A recent Facebook post asked the question, does the meaning of a book belong to the reader or the author. This is very much the kind of debate about Literature that students should be trained to engage with. The following is exactly the kind of objective that I think students of Literature should be regularly engaging with.
Let’s use the tricks of AI to explore how people responded to the question. Firstly, we broke down the three possible types of responses:
A Quantitative Review
We can take a review of the number of respondents that align with either response, though there is also the third category of people who feel both statements are true (and also a fourth category of comments that were of no use because they were ‘meta’ or ‘comedic’).
Coding Rules Used:
Category a) Reader – The comment explicitly states or strongly implies:
- meaning belongs to the reader
- interpretation is determined by the reader
- authorial intent is irrelevant or secondary
- references to Barthes, Jauss, Wimsatt & Beardsley, etc., in a reader‑centred way
Category b) – Writer The comment explicitly states or strongly implies:
- meaning belongs to the author
- authorial intent determines meaning
- reader interpretation is secondary or incorrect
- writer is “paramount”
Category c) Both – The comment explicitly states or strongly implies:
- shared meaning
- dual ownership
- author has intent but reader interprets
- meaning emerges between text and reader
- “both” stated directly
Quantitative Summary
| Category | Count | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| a) Reader | 15 | 20.5% |
| b) Writer | 7 | 9.6% |
| c) Both | 57 | 78.1% |
Qualitative Observations
There is an element of the ‘both’ category however that notes how a Reader Response or an Authorial Intent are mutually exclusive reading perspectives. Many of the respondents use the ‘versus’ language; intent vs interpretation, author imagines vs reader animates, authorship vs misunderstanding, author invocation vs reader participation. These position the role of the reader in two distinct and immutable camps.
Most of the respondents in camp ‘both’ seem to recognise a binary opposition in the two positions.
Conclusions
These ‘critics’ are aware of the way texts form meanings, but when these critics respond that the writer alone is the creator of meaning, fewest of all agree. If stance c) awards both the reader and writer equal status, and stance b) is half of stance a), then the writer is given the least authority overall. This question would be interesting if done via a poll that forces respondents to choose writer or reader, splitting stance c) into one or the other. The data above suggests that two thirds of stance c) would assign the reader ultimate authority in meaning-making.
Evaluation
And then I came across this video clip by The Good Liars. It shows a man at a political rally with a shirt that makes a political statement (MAGA) within a cultural sign system (Star Wars typography and lore – Dark = dark side of the Force). He is asked to explain the connection between the political affiliation and the lore being called upon. It is worth placing side by side with an authorial discussion of the dark side from George Lucas himself:
The Good Liars ask; is the Dark Side, the Galactic Empire, a force for good or bad? The genocide of eradicating planets – good or bad? The response is ‘hard to say’ and ‘depends on the planet’. The ‘reader’ seems to be making a case that there are occasions when totalitarian authority and genocide can be justified. This morality is placed within the container of a MAGA shirt, as if there are parallels between the authoritarianism of the dark side and the authoritarianism of the MAGA movement. If the reader chooses to interpret MAGA authoritarianism as a force for good, then mirror images such as the dark side of the force must also be a force for good.
But this isn’t what George Lucas wants us to leave his lore thinking. His authorial intent is to show that selfishness and selflessness are two sides of a valid coin, but both need to be in balance with one another. If selfishness comes to outweigh selflessness, the holder comes to be overwhelmed with anger and regret.
I suspect that Lucas would not like readers to take away from Star Wars that the Sith are somehow the good guys because the planets being destroyed qualified for destruction. The Dark Side is the end awful consequence of imbalance, not a moderate act that must be undertaken to create balance.
I end with this thought. What makes a text literary is often that the social and political observations are valuable to a moderate, stable and equitable society. Texts that fail in this liberal agenda (Literature is one of the Liberal Arts of course) don’t meet the entry requirement to be considered literary. Literature tells us something valuable to learn from, and the author is more than merely a writer. The author is a social commentor, a philosopher, a sociologist, a psychologist. Stories that do not add value to society, people and politics in ways that free and empower, are denied access into the pulpit of Literature.
Sometimes, the reader’s intuition or bias needs to be strongly mediated by the authorial intent. Liberal texts are not to be used in ways that can undermine the enlightenment project.
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