Accept the Reader’s Authority Over Interpretation

Practice. Keep an interpretations ledger for one Work, in about an hour plus the time the readers take. Ask a reader who has not discussed the Work with you what it is about, and write down the answer without correcting it. Ask a second if you can. Then list three readings the Work supports that you did not intend, and mark each as supported by a pattern of choices in the text, merely compatible with the text, or unsupported by it. Beside each, decide whether to welcome it, revise to open or close it, or leave it. Beside any reading you would rather not have, write the line of the text that produced it. The result is a short list with a decision beside every line, and perhaps one revision.

In a foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien took up a persistent assumption, that the book was an allegory of its century. He answered that he cordially disliked allegory and preferred history, true or feigned, because history can be applied to the thought and experience of readers in many ways. Allegory, he says, lies in “the purposed domination of the author,” and applicability in “the freedom of the reader.” Denying that he intended any allegory, he keeps the right to say what he meant and gives up the right to say what the book may be applied to.

An author can instead play proprietor of meaning, correcting readers in public and treating each unintended reading as a theft, or abdicate on the grounds that readers decide and so nothing the book does is the author’s concern. Control of interpretation moves to readers, and responsibility for the text stays with the author. A published text is a fixed set of words meeting readers whose histories the author doesn’t share, and the author’s knowledge doesn’t travel with the book unless it is on the page.

That authority stops where the text does, so a reading that requires ignoring what is on the page is not an interpretation the Work supports. It also stops at fact. In nonfiction a reader may disagree with an argument, but can’t make a false claim true by reading it generously, and a writer who has misquoted someone can’t say the text means otherwise (Practice 77). Nor does it remove the author’s duty to respond. If many readers find harm the author didn’t intend, a stereotype for instance, “that is not what I meant” is not an answer. The remedy is often a revision in a later edition (Chapter 8), not a rebuttal.