I’ve been thinking recently about the concept of the death of the author, along with the broadly related concepts of prescriptivism versus descriptivism, headcanons, and to what extent authors have the right to their own work.

So as you can probably see from the menu above, I have written some poetry. And my dilemma is this: I want to explain what I meant when I wrote the poems. I feel it is important to me that my thoughts are out there. But I also want them to stand as they are. That too is important to me. And then that got me thinking – if I state my analysis of my own poetry, to what extent does that discredit other people’s analyses? If someone else sees something in my poetry that they appreciate, and I didn’t consciously intend for it to be in there, are they somehow wrong for having found it?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, I plan on answering them.

I am drawn to a conversation I once had with somebody, who told me how ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was an allegory for WWII, and who had some rather convincing arguments. Later I found out that ‘The Lord of the Rings’, although its first volume was published in 1954, was to a large extent, planned and written before the end of that war. In fact, I can directly quote Tolkien’s beliefs on this matter. This passage is from his Foreword to the Second Edition, as follows:

“As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical… The crucial chapter, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, is one of the oldest parts of the tale. It was written long before the foreshadow of 1939 had yet become a threat of inevitable disaster, and from that point the story would have developed along essentially the same lines, if that disaster had been averted.”

So the question remains: was this person wrong?

To paraphrase the great Reverend Lovejoy, the long answer is ‘no’, with a ‘but’.

Allow me a brief diversion. I am a very large ‘Harry Potter’ fan. I am very much not a ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ fan. By no means do I consider it canon – as far as I am concerned, Voldemort never had a daughter, and Time-Turners do not work that way. Furthermore, I am reticent about a lot of the extra details J.K. Rowling has released on Pottermore. Specifically, she mentioned how Dumbledore retrieved the Mirror of Erised from the Room of Requirement. This is contradicted in the book series, where Dumbledore implied that he was unaware of the room while talking to Igor Karkaroff. While there are ways to circumvent this contradiction, I can’t say I’m happy with any of them.

So now a new question emerges: Am I wrong? What is my belief about the canon of Harry Potter worth in comparison to J.K. Rowling’s?

Or how about language? I strive to be grammatically correct, because I enjoy grammar. I strive to distinguish between ‘who’ and ‘whom’, for example. But I know that most other people don’t. And I know that many people don’t believe that you should start a sentence with a conjunction, as I am so fond of doing. But I do. Here are some more examples, and you can probably see which ones I tend to side with based purely on what I’ve been doing throughout this post.

With all this in mind, let me come back to my answers to those questions I asked earlier. Allow me to briefly quote Tolkien again, from the same Foreword:

“I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader,and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

I can certainly sympathise with Tolkien to an extent here – there is something to be said for writing something with the intent of allowing the reader to form their own interpretations of the work. But I also sympathise with those who intend a specific interpretation of a work; ‘Animal Farm’ is a pretty direct and intended satire of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist Soviet Union, and another interpretation of that book is almost certainly going to be in some way inferior. And to give some food for thought, Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ is often interpreted as being about censorship, but Bradbury himself has stated that he intended it to be about the decline of literature with the rise of mass media. So who is right?

Here then is my answer, and allow me to paraphrase the aforementioned ‘Animal Farm’:

ALL ANALYSES ARE EQUAL, BUT SOME ANALYSES ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

I believe that, generally, an author’s analysis is just as valid as the next person’s, but all other things being equal, the author’s analysis should be given some more credence until proven otherwise – one should probably trust an author to be an expert on their own work, after all. But, there’s room for a headcanon as well as canon, there’s room for applicability as well as allegory, there’s room to walk that pragmatic line between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and there’s room between subjectivity and objectivity for just a little ambijectivity.

I will be placing my notes on my poetry somewhere on this site – where, I haven’t quite decided yet. They will not, however, be on the same page as the actual poetry. I will not force my interpretation of my poetry on anybody else.