All in the mind...rightly put!

'Don Quixote chasing the windmills'-- I think it was this comment which got the discussion fuelled...quite on the lines of the discussion that A&I were having the other day. So does the author actually mean all the fancy stuff that the critics write about???...

On a textual level, most certainly not! Even in school I remember feeling sad for Somerset Maughm... while he wrote about Philip Carey in 'Of Human Bondage', was the character truly a mirror of himself? I've never heard an author challenge her reviews as baseless and false...why?

True that the subtext of the work helps in providing clues (subtle of otherwise) about the society, culture of the time the work is set in. Together the text and subtext help bring in a context to the author's work, however, 'interpretation' still remains a slippery slope.

Couple of months ago, while taking a shot at A's poems and telling him about my interpretation, I was corrected and put on the 'right' track couple of times... but what about famous literary works? Who 'corrects' our interpretations?

But looking at it from just about the other side, isn't that the beauty of a good piece of writing, the fact that it can hold a different meaning for everyone and influence us and our thoughts to varying degrees?

R made an interesting comment, he said, some interpretations are born from the collective unconscious...generated from that common pool of all our unconscious mind space...and so it intrigues me and yet completes the loop for me that the interpretation might actually be from the writer's UC mind...one that he may have never even thought of...but it exists alright, and there's no way we can challenge that! HA...