No great shakes as yet, but this line stood out, from Intimacy and The Feast by Leslie Daniels:
I thought you could see through the black letters on the page to the author, but they couldn’t see you. I thought that was ideal. (p. 56)
This reminds me in particular of the study of Sylvia Plath for example, where her poetry is incorrectly approached and dissected using knowledge of her history to interpret its meaning. It also smacks of my own discarded premise that the author is the story, and we should try to understand what he or she meant rather than read our own interpretations into it. How very un-Barthes.
Unfortunately, the rest of the story kind of lost me and in facing the pile of books reproducing themselves in the frolic of silent nights in my living room, I skipped the rest of it. Believe me, I will carry this guilt of unfinished reading with me, but it’s something I’ve discovered I can do as time grows short and my wants and needs in literature expand.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
I thought poetry was more open than fiction to the lens light of meaning vis-a-vis the author’s life. They’ve been doing it to Shakespeare’s sonnets for years. 😉