What the author really meant was…

When I was in high school, I was once given an assignment to write an English paper comparing two famous works of literature that we had read during the year, with supporting evidence from literary criticism articles and other research. One of the books I chose was Siddhartha, and I found a book of letters written by Herman Hesse himself to use as support. In one of the letters, he explicitly stated, in answer to a direct question, what the main point of the book was. I had the ultimate supporting evidence! Words from the mouth of the author himself! I would get an A for sure.

As it turns out, I did not. As I recall, I got a B. I don’t really remember what the teacher’s reasons were for the B-rather-than-A decision, since she never gave us anything back until months and months later, when we’d stopped caring and couldn’t do anything about it anyway, but it did bring home to me the realization that English teachers don’t care what the author really meant, despite all the literary analysis conversations they started with that phrase. They just want us to find an argument and make it. Literary analysis is at heart a fuzzy subject, (though less fuzzy for some teachers than others, in that they only have one opinion they want their students to hold.) The point of the exercise is not to be right; it’s to develop argumentation skills and practice organized writing.

This is why Ray Bradbury is going to be doomed to disappointment. In an interview with the LA Weekly News last week, he stated his firm opinion that Fahrenheit 451 has been misinterpreted for years. From the article: