Dear Dr K,
I enjoy reading short stories and poems in my English class, but I am annoyed that we are tested on them afterwards. Not only does this reduce my enjoyment of the story or poem we are being tested on, I find it very annoying that we are supposed to provide the answers that the teacher or some guide book has given us. How do they know what the author meant? Very often I am quite sure that the author meant something entirely different. Is there a way to find out the true meaning of a piece of literature?
Intenn Shun Dear Intenn,
Isaac Asimov once wrote a story in which Shakespeare came back to life in the present day, and failed a college course about his own work. It’s a very plausible story, aside from Shakespeare coming back to life. What is true is that so much has been written about his plays and poems that it would be pointless to ask what he really meant by anything he wrote. And the fact is, we can’t ask him what he really meant because, despite Asimov’s flights of fancy, Shakespeare died long ago and never came back to life.
So Shakespeare is long gone, but what about the authors who are still alive? Surely we can ask them what they mean by the things they wrote. Whenever the author is alive, you have an easy solution: simply copy the questions in your textbook or question paper, and mail them to the authors themselves, and have them answer the question. Then, when the teacher offers you an answer that you disagree with, just produce the answers that you got from the authors as proof that your teacher is wrong.
The trouble with this, however, is that you may not always (or ever) get the author to reply to your questions, even if you do somehow manage to find their email or physical address. If you happen to surmount this difficulty, another problem is that it would be unfair to the dead authors that only the living ones get to defend their work from the interpretations of your English teacher.
In order to face these challenges, a French fellow called Roland Barthes wrote an essay titled The Death of the Author, in which he says, that the author of every text is dead as soon as the text is written. But how can this be, you might ask, most authors write several texts, surely they do not die after each one? Yes, well the essay suggests only that we consider the author to be dead, so that they do not have any role in explaining the story or the poem to us. Once it is written, it is entirely up to the reader to decide what meaning to imbue it with. What this means is that you have every right as a reader to hold your own interpretation of a text, irrespective of what the author may have intended. Unfortunately, this also means that your teachers have the same right, and you cannot dispute their interpretation.
So the next time you have an English exam, feel free to offer your own interpretations. But keep in mind that if your teacher disagrees, you will get a zero and Barthes has nothing to say about that.
Yours questionably,
Dr K