Isn’t Ode to Billie Joe the classic example of this genre?
Despite Bobbie Gentry being on record many times saying that what Billie Joe threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge was a both a MacGuffin and completely irrelevant to the point of the song, people still insist on making up their own stories and then insisting that their story is the “real” explanation and that Bobbie G is lying about there not actually being one.
I reAd a meat article awhile back about a kid some time ago who wrote famous authors and asked hem if the intended the deeper meanings that others had found in their books. I think on Vonnegut wrote him back. He petty much said “hell no”.
Anyone find it?
“Sometimes a hat is just a hat.”
When I voiced a similar opinion to my friends regarding Pan’s Labyrinth, my friends jumped all over me. :eek: I think they really wanted some kind of happy ending after all that trauma.
However, if they’d watched The Orphanage (exec. produced by del Toro) they would know that things do not always end happily in his movies…
I’m surprised that the ending for Pacific Rim was so upbeat, actually (even though some characters did die).
I thought the overlying statement he made with his works with Cicciolina was something about Art vs Porn, but his underlying statement was that he had a big dick and a hot, porn star wife.
My wife believes that Freud ruined everything by making people too self-conscious about how people interpret their work. Not like the glory days before Freud, when people unconsciously threw the door wide on their subconciousness. Daddy issues much, Louisa May Alcott? However, working toward a deadline can push ones super-ego aside and allow the id to fly free. More fun for the interpreter and more embarrassed and BS denials for the creator.
I have to admit, I don’t actually know the difference between the technical meaning and the common meaning of “allegory.”
I would tend to believe Jeff Koons when he says that there are no underlying statements in his work. There aren’t any superficial statements either. Or any other kinds of statements. He’s simply a thieving huckster with a talent for self-promotion.
“Yeah, doc, but you’re the one showing me all the dirty pictures!”
It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but is there a reason for believing Pan’s Labyrinth to be a psychological drama rather than a fantasy genre film? If there was a significant hint dropped by the director, I didn’t catch it.
If there’s no major hint, and if the director says he intended it as a fantasy film, then viewing the girl’s adventures as coping strategies seems a bit odd.
I’m pretty confident that the majority of people who claim that the song is about an LSD trip have never taken LSD.
You found me out.
Yeah, it’s more like an opium dream, ala Kublai Khan.
In the commentary in the film Fantasia preceding “The Nutcracker Suite” it is stated that “it’s amazing how often a creator is wrong about his work”, leading into Tchaikovsky hating “The Nutcracker”. I’m not sure how true that is, but certainly ba lot of authors have been annoyed with or disparaging of some of their most popular works, often precisely because they were popular.
Arthur Conan Doyle pretty famously disliked Sherlock Holmes, and thought it was keeping people away from what he thought was his better and more important work, like The White Company. He even killed Holmes off, with great relish. But he had to bring him back, and continued writing his asdventures for years. It wasn’t just the cash, I’m sure – Doyle had other successful works. He genuinely seemed to feel an obligation to keep writying the stuff in answer to public expectation (kinda like George R. R. Martin now,. with Game of THrones)
Similarly, Gellett Burgess hated his poem “THe Purple Cow”, to the point of writing hs own poetic put-down of it. Isaac Asimov reputedly hated being told that Nightfall was his best work. Alec Guiness came to loathe Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I can understand exasperation with being pigeon-holed, but when that turns to disparagement of one’s own work, the artist is certainly wrong – there’s a reason people like it in the first place.
Asimov was proud of the fame of the story - he was irritated (as I recall) that people praised the paragraph that Campbell added to the story (the paragraph that mentions Earth) as an example of Asimov’s lyrical ability.
He was proud of the fame, but I understand he was miffed that people were calling something he wrote as a teenager “his best work”
Yeah, that too.
ETA: Not quite a teenager - “Nightfall” was published when he was 21.
Exhibit A. (Scroll down to “MULTICOLORED ARGYLE SEA.”)
Reminds me of this exchange in Dylan’s 1969 Rolling Stone interview:
I don’t think Dylan is being sly; he has genuinely forgotten that he already used that phrase in “From a Buick 6” (“I need a dump truck, baby, to unload my head”). The interviewer was presumably quoting him in the first place.
Published when he was (probably*) 21. From my own experience, it takes many months to get these into print. My recollection, which might be mistaken, is that the “when I was a teenager” line came from Asimov himself, but his memory of his age might be off by a few months, too.
*Wikipedia shows his birth date to be nebulously defined.
In “I, Asimov” Asimov notes the exact date when Campbell gave him the idea for the story, which was March 17, 1941 (Asimov had a diary that included that kind of detail). But, all nitpicking aside, your original point stands - it was doubtless annoying for Asimov to be told that a story he wrote as a callow youth was his best ever.
Ah, I think there’s been a miscommunication–I misunderstood what you were trying to imply when you said “Derrida is dead.”
The view that texts have no intrinsic meaning by no means guarantees the author is correct about what he says about the text–to the contrary, if the text has no intrinsic meaning, the author is just as wrong as everybody else when he or she tries to interpret what they wrote.
In my view, since all the meaning in Heinlein’s text comes from its readers, Heinlein himself doesn’t get to be authoritative about its meaning.