Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Understanding authorial interpretation
Magnetic characterization
Character, setting, and types of stories
Authorial interpretation sounds a little complex, and it is. But like many complicated things, it’s important and worth learning about.
DEFINITION
Authorial interpretation is the act of the author writing with an intent that can be identified within his or her work.
For a while now, people who write about literature, called critical theorists, have argued that the author’s particular interpretation is irrelevant to understanding a piece of literature. In other words, for the purposes of discussion, who is right about how the text ought to be interpreted and what subtexts are engaged within the story: the reader or the author?
That’s a tough question and one for which there might not be a definitive answer. But just as an example, I’ll give you take on it: I happen to believe I am the authority on my experience of writing the novel and what my intentions were during the writing process. However, I am not a unique authority on how a reader reads and interprets the text.
Every reader has his or her specialized experience of reading and thereby interacting with the text. If I hear that experience described, I might believe it profound and sophisticated, wrong-headed and simplistic, or something in between. But I’m not in control of the reading experience.
Beyond actual factual errors, I can’t “correct” a reading experience, nor would I want to. A book, like a child, has its own life after it leaves my hands. For me, that’s one of the great charms of writing: that people interact with my books unmediated by me. However, I do remain the authority about my experience of writing my books.
Over the years, I’ve seen many discussions dealing with potential differences between the author’s view of his or her own work, and the reader’s reading of it. And unfortunately, I’ve dealt with it firsthand.
When my historical novel Confederado was published, it was met by many positive reviews and only one negative assessment. However, the negative account was so damning and dismissive of the novel that the editor of the magazine in which it appeared actually contacted me to write a response. The very person who was publishing the review felt it was unfair enough to merit input from the author.
Now, out of legal concerns, I won’t include the negative review or reviewer’s name here, but I will include my response, which combats his points based on what I knew about my book as its author.
Upon receiving the recently published review of Confederado, the editor of SLR, indicating that aspects of the novel may have been overlooked or misinterpreted, contacted me with a request to compose a response. I was happy to do so. However, I would preface my remarks with the general assertion that, having authored a number of reviews myself, the art of reviewing is a deceptively difficult genre of writing. The reviewer brings with her or him, unconsciously or not, her or his own tastes, agendas, and pet-peeves, which—depending on the reviewer—conspire, a little or a lot, to alter the undertaking less into a consideration of the presented fictional world and more into a looking glass which offers back the reviewer’s own predispositions. This review of Confederado constitutes an example of such a phenomenon.
The review begins with a complimentary formal analysis not unlike what one might encounter in a creative writing workshop. Yet the reviewer proceeds to assert that the “power” of the writing, reminiscent of Faulkner, comes at the price of fully-realized characterization. Already, then, we have encountered a fundamental interpretive problem: one cannot generally compare the writing to that of Faulkner—a novelist lauded for his rich characterizations—while also asserting that it suffers from a lack of characterization
The review then performs an additional remove from the southern modernist Faulkner, speculating that the novel is based on nineteenth-century southern romances which make it “overly didactic.” Yet, before doing so, the review establishes the book’s concerns as connected to the “Global South, an approach to southern literature that tries to develop a broader sense of what regional difference might mean in the U.S. and beyond.” It is as if, instead of composing a coherent argument regarding the novel, the reviewer is more interested in advertising, in fragmented bits and pieces, his knowledge of southern literature. By the review’s third paragraph, it has been asserted the book simultaneously possesses modernist Faulknerian writing, qualities of didactic nineteenth-century romance novels, and a shared conceptual concern with contemporary southern literary criticism. However, any relationships between these tropes remain unarticulated.
Things get worse. The reviewer proceeds to identify the former slave who treats the protagonist upon his return from the war as a “loyal black mammy” and criticizes her “elevated syntax and diction.” As the back cover of the novel states, the book is based on a true family story. The author did not make up the fact that this former slave stayed with the protagonist’s family, aided in his convalescence, and was made literate with the assistance of the family. Yet the reviewer seems to prefer and insist upon an uneducated “mammy,” dismissing her speech as “improbable” and appropriating her presence as a symbolic opportunity for the narrator to offer an “apologist” position on slavery. It seems a sad state of affairs that almost half a century after the publication of Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner a white author may not offer a characterization of a former slave—and a laudable one at that—without inviting tired, worn-out arguments and criticism from backward-looking individuals.
The reviewer continues to find fault with the narrative once it moves to Brazil, the chief objections being wanting characterization (again), comparisons of Brazilian people and culture to those of the American South, and the protagonist’s killing of an anaconda as a symbol of his general superiority to his Brazilian peers. While the characterization issue already has been discussed, the comparison dynamic seems altogether unavoidable. After all, how is the protagonist supposed to interpret his new surroundings other than against his previous background, regardless of what and where that might have been? As for the killing of the anaconda, the reviewer might simply consider background again: while the hunting party is made up almost entirely of the local sons of civilian farmers, the protagonist is a four-year war veteran nonplussed by physical violence and very adept at, well, killing. The reviewer goes on to compare the protagonist’s hunting success to “St. George slays the dragon,” and here it is worth pointing out that throughout the review all of the reviewer’s comparisons are to western and white American literature: Faulkner, Virgil, St. George. In a novel which contains not so subtle references to several well-known African-American and Brazilian works, the reviewer’s inability to detect any of them demonstrates a pronounced lack of multicultural reading background, a general Eurocentric literary sensibility, and a willful determination to have the book fit a predetermined conservative white southern framework.
In the concluding paragraph, the reviewer muses, “Were this novel about the thorny moral question surrounding Reconstruction policy or even a realistic attempt to understand the psychological position of those southerners who chose to emigrate, it would be fair to ask readers to suspend certain disbeliefs.” On the contrary, that the disbeliefs of this reviewer are largely self-manufactured rather than gleaned from the book at hand constitutes the prime reason for the review’s almost complete failure as a useful document. Gazing into the mirror of the novel, the reviewer has offered up his own means and bases for interpretation. And it is not a pretty picture.
Admittedly, the mirror association and last sentence are pretty hard-hitting, but then this reviewer essentially was trying to label me a racist and Confederate apologist. I believe my own position was validated by the fact that the reviewer never responded to my points; that was the end of it.
A good reader and reviewer who is evaluating work they did not create often deploys words like seems or appears in order to make it clear they’re only speculating, whether they’re lauding the work or pointing out problems that arise because of the imperfection of the craft. In other words, a good critic never imputes motive where he can’t actually know. Unfortunately, though, it happens quite a bit, often with an attitude of mocking cleverness and/or snide superiority.
Often I read interpretations of books that have little to do with the book and more to do with the filter the individual critic is reading through. Indeed, many professional critics build their reputations on such grounds. This doesn’t mean the reader cannot or should not find such interpretations in a text; I think texts are mutable things within the framework of reading. But it also doesn’t mean that any given reader is always more right than the writer, or more right than another reader who sees something different in the text. Just as writers might bring unexamined assumptions and defaults to a text, so might readers.
So if I say X was my intent in writing Y, then X was my intent. If the reader doesn’t see X, or sees Z instead, that doesn’t change my intent, although it might call into question my craft, or my ability to bring across to readers what my intentions were. But what if Reader 1 sees X while Reader 2 sees Z? Is one reader right and the other wrong? Who decides?
Ultimately, as a creative writer, you have to pursue your vision, not one mediated through the reactions of others. Yet at the same time, you have to be able to hear and listen to voices that challenge your understanding of received wisdom. Sometimes they can help you. The goal, after all, is to bring as clear, extensive, and undistorted a view as you can to the thing you want to tell.