Why "(Mis)understanding Literature"?

I want to clear up any confusion that may result from the title of this blog. Why "(Mis)understanding Literature"?

I'm of the school of thought that the "meaning" of a work of art (including literature) isn't something that is fixed by the creator's intentions, or by the execution of the work. Rather, a reasonable interpretation of the meaning of a work of art depends on several factors:

1. What the creator intended
2. What the creator actually did
3. What the facts of the world were when the work was created
4. What the facts of the world were when the work was read
5. How the reader understood the work
6. (Probably some other stuff, to a lesser extent)

That's a lot of stuff that's out of the control of the author! Let me give a little example to help clarify somewhat what I mean.

Imagine a book was written in 1850 about a charismatic man who is elected president of some unspecified European country. Let's imagine that this leader cements his popularity by blaming some already-disliked group of people for the recent economic trouble his country was having. Let's finally assume that this leader started a war, during the course of which he arranged the persecution and murder of many members of the scapegoat group.

Well, everyone already knows what I'm describing. But I asked you to imagine that the book was written in 1850. There's no way the author could have intended the book as an allegory for Hitler's rise to power, and no contemporary reader could possibly have read it that way. Any modern reader, though, would instantly spot the parallel--it would be practically impossible not to read the book as though the leader were an analogue for Hitler. My position is that this anachronistic reading is totally valid--it'd be more wrong to insist that people shouldn't give anachronistic interpretations of the work than to imagine that the thing is an allegory for Hitler.

To make that more clear, let's imagine one further thing: no one knows when, exactly the book was written--it might have been in 1850, or it might have been 1950; let's say the ink was smudged. Now a literary interpretation of the book that depends on a comparison to Hitler is pretty clearly valid if the book was written in 1950--but do the facts about the book as written change depending on when it was written? Clearly not.

Okay, that's enough defense of a all-interpretations-are-valid theory of literature. Of course, I don't necessarily mean exactly all interpretations... but you get it. So, why the title?

Any interpretation of a work is likely to be rejected by someone, and most interpretations will probably be rejected by most people. You're always going to find someone who'll tell you that you've misunderstood a book, and of course they know just what the correct interpretation is--their pet theory.

In view of this, let's just state it up front: we're always going to be misunderstanding literature. There are some books where I look back at what I thought of them years ago and even I agree that I was misunderstanding them. But that's no reason not to try. So let's just assume that we're going to make mistakes, and go on from there, without worrying about whether we'll look like fools five years from now. Because of course we will--we were all fools five years ago, and why should the future look any different?