These past couple of days, we've been looking at some fairly abstract art and seemingly harmless short stories and delving into them for a deeper understanding of their hidden meanings. This brings up a point that I've considered before, but never in any great amount of detail: do authors and artists intend half (or even any) of the interpretations people take from their work? When I was a kid I loved The Hobbit because I thought Tolkien had come up with an extraordinary, captivating story with a cutesy, sugary coating. After rereading it a month ago, I realized how meaningful the morals and lessons of the story really are.
So the question is: which came first, the story or the moral? That's obviously left up to the author, but what if people take more meaning from stories than was originally intended? It makes it seem like the majority of the lessons we've learned were actually derived from our own subconcious. I guess that just goes to show the importance of literature. Without it, we wouldn't know half the things we already know.
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6 comments:
It seems like this topic gets discussed over and over, and no one ever finds the actual answer.
Well, personally I think that at the beginning of the story, the author has some ideas about what he or she wants the reader to get out of it. As he or she writes, these ideas change, shift, and evolve as the story (or art) takes shape. In the end, the author sometimes has the message he or she started with and sometimes doesn't. I think for the most part, the author does know the meanings of the story that the reader will find...but then again, the readers' ideas can be crazy (ex: our college lit. class).
You have a very good insight on what has been going on overall in college lit. It seems to me that your high intlect allows you to dig a little deeper and actually notice some of the nuances of the class.
I've often pondered this whilst trying to come up with my own ideas for novels. It seems that when I try to create narrative for the sake of narrative it comes out as derivative and bland. However, if you begin with a theme or moral to base something around, you'd be surprised what kind of original ideas you can come up with. For whatever reason it seems that plot resonates more abstractly if the author takes the moral before the story. In other words, most good stories do begin the themes and morals thought out first. That way, you don't get a crime fighting Golden Retriever as your central plot point (to be extreme).
the story is made up first, 100% of the time, don't ask why I know... I just do.
That's an awesome idea to look at. It has crossed my mind before but only fleetingly because the subject has no answer i'm pretty sure. Without the insight of the author there is no way of knowing. Good topic that's a great topic to think about.
I totally just went off on a tangent about this in my latest blog. I feel that people always tend to look for a deeper meaning, especially when they don't truly understand the point of the story. It's like, if you can label it and categorize it, the story becomes "safe" and you can tuck it away in the corner of your closet, knowing that you have found a point. Honestly though, I think that for the most part people are just trying to tell a good, entertaining story. Yeah, you'll run into some morals, but they'll always be pretty obvious. This whole "going deeper bit" is fun to play around with, but I don't think that people should take it so seriously.
Why can't people just accept a story as a story and nothing more?
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