Quote:
Originally Posted by jon_the_d
their intended message, if they had one, is irrefutable. that is what the song, or poem, or novel, or painting was supposed to convey, the very purpose of its creation. if other people interpret it a different way, then it is a failure, either on the part of the artist to convey their message, or the part of the audience on failing to perceive the true message.
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well, there's a interesting brazillian book called "Dom Casmurro". This book taslks about a guy who gets in love with a girl who has "dissimulative eyes" called Capitu. Making the story short, the whole book focus on her dissimulative eyes, trying to imply she wasn't exactly a very trustable person. In a part of the book, he starts to speculate that she's probably cheating him with one of his best friends. Lost in speculations, he ends up assuming she truly cheated him after she gets pregnant and the child "resembles" a bit of his friend, but she promptly denies it. They break the relationship and their life turn into misery, but they never come back again. End of the book. The great mistery of the book is: did Capitu truly cheat on him or not? There's no REAL evidence that makes you assume if she did or not, even though the book tries to work on the disimulative aspect of Capitu's personality (the book is old, and no blood or paternity tests were available at that time). Maybe her dissimulated eyes and the fact their son looked a little like the other guy + a few other things that happen, make it likely that she cheated? But hey, what if everything was just things created on his mind because of his jealousy and she truly didn't? The book leaves you with that question. Is it wrong to think she did? Is it wrong to think she didn't? Is it wrong to be undecided? Obviously not. The writer of the book never left any notes giving any answer. Maybe he had an opinion about it, but since he didn't make it public, people are left to wonder what they want, and there's no failure about it. Maybe if he had tied an answer to it, the book would have lost its value as an artistic piece. Whoever read the book can have the feeling they want, and that's where art truly exceeds the simple concept of only being the "creation of an artist". If there's just the artist and the art, but nobody to appreciate it, the art does not exist.
Something simillar happensd in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Who was the murderer after all? Even though there's such a thing as an alternate ending telling somebody was the real murder, it is nothing but an example, and the book leaves you free to decide who actually did the murder. There's no failure in the book, in the person who wrote it or those reading it.