Stories: Lives and souls of their own?

Quite frequently a story (or any work of art, really) can be analyzed, praised and condemned for possessing elements that the author did not intend.

For instance, it is pretty much a given that Frank Baum did not intend The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to sync up with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, nor is vice versa likely (and to what extent they sync is debatable), yet many people see that in there.

In another example, comic books were nearly banned entirely around the Mc Carthy era for storytelling elements that were seen as a literal and literary danger to society.

Many people see romantic subtext between characters in a work that the author never intended (or did they), and the motivations of good and bad guys alike can have many interpretations that utterly change the meaning of a story.

So my question is: if a large volume or percentage of readers see an element of a story that is in contrast to or orthogonal to the author's intent (or deliberately left vague), is it possible that the element exists in the story regardless of authorial canon?

or to put it another way,

Can the story itself "decide" to contain elements regardless of authorial intent?

For your consideration:

- Whether Han shot first; Midichlorians
- Superman and his relationship to the Ubermensch
- Zombie Apocalypse movies...survival horror or social commentary?

Related:

Does each version of a piece of art exist in its' own universe? For instance should Movie!Daredevil even try to emulate Comic!Daredevil, or are they isolated from each other from the get go? Is Superman Returns a sequel, or not?

I'm a fan of the World As Myth belief. Basically, all stories exist somewhere in the multiverse. I'd like to think that when we "write" a story, some facet of ourselves either exists in that universe and we're channeling, for lack of a better term, something that happened there.

Cue Arnold Shwarzenegger getting punched out by Jack Slater.

I hope you're wrong, since I am currently into writing horror stories.

Here's something else to consider...

What if those "crazy" people that claim to be the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln or Cleopatra, for instance, are right? That in a different universe, they actually were that person? They were able to channel that existence so well, it overwrote THIS existence.

Another hypothesis...who says a "soul" has to exist within the same meatspace timeframe that we do? All those people claiming to have been Lincoln are in fact the same soul. A person dies and chooses to reincarnate within the same timeframe as their previous existence. That could be an explanation for people finding their "soulmate"...they're actually finding another copy of themselves!


This is the kinda stuff I lie awake thinking about at night...

The logical extreme of your theory being that all beings that exist everywhere are expressions of the only soul that exists.

Telepathy? Precognution? Claurvoyance? All memory.

I think in most works of art, people see things in them that really aren't there.

But then, I also think the point of some of those works of arts is for the viewer to decide things on their own.

Of course, the creator could have had an idea and the viewer thinks it's something else. Or the creator does indeed have an obvious view they're trying to get across.

For instance, I think a large majority of people look a little to deep into comics. Why I defend it so much. You hear cries of "sexism" when I see "visually stunning/appealing art".

Comic books are a visual medium, so I don't expect them to draw plain looking characters, and if they did, I likely wouldn't be that interrested in the comic anyways.

As someone who loves to write (and used to write more often untill something put a hold on that) I remember writing a 5 chapter intro to a story I was writing. For those who read it, I got lots of compliments. It was also noted for being being quite dark, twisted, and erotic...it was written that way with no real objective of trying to put any belief into anything other than what my economics teacher said in class and I agreed with: "Shock effect sells."

Sadly, if some read it, they might see something deeper in it like "Author hates men" or "Author hates women" or "Author hates priests" or "Author is a sexist jerk" or "Author is an uptight feminist" or "Author is one twisted individual who's probably some evil satanist"

When really it was "Hmmm...how can I introduce the characters in some shocking way to help keep the readers interrested? Oh! That's it! Sex and violence sells! Intro characters someway using one or both of those!"

Basically, sometimes a story is just a story with no real meaning behind it other than to entertain. Of course it seems many people today look for a meaning that isnt there or misread the meaning.

Reminds me of the 80's Rodney Dangerfield movie, Back to School. Kurt Vonegut (sp?) writes a paper for RD's character's about what the meaning of his writings were and the college professor was all "I know you didn't write this, and whoever did has no knowledge of Kurt Vonegut!"

Now what I do like to hear, is people's own impressions. Which tends to happen more in music, when songwriters will have the song mean something to them, but not tell anyone what it was (or at least not at first) prefering people to find their own meaning in the song.

Which can make a song about love and loss to one person (possibly even the writer) be about finding and keeping the love to someone else, for example.

