All that said, I still agree that a work’s creator may include meaningful aspects they may not even be conscious of. I’d also say that finding something in a work that would be impossible for a creator to be aware of is a combination of coincidence and projection.
Not at all. I wrote a poem about a sunset once, that several of my friends quite liked. That poem could have been written any time in the last two centuries. A friend of mine observed that it had interesting parallels to
The Lord of the Rings, because of its emphasis on the West. It would be genuinely impossible for a person in 1890 to
intend a relation to LotR--because the work didn't exist then. I certainly did not intend such a relation, despite having read Tolkien's works, and while it is not strictly
impossible for me to come up with that interpretation on my own, I can certainly say it would never have occurred to me independently. I in fact love it when that sort of thing happens, when someone sees something in my work that was never intended but which nonetheless expresses and draws value from the themes I presented.
Unless you mean to dismiss all of history itself as "coincidence," I guess. Though at that point I think you would have done far, far more damage than an erroneously excessive application of the death of the author ever did.
The heart and soul of the "death of the author" idea is that creators do not have
monarchy over the meaning of their works. It arose, in large part, because in the context that the idea was expressed, literary analysis and criticism had in many ways devolved into "biography of authors," where knowing what kind of person the author was meant you had THE one and only valid, fitting, justified interpretation of a work. The one and only valid form of dispute was to, in effect, claim that you knew the mind of the author better than someone else did, and so of course this also meant that an author actually analyzing their
own work was automatically the only valid voice in the field, period, end of discussion, you're just
wrong if you think anything else.
In that kind of environment, a radically anarchist "NOBODY is the king of art" attitude was warranted. Much as, although I
loathe the whole "found art" thing, Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists were raising a valid criticism of how an elite squad of pretentious jerks had locked down what was
permitted to be "art." They were trying to break open those ideas and get people to recognize that what
pretentious galleries call "art" and what art
actually is can often be only distantly related things. Unfortunately, as is the case with so many revolutions, the former revolutionaries became the new traditionalists, it's just now art is
even more pretentious than it was before,
even more divorced from connection to anything concrete or meaningful or interesting, and we have a new crop of revolutionaries (e.g. the Stuckists) reasserting that there's value in so-called "traditional" arts like portraiture, and that things like "a depressed person's bed that they barely left for multiple weeks, including used tissues and multiple types of bodily secretions" really aren't particularly great pieces of art.
As a result, though we should not fight a revolution against DotA (the philosophy; jury's still out on the Steam video game), we should recognize that taking it to extremes--as many have done--can lead to just as bad of a place as what it responded to, dead ends with no possibility of development or nuance. Authors, performers, composers, etc., they certainly have a
special position, which means we ought to heed them for the same reason we ought to heed licensed, well-respected physicians or widely-cited, prolific physicists within their personal areas of expertise. But having a special position does not equate to having the only or even best position. Even an author who has taken great pains to analyze and comment upon their own work is not omniscient, and cannot be prepared for all possible future events and perspectives. Contrasts, unexpected comparisons, future developments that re-cast an idea in a new light, new debates that only arise
because the creator did what they did...all of these things can lead to interpretations, indeed whole well-defended theses, that the original creator could never have personally predicted.
Hell, just think of how much effort Asimov put into his "Multivac" concepts, and which led to several amazing works, and yet he never predicted the internet or even anything much
like the internet. He thought people in the 21st century would still be consulting "Multivac terminals," rather than having an actual personal computer. The very idea of a personal computer at all was something he didn't think would happen for centuries, if not millennia. But in the light of such technologies today, we can go back and re-interpret his works through the lens of modern cell phone and internet technology and consider what impact they would have on, say,
The Caves of Steel.
