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On the blue curtain question. Think of reading as like directing a Shakespeare play. Each performance is different and modern performances would be nothing like those staged in Shakespeare's era. That's because the director (or the reader who reads a book) brings their own experience and context to the text. As in Reader Response theory: the reader writes. A text only exists in the act of its being interpreted
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You're right: the idea that an author holds a secret which we try to guess is simplistic. I used to write sample pieces for students as part of creative writing to demonstrate this (because they had the "author" in the classroom, so we could overcome that part of the issue)
Students invariably interpreted my writing in ways I didn't expect. It was great
that piece was inspired by a similar experience - someone read something i wrote and had an interpretation i hadn't thought of at all, but that struck me as equally valid
Fascinating article and conversation! I've had similar experiences. Funnily enough, interpretation of spiritual texts (i.e.: the field of "hermeneutics") actually discourages people from reading their own meaning into passages ("eisegesis") versus trying to understand what the author was attempting to convey specifically ("exegesis").
Where it gets really interesting is when considering how personal approach and social application relate. Is it a story with layer upon layer of metaphor or is it intended to be a legal framework that people live by? What if it is both simultaneously? These questions are not always easily answered.
The interplay between author's intention and the reader's personal experience is such a fascinating topic, and it always seems like there's something new to be said about it. Two ideas that come to mind from a literary theory course I took are (1) Foucault's author function, where he replaces the author with something more abstract,
and (2) wolfgang iser's theory that the world in the readers mind comes into existence precisely when there are gaps in the author's text. I.e. the power of fiction is completely derived from its subjectivity and openness to interpretation.
References for anyone interested: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Foucault_Author.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/468316
I find the foucault essay kind of hard to follow, but it was very influential. Iser's perspective was very memorable to me and has been a big influence on how I think about both reading and writing
if i recall correctly i was inspired by something i read in the "polemical introduction" of frye's "anatomy of criticism" while on 3 cups of coffee. can't promise anyone else will be able to find what i did in it, though. still have to go back and finish the rest sometime too.
Think I've found it - from Frye: "The absurd quantum formula of criticism, the assertion that the critic should confine himself to 'getting out' of a poem exactly what the poet may vaguely be assumed to have been aware of 'putting in', is one of the many slovenly illiteracies that the absence of systematic criticism has allowed to grow up . . .
". . . That is, the critic is assumed to have no conceptual framework: it is simply his job to make a poem into which a poet has diligently stuffed a specific number of beauties or effects, and complacently extract them one by one, like his prototype Little Jack Horner."