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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1213614" data-attributes="member: 812">Objective? That presupposes that people have an objective point of view on their own thought processes. And then that they have an error-free means of transmitting that point of view. And that we possess a perfect way to translate that transmission into our own terms.None of which are true, so I guess there is no objective way to decide whether or not a work has a "message".I'm not saying (Umbran) that investigating authorial intent is valueless. I am saying that expecting to derive objective statements on a work of art from ANY source is a sure route to disappointment.Here's a couple of interesting quotes from the good Professor for you to chew on:Clearly while Professor Tolkien did not intend for one single "message" to be read into his book, he DID hope that people would draw what I've been bludgeoned into calling "meaning" from it. Clearly he expected it to do more than provide an escape from the world.An artist does send a message with every work. Just as you send a message with every gesture you make, every word you say, every post you write (does anyone else hear the Police?). We send messages, will or no, with every action. Our acts are interpreted by others to mean things. Very often things we did not intend. Indeed, very often the most important messages we send are the ones we do not intend to send.Art (action) gives rise to interpretation. I have said before that a work of art does not have "a meaning" or "a message". What I meant is that no work of art admits to only one interpretation -- it is the nature of art that every reader, every audience, produces their own interpretation. It can be useful, powerful, to compare interpretations -- but nobody can ever claim that a single interpretation is the correct or final or ultimate one.We can assess interpretations, of course. There are two criteria, neither of which have anything to do with authorial intent. The criteria for assessing interpretations are firstly, is the interpretation supported by the work itself, and secondly, is the interpretation itself interesting? For example, an interpretation of Hamlet that is well-supported by the text is that Hamlet is about a Danish prince whose father is dead. Well-supported, but not very interesting. Useful interpretations are those that are both well-supported AND interesting, but no interpretation, no matter how well-supported or interesting, will ever be the final interpretation.Authorial intent -- you seem to keep coming back to this. There's a lot of problems with your position, some of which I've tried to outline already. It's hard to determine -- claims of objectivity are patently false. It changes -- you're applying your own interpretation (whoops! there we are again!) to Tolkien's other writing as a means of claiming primacy for another interpretation of a different work? Shaky logic, my friend. Finally, it doesn't supply much to the debate.Critical discussion should never be about closing off possibilities -- except as the evidence and the interest of the possibilities themselves dictates. If somebody wants to suggest that LotR is an allegory for gasoline prices in the 70's, let 'em try. I submit that my two criteria above will demolish such an interpretation without any need for recourse to authorial intent (let alone date of publication!). But introducing authorial intent as a means of shutting down possibilities is just foolish. Use it to offer new possibilities -- not until I learned that Tolkien had been a devout Catholic did it ever occur to me to look for the Catholic ideas contained within the book. Now I see them clearly and they're among the book's most powerful ideas. So knowing about the author can be helpful -- but it does not provide any authority to any interpretation.So when somebody posits that LotR reveals Tolkien's class snobbery, the supposed fact that Tolkien intended no messages in his work is of no value in assessing that idea. We have to turn to the work itself and see what IT says, not what the Professor says it says.</blockquote>

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