In my view, a literary work must speak for itself. It legitimately means whatever the reader thinks it means. Literature is a deeply personal collaboration involving author and reader. There is nothing the author can say that will change that essential fact. An author's intention colors his perception of what his work means, but the author's is only one opinion out of many.
The poet Robert Frost seems to have viewed it that way. In the 1960s at the University of Miami I attended a lecture and reading by Frost, who regularly spent the winters in South Miami. He was asked whether his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" could be interpreted as "an invitation to suicide, reluctantly refused." Frost said that he was thinking mostly about the beauty of the scene when the idea for the poem came to him. He said the moment was "deep and mythic," so it might well have had a meaning like that embedded in it, but he wasn't aware of that meaning until later when it was pointed out to him. Pressed, he replied that what his intentions were and what the poem might mean to a reader were not necessarily the same. I was a college sophomore at the time, and Frost's response seemed like a revelation to me.
Granted, there are better and worse opinions, depending on the reader's background and literary perception. Some readers never see beyond the surface meaning, while others pierce through to the subtext, and some to the mythic substratum.
The reader will soon discover that The Passing of Merlin Zauber is unlike most books designated as fiction. The novel is based on actual experiences of which many are non-ordinary. While it has taken me over forty years to gather material for this novel, I have the feeling that most of it was just handed to me. That means my function was mostly to serve as a willing scribe, putting down events as presented by the Muse.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.