> What narrative purposes something serves are absolutely an interesting question-- whether the author intended it or not.

I have no problem with people discussing what purpose it serves for you. What I have problem with is this frequent notion that you know the intent of the author. Unless they told you.

> And, in quality literature, there's a lot less put there on accident that survives the editing process.

I've witnessed enough discussions with authors to not accept this for a second. It's pure fiction.

> you do a whole lot of telling the reader about your world and things rather than setting up scenes that show them.

I absolutely do, very much on purpose, because I utterly detest this obsession with showing when it comes at the cost of slowing down the story.

I much prefer older style novels that don't make you wade through paragraph after paragraph of descriptions of events that I have no interest in to get to the bits that interests me. I hate books that are afraid of delving into the thought processes of the characters or that are afraid to take shortcuts to describe the why of aspects of the world you can't reasonably show without derailing the story.

I fully accept this is a niche view, and not one that caters to mass appeal, and I'm fine with that.

(In fact, I'll give you one specific story about actual intent: I agonised for a month over feedback from my editor about breaking up the telling in the first chapter of my first novel and rephrasing it to be more "showing", and I specifically decided not to, not because I didn't agree that it'd probably have broader appeal, but because I decided I'd rather put readers that don't like my style off right from the start than lull them into false expectations; that consideration took more time than the rest of the editing combined because setting the right expectations about style from the outset mattered to me far more than any specific sentence)

I'm bothering to tell you this because it clearly does colour my attitude to analysis of literature. I write what I like reading, and I hate it when people try to guess at meanings the author haven't made clear rather than discuss it in terms of what it means to the reader, because I've seen so many utterly ridiculous outcomes of it, but also because I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about their intent and encouraging that.

Now, I don't think Golding was coy in any way, but ironically, when you're being clear about your message, that too tend to egg people into over-interpreting every word to support an interpretation that doesn't need it.

I think the eating of the pig is a good example, because on one hand it's entirely possible, and likely, Golding meant it the way you think. But it is also entirely unnecessary to interpret it that way to understand the book, so it doesn't matter.

You could delete the whole thing, and the rest is still intact. In fact, you could delete most of the book and still get the message, because he keeps hammering you over the head with it - it's not a subtle book (that does make your interpretation more likely; it'd certainly seem to be in keeping with the rest for this to be Golding appearing to hammer us over the head with symbolism, but it's still a guess)

I'd argue that irrespective of the purpose of individual words or paragraphs, most of the book is there not to make the message clear, because the apparent message is trivial and bordering on trite, but to make the book a compelling read. (And yes, that is intentionally reductionist)

> The bits with pigs in Lord of the Flies are very clear showing, with a combination of literary intent and leaving room for readers' own interpretations.

And accordingly inability for you to know the actual intent. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's the presumption of to what extent you can say anything about the purpose of specific phrasings I take issue with.

> I have no problem with people discussing what purpose it serves for you. What I have problem with is this frequent notion that you know the intent of the author. Unless they told you.

I think everyone, even dedicated lit crit advocates, know that we can't know what the intent of the author is. But we can see the purpose it serves in the writing, and with a decent author be moderately confident that the important elements here are not complete accidents.

> I've witnessed enough discussions with authors to not accept this for a second. It's pure fiction.

K.

> I absolutely do, very much on purpose, because I utterly detest this obsession with showing when it comes at the cost of slowing down the story.

OK. I don't really like reading massive amounts of exposition drivel, where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting and makes sense without example.

If I drop in a couple page digression about a character making a sandwich-- why?

- Does the character make the sandwich in the expected way, consistent with the way I, as the author, view them in general?

- Does this fastidious, fussy character carefully arrange his ingredients like I would normally picture him doing so, or does he throw them together?

- If he does something different from how the reader probably pictures them to this point, is it an accident, or am I revealing something about his state of mind or an unexpected other side of his character?

- Do I need some obvious break in the action; some downtime. Do I need to make it clear that the characters are obviously unhurried and open to leisurely talking or exploration next? Do I need to put the characters in some specific place for the next step to happen?

- Did I just run out of things to write that advance the main story, and I'm just doing random things at this point? If I'm taking a digression, or I'm doing something different from what would seem to be in character, I'd hope I'm doing it for a reason.

