byzantiums:

I don’t get why the fact that texts need to evolve and be constantly re-imagined by new audiences is such a hard concept to grasp?

When it comes to the consumption of stories, authorial intent is not sovereign. I mean, just because a story is sacred does not automatically make the hand that penned it sacred as well. Creators are human too and they’re not always going to grasp the full weight their texts carry.

The consumption of a story is not a triangular dynamic between author, text and reader, it’s a binary relationship between text and reader.

What’s important isn’t what the writer meant, what’s important is what is what the story means to you, your point of connection or entry into any given text, how you interpret it. And…that’s not a bad thing? It’s empowering and it’s refreshing and it encourages freshness of thought, originality of interpretation. Trying to shut it down is not only anathema to the diversity that makes literary discussion interesting, it’s also likely to ensure that your beloved texts sit collecting dust on your shelves for a long time, because no new readers are going to come along to attempt to connect with them.