Reddit mentions of Validity in Interpretation

Oh, I don't think that the author has any privileged vantage point themselves - I agree that, once written, a work is out there and the author has the same interpretive weight as anyone else. I think that the relevance of an author's life depends on the kinds of questions you ask and, as I mentioned, isn't always relevant to the same degree.

If Dostoyevsky's books are psychologically accurate because he spent time in prison, then it clearly would not be the case that they would be as accurate if he had not. Do you have to know he spent time in prison for them to be accurate? No. But of course the events of his life allowed him to write the way he did - how could they not?

The writer's motivations are absolutely inaccessible - even to the writer after the fact - but the relevance of a writer's life and times does not begin and end with motivation. The importance of a writer's life and context has more to do with developing a more informed perspective than the exact one the writer had. Knowing that Dostoyevsky spent time in prison lends a deeper understanding to his writing. Similarly, knowing that the moon is made of rock because of samples brought back from expeditions has more weight than saying it's made of rock because it looks like it - and especially more so than saying it's made of cheese, and my opinion is just as valid as your rock idea.

I'm familiar with the 'Death of the Author' camp, and I don't agree with it - I guess that's obvious. I'm of the view that a work, as an artifact, can have better or worse interpretations grounded by research: it's silly to say that every interpretation is equally valid. That view, so far as I'm concerned, is the result of an general obsession across many liberal arts studies with relativism. That a generalization and an oversimplification, but that's the meat of it.

For a good criticism of 'Death of the Author', and an example of where I'm coming from, Hirsch has a great book, Validity in Interpretation.

I'm not saying you should by any means rush to buy it, I only want to posit that I'm not just pulling shit out of my ass. I don't expect to convince you, but I think the topic is an interesting one.

Part Two:

> [...]but that does NOT necessarily mean that (a) the author knows what his text means, (b) that the text ends up meaning what the author intended it to mean, (c) that the proper task of interpretation should be to discover the author's meaning, rather than the significance of a text for its reader, or (d) that we can even reliably ascertain what an author meant in the first place.

I think that (a) is largely correct. After the fact of writing, the author (much less the reader) cannot enter the psychological state they were in while writing. Likewise, that psychological state is not the same as what is written, so (b) is correct because everything going on in the author's head could not be written. The act of writing is by definition an act of exclusion: an author chooses certain constructions which necessarily exclude other possible constructions.

(C) The proper task of interpretation is, in fact, to discover the author's meaning. Again, within the realm of probability. Any written words must mean something determinate, and the only possible determinate meaning that the words can represent is the author's meaning. However, your difficulty is in equating an author's verbal meaning with his psychological mental state at the time of writing: I have already described why these are not the same. This is where your conflation of interpretation (meaning) and criticism (significance) is particularly apparent, and it is simply an imprecise use of the terms - which was popularized in the literary world (and for good reason because it was at the time replacing an illegitimate theory that what was important was the psychological state of the author (re: romanticism), but that's another conversation).

If the meaning of a text is its significance as understood by a reader, then a text can have no determinate meaning whatsoever and we fall into relativism. Any understanding of meaning as significance (instead of informing significance) will lead to any interpretation being just as probable as any other. There would be no point to literary criticism - and perhaps no point to writing in general. What makes examples of criticism better or worse is their ability to successfully understand the significance of a text as interpreted: but if there was not a shared interpretation, there would be no grounds to evaluate any criticism.

(c) would be correct, I think, if instead of "interpretation" you said "criticism". Criticism, indeed, is something beyond the verbal meaning of a text, and it is certainly the significance of a text for a reader. But that criticism must be pointing at something - and that something is the interpretation of meaning.

(D) We can reliably ascertain what an author meant (that is: we can reach a most probable account of meaning). Whenever criticism is published it implicitly presumes a concrete and shared understanding of a text which is then evaluated. You and I know that we're looking at the same box, which is the only way that we could have a conversation about our divergent perspectives of it. The question must be asked, how exactly can we reliably ascertain what an author meant?

I already began to answer this question above, but I'll add a few additional points of clarification here. All verbal meaning is necessarily communicable. Even though there are countless unreachable psychological states in an author's mind when he writes, we are dealing with a text - not with the author's mind. As soon as words are written in a particular way, they define a certain area of meaning. A further understanding of context (sentences around the one in question, the author's other works, trends at the time, whatever is available to us) gives us a clearer and more defined view of what the written words probably mean. Given that the meaning we're concerned with is verbal (communicable) then it is far more likely that a reader can achieve an accurate interpretation than that a reader cannot: this gives us a framework to judge how more or less probable a given interpretation is.

To deal with the subject in its entirety, I'd have to write a book. Luckily, there has already been a book written on it - and it's the best example I've come across (as well as the description I'm relying on) of the understanding of literary criticism. Comparatively, I've done a poor job here, and if you are interested in literary criticism, you should read it.

That said, I agree entirely with your final paragraph. Although I have described here a particular way of looking at literary studies and criticism generally, the questions I'm trying to define and answer are far more complicated than they may seem here. I just want to point to a couple things therein before I save my reply.

> As some others have said, there is not necessarily any one right way to interpret a work of literature, but there are more or less good ways to do it.

I think given my understanding of interpretation, and the idea that it necessarily lies within the realm of probability as opposed to certainty, this point has even more weight.

> For starters, a good reader will use his intellect to recognize that the question of authorial intention and literary meaning is a complicated question, not easily resolved or dismissed.

Absolutely. Even when we have a 'most probable' sense of the meaning of a text, new information can change that meaning - and thus displace criticism relying on it. This is, in part, why it is so important to try and include as much information as possible when interpreting a text: if, as has been popular, we rely exclusively on textual evidence and ignore all non-textual evidence we run the risk of misinterpreting a text (and the more we look at it, the more certain we will be of our misinterpretation). Hirsch gives an excellent example of this in his book [linked above] (albeit a bit long) that I'm willing to type up if you're interested. It's an example of how we might evaluate two divergent examples of criticism regarding Wordsworth's A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal based on the interpretation of meaning.

> I hope this post has helped to unpack some of those complications, if not to refute the fact that the curtains are indeed blue.

Indeed, while my project here was to try and point to certain flaws I see in your post, it is nonetheless an excellent one. Hopefully my own has helped unpack some of these problems even more.