- Yes, there's still aspects that are totally without purpose. Putting a tomato on the sandwich may not be super meaningful (though it actually does still tell us small things about the world the characters inhabit, and is hopefully still consistent with other things we've been shown/told).

Authors have a whole lot of freedom, but what makes a cohesive story is already a highly constrained sequence of events compared to what could be written on the page. If you want that story to hit with maximum impact, there's yet fewer good choices.

> but also because I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about their intent and encouraging that.

OK, so--- you detest hidden and layered meanings, and assert your writing doesn't have many. That's OK, but assuming that this is representative of most literature isn't valid.

> I'd argue that irrespective of the purpose of individual words or paragraphs, most of the book is there not to make the message clear, because the apparent message is trivial and bordering on trite, but to make the book a compelling read.

For most books, sure! But -why- is it a compelling read? As Chekhov said -- "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Every word is a chance to create tension and to play with readers' expectations for what may happen next-- and then fulfill or subvert these expectations. Good literature does this a lot.

This can be a beautiful thing. Reading Mending Wall by Frost, and all of his ambiguity --- wait, does the author like walls or not, and why won't he tell me? Realizing that the first couple sentences were talking about frost not liking a wall was a pure hidden delight. Perhaps this was an accident, but I doubt it... and the meaning's there whether he intended it or not.

> I think everyone, even dedicated lit crit advocates, know that we can't know what the intent of the author is.

I've personally had discussions with lit crit advocates who argue not only that they can know the intent of the author, but that they can know the intent of the author even when the author contradicts their interpretations.

I'm glad you're not one of them, but they very much do exist, and rejecting the notion that you can know the intent of the author with any reliability was the main point of my original reply.

> But we can see the purpose it serves in the writing, and with a decent author be moderately confident that the important elements here are not complete accidents.

Depends on what you mean by "moderately confident". There are enough cases of authors completely shooting down claims of critics about the meaning of paragraphs that it's clear it's often not at all obvious you can have much confidence in it. (I'd love to see someone try to quantify the accuracy of critics by surveying authors; that'd be fascinating)

Nobody here is objecting to you setting out your theories. My objection was solely to the notion we know the authors intent.

> OK. I don't really like reading massive amounts of exposition drivel, where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting and makes sense without example.

To me the most interesting parts often are the parts where the author tries to convince me that the world is interesting by telling me about the world. I often find myself skimming past dialogue and descriptions of the characters actions to get to the part that lets me see the world with a birds eye view in exposition because I find the world building and the concept far more interesting than characters that are usually insignificant in the grand scheme of things (and most characters are). I've done that with many fantastic pieces of highly renowned literature because I know it's not the characters I remember once I'm done with a book - often not even the story - but the world and the concepts. Often I find the focus on showing to result in overwrought drivel that is contrived because the author is afraid of just telling us something and need to concoct contrived conversations etc. to show us instead.

We clearly value books for very different reasons. That's fine.

> Authors have a whole lot of freedom, but what makes a cohesive story is already a highly constrained sequence of events compared to what could be written on the page. If you want that story to hit with maximum impact, there's yet fewer good choices.

The problem with this is that you're presuming a specific, fixed story. But absent a statement from the author you have no direct knowledge of the set of possible variations over the story the author might have considered. Some outline in great detail, but that just introduces a step of regression. Others let the story unfold from nothing. For my part, I recursively iterate until I have about 1 line per 1k-2k words. At that point I've somewhat constrained myself, and so there won't be 4000 word digressions, but there sure as hell can be and are multiple paragraphs that I hadn't thought about and that just ends up there without any particular purpose because it felt right when I wrote it.

Back to the point: You won't know whether a given section was a result of that, or was something deeply meaningful to me without asking. You can speculate, and you're of course free to do that.

> OK, so--- you detest hidden and layered meanings, and assert your writing doesn't have many. That's OK, but assuming that this is representative of most literature isn't valid.

This, to me, is an illustration of why you can't presume to know the authors intent, as you here infer an intent behind my words that was not there. It's not strange - I did not elaborate. But it does show how easy it is to think you know the intent behind something and miss it.

