Does an Author’s Intention Settle a Work’s Meaning?

Years after publishing a novel, its author says that a character who repeatedly closes windows was always meant to symbolise “refusing to grow”. Must readers now accept that interpretation? The question concerns the place of authorial intention in interpretation.

In “The Intentional Fallacy”, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley opposed allowing intentions outside a work to determine its meaning and value: once public, a work should be tested through its language and structure. Intentionalists reply that the use of language is itself an action performed for a purpose. Excluding purpose altogether may turn irony into praise or detach a work from the historical conventions through which it communicated. The dispute is therefore not simply whether we should listen to authors, but what evidential status their intentions should have.

If the novel never connects closed windows with age, change or fear, the author's later statement cannot write that symbol back into the book by decree. If drafts, historical context and repeated contrasts within the novel all point in that direction, however, the statement may help us notice a structure we had missed. Authors can also misremember, change their minds or offer an attractive explanation that their text cannot bear.

My view is that intention is important evidence, but not perpetual ownership of meaning. A good interpretation neither pretends that a work had no maker nor treats a later remark by its maker as a final court of appeal. It must show how intention leaves constraints in words, form and context that others can examine. Readers may discover implications beyond what an author consciously foresaw, but that does not turn every association into the work's meaning.

https://iep.utm.edu/art-and-interpretation/
https://iep.utm.edu/aesthetic-formalism/