‘Canonicity’: the Book or the Reader?

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

But doesn't this just mean that we have passed 'control' out of the hands of both Author and Reader? Who sets the conditions for interpretation? Is it a peer group of other readers? Or do we allow the professionals to set the boundaries? That suggests that instead of allowing meaning to lie within the experience of the reader and enabling true anarchy, the cognoscenti actually do not wish to relinquish control because said anarchy can also be risky.

No, I really don't see where that necessarily follows, unless my questionable analogy of literary terrorist is at fault, for which bad taste I apologise.

Where individual readers discuss their own interpretations, interpretive communities will be developed out of the ferment, even the anarchy, of the discussions, as readers come to understand each other's perspective. Where we don't castigate interpretations as wrong or invalid or incorrect but instead consider their reasons, where we don't ridicule interpretations because they aren't based on wide reading experience, or grand knowledge or privileged information, we tend to develop better, more imaginative, more open-minded readers.

In pedagogical terms, it is difference between the teacher as a facilitator of learning and the teacher as proponent of content. From comments in your posts, I would assume you knew mainly the latter kind of teacher and school, but I have seen the former kind.

Originally Posted by davem

If the Tower can be made to serve another purpose by someone else, fine, but they would not be using the Tower for the purpose for which it was built - & they should admit that, & not claim that they know the 'real' intention behind it.

Hmm. I am not aware that I have claimed I know the real intention behind this tower. I did say this:

Originally Posted by Bethberry

It in fact often can result in greater understanding or appreciation of his work and his methods.

But that is not the same thing as 'claiming to know the 'real' intention behind it.'

EDIT: Perhaps another way of explaining is to offer this experience of mine. While in London last summer, I came upon a small statue dedicated to someone. This statue was not listed in any of the tour books or guidebooks or histories that I had read prior to coming to London. Yet I knew who this person was because she had had a monument named after her in my home country--a mountain in fact, with a glacier. In one flash, time and space conflated and I was no longer a foreigner in London, but had found a small piece that I could interpret as my own. This interpretation is intensely personal, based upon a work of Art and Nature (how more Blakian than that) and completely independent of any knowledge of why and how the statue got placed in Charing Cross in the first place. That purpose is in fact irrelevant to my artistic experience, which likely has no great importance to others and certainly not to those who heroically endeavoured to commemorate the woman's fate, but remains very important to me. As I read the plaque, of course I came to know more about why the statue was built, but that knowledge really was, if I may borrow a term from davem, baggage which added to my experience after the fact but did not contribute to the initial aesthetic experience.

It is possible to have a meaningful personal experience of a work of Art without knowing what or how the author wanted me to experience. This does not mean the author's intention is irrelevant, but that it is not crucial to the aesthetic experience. At least, intention as explained not in the story itself but in a prose explication written after the fact.