This kind of thing is why I love that JRR Tolkien spent a whole introduction page lambasting people who read too much into symbolism in books and stating explicitly that Lord of the Rings was written as an exercise in long-form storytelling with no hidden meaning.
That just sounds like a (very) elaborate troll. Write a three part book stuffed full of symbolism and then write an essay complaining how people read into the symbolism.
And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the author intended. If I see Mordor as Stalinist Russia, isnt that my prerogative? Its selling the art form short if the only possible interpretation is the authors own. /rant (against a dead guy)
In the entire concept, or just the degree of importance?
Lets take the example of Farenheit 451, wikipedia [1] suggests an evolution (at least) in Bradbury's own interpretation of his own book:
"In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury said that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature."
So which is right? And neither of those seem to match up with the popular interpretation of it being against state surveillance and censorship. If that's what it says to so many people, if that's why it's so popular it seems strange to discount that interpretation.
Then we look at older works where the cultural nuance passes us by. Should we not be allowed to enjoy Shakespeare on our cultural terms instead of (always) through the prism of Elizabethan culture?
Then you've got things like Anne Franks diary. I suppose half the point is getting inside her head, but on the other hand you're reading it knowing what's going to happen, and interpreting it as the author intended is, impossible?
I think the most controversial thing you actually said is "valid". That word is very ambiguous, and it's no surprise there's disagreement around it.
You can definitely make any interpretation you want. They will be valuable as long as you can take something from them, regardless of the author intent. As you have just shown, even authors might change or make additional interpretations as time passes. The world keeps changing, the contexts change, and we make new interpretations. That's pretty cool. But the other thing is whether they are true or not (whether they reflect something that the author really attempted to express). In this case, it's not strange to me that many authors want to explicitly say that they didn't attempt to hide some political meaning or similar behind their works. The problem is not that people reads into what they write, but that they attribute to them things they never meant. And that's an imposition on an author, which is not nice, and that's what a lot of people will discuss with you when you say that any interpretations are "valid".
If a politician tells you what he meant to say in a speech do you take it at face value? People lie to themselves and others all the time about what they have said and why they said it.
The text is the truth. What the author says about it is useful but not the end of the story.
There is a difference between what something is used as and what something was created as. Bradbury wrote F451 because of book burning and later used it as commentary about mass media. That doesn't change its original intention any more than Top Gear using "Jessica" as its theme song makes it any less a tribute to Dickey Betts' infant daughter Jessica. The difference is that the original intention is immutable and exists independent of the context of the consumer's experience. Anything you choose to add onto it is your personal headcanon.