To start with, I don't assume that this is representative of most literature. Nowhere did I say it was. That's an inference you made without support in what I wrote. I do assume that given there is a significant number of works for which this is true, and statements where it is true even in works for which it is not for the work as a whole, there is no reliable basis for drawing conclusions about the intent of the author unless they've spoken about it.

That does not mean you can't present possible interpretations and discuss those, of course. The two are entirely orthogonal. It doesn't matter what Golding intended with the pigs as long as it can be read in a given way, to bring it back, and you can discuss to what extent it contributes to the readers interpretation. That remains possible whether or not Golding just happened to be eating bacon when he wrote it or planned it out.

I also did not say that I detest hidden and layered meanings. I said that I find it dreadfully annoying when writers are coy about it and "encouraging [making unsupported guesses]". What I meant was not that there can't be purpose, and layered purpose behind decisions, but I don't like it when it appears the writer is intentionally trying to make it hard to get at the intent of a passage in ways which encourages overwrought interpretations or leave people hanging.

To take a concrete example, in my novels one of the characters have had her eyes replaced by artificial eyes. On purpose. It serves a direct and very overt purpose in the story in that it allows for abilities that are used and directly impacts the plot. As such there's a very obvious surface purpose there. I'll concede that in those cases there's a case to insist people can know my purpose, because there's a direct causal link to the plot.

But for my own part I also liked adding them rather than e.g. giving her wearable tech to achieve the same purpose because I hate wearing glasses and love the idea of being able to use tech to replace the need entirely. So there's a hidden meaning there to me, but not one I've dropped hints about in the text. I don't object to writers doing that at all, as it doesn't affect me as a reader.

If I do feel the urge to reveal that purpose in the text, however, I'll be direct about it rather than drop hints. I won't have her react negatively to someone wearing glasses or talk about how annoying it must be, or otherwise be coy about it by implying there's another layer to that choice but leave the reader hanging. I'll have her give someone that as reason for having made her change. I might well do that at some point. I fully get that some people love it when the writing is all mysterious and the writer isn't giving up their secrets. For my part I find that just about as annoying as if they'd ended a book on a cliffhanger. I want to dive into the reasons and what lies beneath them, not be stuck speculating because the author refuses to tell me after they've teased it by dropping hints. If you prefer the mystery that's fine, that's your choice. To me it feels lazy - you avoid having to find ways of giving an answer without it being contrived or disappointing. This does also tend to make me dislike symbolism embedded in works that are external to the work and can't really be revealed "in world" because it feels gratuitous.

> For most books, sure! But -why- is it a compelling read?

The why is separate from the writers intent. So we're back to my purpose with my initial response on this thread: I don't object to people exploring why it's a compelling read at all. On the contrary. What I object to is the idea you know the authors intent. By all means, explore why it's a compelling read.

> As Chekhov said -- "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." Every word is a chance to create tension and to play with readers' expectations for what may happen next-- and then fulfill or subvert these expectations. Good literature does this a lot.

I find it fascinating that you first give this Chekov quote here and then argue for subverting expectations after a quote that tells you explicitly to excluding objects unless you're prepared to meet the expectations their presence creates. For my part, I strongly disagree with Chekov there. I get the why - it creates a strong focus on the story. If you want that, then it's the right thing to do. But to me it leaves the resulting worlds cold and barren in a way that strips it of interest to me. I want to know about all of the details that do not matter to the story but tells me about the world and creates an atmosphere. A book where a rifle on the wall means it will be used, to me is one stripped of wonder and mystery.

> This can be a beautiful thing. Reading Mending Wall by Frost, and all of his ambiguity --- wait, does the author like walls or not, and why won't he tell me? Realizing that the first couple sentences were talking about frost not liking a wall was a pure hidden delight. Perhaps this was an accident, but I doubt it... and the meaning's there whether he intended it or not.

You don't need to know or claim to know the writers intent to be able to take delight in that. You're free to imagine whatever interpretation you choose. I'm not arguing you shouldn't. I'm arguing against assuming you know the writers intent, and only that. I used to write a lot of poetry, and more than once ended up in arguments with people who claimed to have found some hidden meaning I'd supposedly inserted. I had to explain to them that I had no objections to them finding those meanings in it, but those were not mine, they were theirs. That's not at all to say that others don't insert all kinds of hidden meanings in what they write, but I would not presume to know, that's all.