I would point out there is plenty of stuff that has references in things I create and I go out of my way to use name that "mean" something usually. Sometimes it is obvious, sometimes it's not, and for a few it mean nothing at all...

Kino Raziel is the actual character name of Durakken... It mean Wood of God's Secret or something like that... It came about from the creation of the residence where Durakken live. Likewise Durakken isn't the original user name or character name. Originally it was DurakkenSaebure or something like that, it's been a while, and that's a really funky spelling of what was original DragonSabre. That originally meant nothing but the fact that I like Dragons and Sabres and the character was originally just a Dragon...Though as I learned more about Dragon Mythology it evolved the character and the Sabre part evolved a back story...

Likewise I often go to lengths to use references like Omelas, almost meaninglessly in terms of anything other than a "hey you people that know what this is you can act smart ^.^ but it has nothing to do with the story"

On the other hand me doing that... where there are interlinking meanings and references and all that... creates a problem when I don' do that. Like ultimately the story Durakken is involved in ends up where he is more or less the god of Abraham which then if you look at it retroactively could be seen as making a statement... a statement that I never intended to make. Regardless of whether I agree with that statement is irrelevant in my opinion. It is there and it will be seen as me making that point. Furthermore it could be argued that regardless of whether I intended it or not I riddle my works with those interlinking meanings and must have known most every message in the work and as such me leaving it there must indeed be meant.

As far as what you see in my work I care in the sense that i want to tell a story and want to have little messages in them that is accurately received, but I don't care whether you want to see social commentary or not because anyone who thinks on the more universal scale that I do is going to have that commentary in there on accident just from the fact that every story i will ever write will consist of creating or changing a civilization and how it in general reacts to some stimuli. Within that there has to be what something about what i'm thinking about a given thing.

For example, Star Wars' Republic vs Empire... They are stand ins for "good" and "evil" so one can argue that even though Lucas wasn't making any true social commentary what we have is things that are clearly marked as good and things clearly marked as evil. We can, from that, look at what aspects are represented on each side and then we can say that more than likely Lucas holds them as such... i could therefor, as an example, say that Lucas is a theist who believe secularism is evil as the Empire seems to be secular save for the Sith which are more or less seen as a cult. On the other hand the "good" side could be seen as holy crusaders who believe they are in the right regardless of anything shown to the contrary and prefer to be ignorant to progress rather that embracing it, while condemning those who do. But then that could just be Lucas being bad at modeling real civilizations and so they become hyperbolic characterizations of what Lucas would roughly call good and evil people.

I think that is a rather shoddy way to look at in general, and don't really care... I'd much prefer to look at the universe itself and explore it in the minds eye... For example, The Force, in our lexicon would be considered science, not religion, and it is almost assured that when the force was originally discovered to be "real" in their universe there were general Laws of the Force like the Laws of Motion...and the Jedi arose via a philosophy about how to use the Force... then it became corrupted which led to the Dark Jedi splinter group...which also got corrupted and now in the present of the SW universe the laws have been more or less forgotten while the two corrupted philosophies remain and fight with each other, both never realizing that they have no clue about the truth of what their talking about.

There are schools of literary criticism built around whether or not the author's view of his work is of prime concern vs. it's not and what you or others may find in it are the prime concern. I know this from having read a little about them but not enough to really discuss them in depth... my own feeling is the author's intent is the best way to go. Someone might read Moby Dick and see some gay subtext or something about the destructive nature of capitalism or whatever, but from what I know of Melville, this is probably wrong - a cute 'catch' if you can argue your point well, but ultimately a little pointless I think (see TVTropes.com). At best I think they can score some real points by reading (and arguing) the text through their specific lens, "this work can be applied to my issue X and provides good examples of it because... etc."

There may be real room though for saying author X was writing about Y but you can see he may also be writing about issue Z without realizing he was at the time (I recall John Lennon had written some angry song about Paul McCartney after the Beatles broke up and later said something along the lines of 'turns out it was really about my own issues at the time'). Which may be the basis people use to argue these angels-on-pinheads topics, I don't know.

As for ideas having their own lives, that I think is what a meme is supposed to be. William Burroughs wrote about this from many different angles; he may have even been quite serious about it, from what I know of him. It's all summed up best in his simple phrase: language is a virus.

Ok, that's my rambling.

heh, Effectively, Lucas went back in time and changed history. But now nearly everyone that lived through the original event remembers both histories, and they prefer the one in which Han shot first.

...there's a Doctor Who episode in there somewhere...