Zoe Halpern argues that any interpretation is valid
It is impossible to read a novel without interpreting it. Reading is not a passive activity but an active engagement with the text. Each and every reader brings his or her unique perspective, background, education, heritage and culture to the text. This allows the reader not just to have their beliefs confirmed but also challenged. Moreover, it makes for interesting discussion and debate between readers of the same piece.
Franz Kafka’s stories are a testament to the importance of the reader’s interpretation. His absurdist images invite the reader to explore and speculate. For instance, his best-known work The Metamorphosis, about a man who wakes up and is curiously transformed into an insect-like creature. This event, and the story surrounding it could be interpreted religiously, autobiographically, psychologically, anthropologically or nihilistically.
The array of interpretations is what makes Kafka timeless. While giving preference to the reader’s interpretation liberates a novel, prioritising the author’s intent imposes limits. Either a single author’s view or a many-voiced readership can be highlighted. On the one hand, advocating that the reader should simply take the author’s opinion unquestioningly encourages them to be less creative and critical. However, encouraging the reader to interpret, enables them to enquire, decode, and analyse. As a result, one’s ideas are facilitated in maturing and developing. For example, what makes Life of Pi, so compelling is that the author, Yann Martel, explicitly states that the reader should interpret his novel as they want. The book ends, leaving you to wonder whether the whole tale was literal or allegorical.
What is more, the author themselves may be unaware of some of the symbolism within their own novels. In Literary Theory and Criticism, Patricia Waugh writes that literature is “fundamentally entwined with the psyche”. This idea bears resemblance to Freud’s dream interpretation. This involves a subject’s dream consisting of a series of surreal, seemingly unintelligible images being decrypted by a specialist. In the case of interpreting literature, the author becomes the patient, while the reader plays the psychoanalyst. This approach allows the reader a fascinating window into the human psyche.
The value of reader interpretation doesn’t just hold true for novels but for theatre, film, music and art alike. The reader encounters the world of the fiction, not the world of the author. Giving the author total jurisdiction over their novel quells the reader’s analysis, and stops reading being fun. As Roland Barthes says in Death of the Author, “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination”.
Rebecca Cowper believes that books are often misunderstood
I have always found it strange that people seem obsessed with trying to interpret books in new, and frankly sometimes just plainly incorrect, ways. I spent most of English GCSE wondering why To Kill a Mockingbird was suddenly being said to represent everything from Bible passages to McCarthyism.
Harper Lee herself is famous for not choosing to comment on interpretations of her sole novel, apart from when she stated that “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honour and conduct”. Or, in other words, why over-complicate interpreting something that is really quite a simple message about respect and being a good person? Of course you can argue that the most important person in relation to any book is the reader, so their interpretation can never be wrong. But how about when the author categorically states that an interpretation is nothing to do with what they intended?
Take The Lord of the Rings for example. J.R.R. Tolkien was known to be strongly anti-Stalinist, calling him “that bloodthirsty old murderer”. As a result, people seemed to think he couldn’t possibly write books about elves and dwarves without this having a deeper anti-Communist message. Why this should be the case is beyond me, particularly since Tolkien himself stated that “Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought.”
This isn’t the only interpretation that Tolkien has rebuked. At different points he counteracted claims that The Lord of the Rings was anti-Nazi, with Sauron representing Hitler, and that the One Ring was an allegory for the Atomic Bomb.
Most recently, with the release of the Lord of the Rings films and the rise of eco-criticism, in conjunction with increasing awareness of global warming, it’s the interpretations of The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for man’s reckless destruction of the environment that I’m not arguing that any sort of deeper meaning is wrong, or that straying at all from what the author originally intended is misinterpretation. I’m simply saying that there is a possibility of misinterpretation sometimes.have been circulating. Whilst there are several passages that place an emphasis on the purity of nature, global warming was not a concept when Tolkien was writing the books.
If I suddenly announced that the Very Hungry Caterpillar was conveying a message about the development of capitalism, I’m fairly sure people would tell me I was reading far too much into a really good children’s book. Therefore I don’t see why there can’t be misinterpretation when it comes to slightly more complicated novels, just because it is supposedly always down to the reader.