding of the work than the author! Talk about ego.
Yes, some works aren’t absolute; they can represent the author’s unconsciousness. Interpretation is possible. But some really are about “a dog dying”.
Indeed - that mean kid, telling Lewis he published his books in the wrong order. Fortunately, there are critics and scholars to defend Lewis’ original vision.
I’m not an academic at all - I’m just amused that people are overinterpreting a letter to a child fan who was asking about rereading the books and deciding that Lewis was making a global statement about how everyone should read the books for the first time. That is what aeems like a bizarre ivory tower interpretation to me - to take an offhand comment hyperseriously instead of looking at how Lewis actually wrote his books.
If you proclaimed yourself an expert, I would look upon it askance. However, if you have a question about C. S. Lewis, or Ugaritic literature, or zombie fiction, you would look to someone who has read it (+ other requisite material; these works were not created in a vacuum)
If you accept the idea that a critics subconscious can influence a critic’s writing, why are you so adamant that an author’s subconscious can’t do the same?
It’s worth pointing out that the whole “The Wizard of Oz is an allegory for the Populism movement!” wasn’t conceived by a literary critic. It was the invention of Harry Littlefield, a Columbia-trained historian who was teaching high school students at the time. From what I can tell, it wasn’t conceived as a literary theory originally, so much as a teaching aide to understand early 20th century American politics - Littlefield distributed the original to his history students, not to an English class. It’s not a theory that has much currency among actual literary critics.
No, it is that simple at the end of the day–when you look at what is, rather than what you think should be. Readers will read the work, and interpret it how based on their own experiences. They may take the author’s opinion into account, but they also may not. They may not even know what the author thinks. Yet their interpretation will affect them. And multiple people agreeing will affect society.
If you limit things to only what the author thinks, you greatly limit the ability to study those things, both of which are key parts of the study literature. What the author meant doesn’t ultimately decide how a work is viewed in actual practice. It never has.
It has nothing at all to do with ego, at all. The ego would be the author assuming they have the right to control how other people read their work. The ego is in making the author a God who cannot be questioned. The scholars are the ones who democratize the meaning, making it based on how people interpreted it, not some almighty author declaring how you must engage with their fiction.
It honestly seems like “Death of the Author” was not well taught in schools. Hell, I’m actually wondering if literature itself was well taught. Too many seem to be taught that there is a single correct view of the text, and not that the goal was to make the best case.
There’s a reason why literature uses essays. All essays (even ones on literature) are persuasive arguments. It’s always about making the better argument, not declaring something to be true because one person said it.
