On intentional fallacy

The idea that an author's intent should hold no bearing on the interpretation of his/her work is a reckless concept that leaves way too much room for unreasonable readings. Many critics assert that only what's written in the text can be taken into account when critically examining a work. External evidence, like supplementary notes or an author's explicit declaration of his intent should not be considered in criticism. I couldn't disagree more. I concede that an author's intent should not be the driving force behind getting meaning from a work, but it should not be cast aside either. The beauty of all literature is that it can be interpreted differently by everyone who reads it (the notion of reader-response; I see a red wheelbarrow with chickens, you see a dichotomy of the human spirit, whatever). However, I do think that if people are given too much latitude in their interpretations of a work that it can often be completely transformed into something it's not or lose the meaning it was intended to have. This is where author's intent should come into play, as a sort of guard against people forming outlandish opinions or missing the point completely. For example, a few years ago I overheard a young girl talking to her friend about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe movie, and she said that, "Yeah, like I guess the whole thing is, like, symbolic of the Bible. I did NOT get that when I read it." Ignoring for a moment the epic failure of this girl's teacher or her apparent inability to comprehend written english beyond the Berenstein Bears, we have to consider what a shame it is to have a book's meaning (a fairly obvious one in this case) lost because the reader was not aware of the author's intention. Similar misunderstandings have happened elsewhere. Huckleberry Finn has been banned numerous times throughout its history and panned as racist because of its use of the word "nigger". Anyone who has any knowledge of Mark Twain knows that he actually opposed slavery and the book was a comment against the racism he saw present during that period. Granted, these examples involve some severely ignorant people (not, persay, English majors), yet one needs only to read the paper or turn on the TV to discover that the number of ignorant people in the world is increasing at an ever alarming rate. To allow everyone who picks up a book to attach their own meaning to it means that a text runs the risk of losing its vision. Robert Frost once said that poetry without meter was like tennis without a net. I think that is how an author's intent should affect the interpretation of a work; like a net, preventing the interpretation from getting totally out of hand and ridiculous. Acting as a guard against the absurd, an author's intent can be one of many factors that help the reader to come to a reasonable interpretation.