I think you’re contradicting yourself a little bit there, Little Nemo. If there are meanings that the author is unaware of (subconscious or otherwise), how is the reader not creating their own meaning by reading the book and seeing them?
It’s generally accepted in criticism that the viewer’s perspective is valid as long as they can back it up with elements of the work. You don’t have to view it as the original or commonly accepted meaning to the story, and I think you should be able to find some valid interpretations as a bit laughable. You are, after all, the critic of their criticisms.
I’m a big fan of Reader-response theory for a number of reasons, but I think the central one is, if I read a book and get meaning X from it, but the guy who wrote it intended meaning Y, which one of us has failed? Am I an idiot for not seeing the “right” meaning in the book? Or is the author incompetent for not creating something that communicates his meaning clearly? And what happens when there’s a work of art I like, and the artist supplies a meaning to it that I don’t care for? Am I obligated to stop liking the work, because the “real” meaning is something I think is stupid, even though I’ve got a personal interpretation that I enjoy quite a bit?
I also appreciate the universalness of the theory. If meaning is only imputed by the author, than the pool of artwork that we can actually know the meaning of is vanishingly small, and includes only authors for whom we have extensive biographical information, or are still living. If there’s only one true meaning to a work of art, and it’s the one intended by the author, why ever study Shakespeare? We can’t ever get the “right” answer, because the only person who knew the right answer died half a millenia ago. If there’s a right answer that we can’t possibly know, what’s the point of asking the question? And if there is a value in talking about a work of art where we can’t know the “right” answer, then why do we need to know the “right” answer to discuss works where the answer is available? If we can talk about Shakespeare without having Shakespeare around to explain his work, can we not also talk about, say, Stephen King, without bothering to have him explain his work?
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If you can make a good argument, supporting it with the text, then that interpretation is valid. Laughing at that is no better than laughing at a scientist or mathematician.
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Because literary interpretation is open to many arguable conclusions while science and math tend to only have one correct interpretation.
Hey, would you mind if I did a quick edit on your post to make it clear that I didn’t say the second thing? Because right now, it looks like you’re attributing both quotes to me.
My point is that when you read a book, you’re bringing your own experiences into the reading. The cross product between what the author said through the book and your experiences is what creates the meaning of the book for you. But that meaning is created in your mind not in the book.
And the meaning in your mind doesn’t transfer back into the book. A book isn’t transformed by you reading it. The book says the exact same thing after you read it as it did before you read it. Books can change readers; readers cannot change books.
And you can say the same thing about movies. Just because some people think the movie is some extended metaphor for the Black experience, doesn’t mean that it is.
The problem with “out of the jungle” is that, well, that’s where gorillas live. You don’t have arctic gorillas or desert gorillas or the gorillas of the Great Plains. So, if you use a gorilla, anyone can say “Out of Africa, see? Just like African slaves were out of Africa!” and there isn’t much getting around it. Heck, Skull Island is located near Indonesia and people still say “Yeah, but gorillas are from Africa, so…” Per Wiki:
I don’t know if the creators picked that location to separate it from Africa or (much more likely) they picked it because it sounded sufficiently exotic and adventurous. But if they HAD intended King Kong to be an allegory for slavery, wouldn’t it have made more sense to set his capture in or near Africa?
Interesting theory, but it does little to explain why, for a time in the 60’s, comic books with apes on the cover would always see a not insignificant increase in sales. Surely people had seen gorillas by that point.
Saying king kong is not about race and interracial relationships is like saying planet of the apes is just a commentary on futuristic chimpanzee society.
Saying that King Kong is about race is like saying Racing Stripes is an allegory about slavery and race relations because the zebra (from AFRICA!) was abandoned by the circus (post-Civil War relations) wanted to run but the white man was trying to keep him down so the European Thoroughbred horses wouldn’t have their racing (“racial”?) purity threatened by his African presence. Meanwhile, the zebra struggles with his own identity (black & white?) trying to stay true to his African roots while competing in a white man’s game.
I agree. In a pretty clever bit of in-joke meta movie geek display: the stage presentation of Kong in captivity is preceded by a dramatization of how he was captured. The sets and costumes are exactly like the 1933 version (and nothing like what we saw earlier); and the music the orchestra is playing is the 1933 soundtrack.