Who is right the writer or the reader?

First a post taken from Dave Ex Machina

Ray Bradbury seems to have caught a bad case of Intentional Fallacy.

Bradbury still has a lot to say, especially about how people do not understand his most literary work, Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953. It is widely taught in junior high and high schools and is for many students the first time they learn the names Aristotle, Dickens and Tolstoy.

Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury’s authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

So tell us, Ray. What’s it all about?

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

You know what else might harm reading literature? Telling people who’ve read, enjoyed, and thought about your book for decades that it turns out they don’t get it. Why even write a book, Ray, if fifty years later you’re just going to stand up and say, “TV is bad. Oh, and you’re all wrong.”

No, Ray, we’re not all wrong. See, that’s the great thing about art: it’s not a quiz. There’s no right answer, not even yours. You wrote the book, you got it published, and then it went into the great big world on its own. For fifty years it’s made its way through the minds of others and now, suddenly, you want to write it again? You want “backsies” on fifty years of interpretation? Sorry, Ray, it doesn’t work that way.

This is not to say that Mr. Bradbury doesn’t have some worthwhile thoughts on the damaging influence of television. And it’s not to say that there isn’t a good dose of anti-television material in the novel. but to say any different or additional interpretation is “wrong”?

Next thing you know, you’ll be saying Guy Montag was a replicant!

I am so torn because I hate when the "critics" find deep meaning in works that don't have them. But then again I read Fahrenheit 451 and I thought it was quite obviously about the evils of government censorship. I have become that which I most hate.