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People want to have it both ways.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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"death of the artist" only makes sense in-so-far as you want to look at a text how it exists rather than the artist's own interpretation. It's more a thing with books, "death of the author", cause the author might say it means one thing but you can look at the text and question what it's actually saying, infer new meaning etc. Cause artists'/authors' intent may not actually have come through in the text. Like "You intended this but this is what it comes across in the book as".
But I think for the most part, there's no need to dismiss the artist/authorship completely cause it gets away where this thing has come from in the first place.
Like Tolkien insisting that his books contained no allegory. The amount of accidentally allegorical content in LotR is staggering.
Yeah you can look at it as the result of someone's trauma from WW1/WW2 and dealing with Industrialisation. Hobbits are a reflection of Rural Britain and no one can say different
Tolkien said that his works didn't intentionally contain any specific allegories. In other words, Gandalf is not supposed to be a direct stand-in for Christ for example. But that doesn't mean that there aren't Christian influences on Gandalf that the reader can infer, along with other types of influences, or read into Gandalf futural aspects that didn't even exist at the time of writing. There is complexity to Gandalf.
He just didn't like simplistic meaning like that because it kills the depth and layers of interpretation to the story. Instead of saying "Gandalf is a fully fleshed out, independent character" people say "Gandalf is just Christ!" and either leave out or don't need or want the Gandalf character development because they already know he's just Christ.
I use that example specifically because he disliked how C.S. Lewis (close friend of Tolkien, by the way) made the Lion in Chronicles of Narnia a literal and direct allegory for Christ, like the Lion is literally Christ, which Tolkien found to be lazy and hated allegories for this reason.
Certain Tolkien nerds are so obnoxious about this, it's like a mantra. In a lot of online spaces if you ever try to talk about allegory in Lord of the Rings you'll get a dozen of these people responding purely to tell you Tolkien hated allegory. As though everyone isn't already aware.
Not only that, but artists absolutely embue elements from their subconscious into their work. When we talk about the author's intention, what we're really talking about is their ego's contribution to their work. They can give their works meaning that they didn't consciously intend or even that they disagree with.