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Borges: The author's "claims for what he meant should not be an impediment to others' interpretation." Sandra Day O'Connor, is that you?????

The author's "claims for what he meant should not be an impediment to others' interpretation." Sandra Day O'Connor, is that you?????

Fiction is filled with contingencies. If you write a 3 page short story about you and your family having breakfast you will reveal all sorts of things about yourself and your family that you had no intention of revealing. It's not avoidable. Noone involved with those 1950s Sci Fi movies thought they were making Cold War Parables. But that's exactly what they were doing. You can't help but be informed by yoru cultural references. Look at how many interpretations of Hamlet there are. Do you think Shakespeare intended all of them? No way. The oft repeated saw that 'the Prince has sexual feelings for his mother' seems like it's been around forever but only goes back to post Freudians. to give two obvious examples,

1. Milton wrote 'Paradise Lost' to justify God and his moral law to humans. However, since the late 18th century the poem has been read with Satan as the hero. He's simply a much more interesting character than God is. Milton's imagination was with evil whether he liked it or not. Blake and P.B. Shelley (who was an atheist and would have probably been a commie had he lived longer) thought so.

2. Dostoevsky was a Russian Orthodox Pan-Slavic kook who thought Catholicism was a false faith and 'those Jews' are always up to no good. 'The Grand Inquisitor' was an attack on the Catholic Church. His depictions of various nihilists were meant to scare people away from such wayward thoughts and show how fervent religious faith (preferably of the Russian Orthodox stripe) was the only thing that would save the world. However his depiction of evil was so powerful and vivid that it's the reason people read his work. His angelic characters are deathly boring.

That "idea" you responed to is, as Rep. Randolph once said of a piece of legislation, - it is like a carp in the moonlight. It is shiny and it stinks.