Learning to Unlock Texts: On authorial intent

We have, finally, reached the conclusion of this series of reflections about textual analysis. Thank you all for coming on this journey with me for my longest series yet! You can read earlier instalments here if you missed out: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.

One of the questions that pops up continuously during analysis is “what is the author saying here?” Seemingly simple, but often very difficult to answer with much confidence. Creative writing is rarely direct, and interpretation never truly universal. Plenty of works of fiction have been assigned multiple contradictory meanings: George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has been decried for being both pro- and anti-communist, and Shakespeare’s Henry V could either be staged as war propaganda (as Laurence Olivier did) or as a critique of war (as per Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation). Even when authors think they’re being clear about their stance on a topic readers will presume otherwise—the number of people who genuinely thought that Vladimir Nabokov glorified pedophilia in Lolita shocked and dismayed the poor man, and the misconception continues to this day. Except for the occasional cases where an author explicitly states what they wanted to say in their work about a particular topic, we have little to no way of knowing for sure what their intention was. That’s why analytical skills and strong arguments are so important in studying literature; they allow us to pick out the most plausible messages and ideas in the text. This situation does, however, leave plenty of room for competing theories.