/lit/ - Literature

I feel like I am a guest in these girls house, maybe an old friend of their parents, and they have never met me before.

Their different reactions and postures says so much about the point in each ones life.

Yes.

People who attach the author to the work are unable to grasp the work on its own terms and therefor cease to even open the most basic dialogue with a work.

Its not absolute of course, a work is as imperfect as the authors themselves. A typo for instance.
But certainly the author himself, and his personal and political facility mattering in the reading of a work, absolutely fucking not.


A pleb ass example is Dumbledore, who in the books is just a wizard. But later, JK rofling said that he was gay, despite never having the balls or skill to ever write the character as such. She has essentially coped out and made something that is not so, so, in her retroactive "opinion" about her own work.

Like people who like to talk about how the Mona Lisa is surely a man in drag or whatever the fuck; none of it matters. It misses the entire art-ness of art, that is: the "totality" of the work of art itself. The work can give you something on its own with all this extra shit being meaningless.

You don't have to ask the author what he meant about the blue fucking curtains, or the green light ETC ETC, it means something TO YOU.


When you look at art. When you see that it is good. When it makes you feel such a thing that seems to intimate that it could only be for you; it is for you. It is special and it is yours. Take it for what it is. Don't let anyone tell your how it should be.

That's exactly the spirit which is a claw around the neck of art. Why is it that so many of us feel utterly powerless to get anything out of a painting nowadays when we should given the level of our education be the best equipped in all of history to appreciate beauty.