I mean, it's not a science. It's media.
edit: I guess that's to say, yes I agree someone would have a wack interpretation of an art piece being the ever evolving author's current position, to finalize at the last utterance before that author's death... or worse, to be the estate's current declared position.
And to build a function that takes their evolving intent but then reduces the weight of that intent by a time duration would be absurd.
Which is to say we don't need a standard for interpreting work, but we could be reasonable to agree that our subjective impression of the work, an analysis of what is literally in the work, clarifying intentions, what you at for breakfast that day and its psychic coincidence, these are all.... how someone experiences an art.
And that's what I would argue, how someone experiences an art, including their insistence to maintain the conversation on author's intent, is how that person experiences the art. So I guess it's up to you to say "death of the author" politely, and me to call them a toad, rudely.
I'm reminded of Star Trek. The Animated Series has been canon, not canon, at one point Roddenberry preferred to pretend it didn't exist (I wonder if that was during one of his many feuds with the people who wrote and/or edited the stories and scripts?), but after Roddenberry's death it's his son and CBS/Paramount that get to legally decide what is and is not canon. The nuTrek movies just recanonized TAS, or at least one episode of it ("Yesteryear") to depict the bigotry nuSpock experienced on Vulcan during his childhood and youth before he left to attend Starfleet Academy.
At least the popular wish seems to be that "Threshold" never be recanonized, although there are some interesting fanfics about it. Voyager is merrily cruising through space, and along come some aliens who had found the salamander kids, did a DNA analysis, and charged Janeway and Paris with child abandonment.
Why does their have to be a line in the sand at which the author's authority over the text simply dissolves? We can accept that an author has some authority over the text, while accepting that this authority can diminish to the degree their comments diverge from the internal logic of the text, that this divergence is more likely to occur over time, and that this divergence is more evident to the degree their comments appear self-serving or disingenuous.
It didn't take Lucas long to "diverge."
In the case of Marion Zimmer Bradley and inconsistencies, she just didn't care. If it took three days to travel between two specific places in one book and ten days in another, she just shrugged since what mattered was the characters getting from one place to another. But when she initially gave her blessing to fanfic writers, it caused a great deal of confusion and it's impossible to make a coherent map that will fit all of the novels she wrote, never mind those co-written or ghostwritten.
And then you get to the problem of Thundersnore* - excuse me,
Thunder Lord, the decades'-long-awaited sequel to
Stormqueen! that makes me think that Deborah Ross must have skimmed the first book lightly enough to get one or two characters' names, the basic issue, and made the rest up out of generic knowledge of the series and chucked this into a malfunctioning literary transporter with a bunch of Harlequin romances and a sprinkling of Outlander.
*The title of the review I wrote on Amazon
I could have written a better book, and I daresay so could ten thousand other Darkover fans, if the assignment was to write a sequel to one of the pivotal books in that series (even the Darkover board game was based on it).
I wonder why the MZB Literary Trust allowed the publication of that piece of drivel. It's not that Deborah Ross is a bad Darkover author. Her
Hastur Lord novel is the best of the ones she's done, and aside from one or two issues that could easily have been fixed in editing, the overall story is excellent and so are the characters.
("The author", in the former sense, may not even correspond directly to a single person, but may be two or more collaborators. Unusual in prose, but commonplace in, for example, comic books.) "Authorial intent" is something present in the text itself, in the internal logic of the text, it isn't something which accrues directly to a flesh-and-blood person, we simply assume that the person occupies a privileged position in regards to interpreting the intent present in the text. We can preserve the idea that the biographical and historical context in which a text was written informs that text without attributing to the author the right to endlessly interpret and re-interpret the text as they fancy.
Co-writing and collaboration are, or at least were, common in some genres.
The very first book series I ever collected, Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators, was at least honest about this, as the Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys was not. We know who wrote which T3I books because their names are on the covers and each had a distinctive writing style. There were a few things that had to be mentioned in each novel, but it wasn't done cookie-cutter style. The authors didn't mess up with the major points or the characterizations of the characters.
Contrast that with the committee of authors/editors who did the Trixie Belden series (again with the juvenile mystery stories!). The inconsistencies got to the point where someone wrote a fanfic addressing how "isn't it odd how Jim's eye color and last name keeps changing and sometimes I'm older yesterday than I am today? We've all been in high school for 10 years..." etc. This is the result of sloppy continuity, and while Nancy Drew can be 18 years old for 70 years, it's a bit different when the kids' ages and birthday parties and school grades are literally part of the plot. They age on an in-story basis. Eventually they should have left high school and moved on to college. This series had at least two different authors I know of, and how many others using those two names.
Now getting away from the juvenile mysteries I read as a kid and still read sometimes 45 years later (when my mind needs a light snack sprinkled with nostalgia)...
The Children of the Lion. Author: Peter Danielson, a house name for the series (like Carolyn Keene was a house name for Nancy Drew and Franklin W. Dixon for The Hardy Boys).
But there were 19 Children of the Lion novels and four different authors. The first author really set the style of how to combine the Old Testament characters, the odd historical character, and the fictitious caste of armorers and artisans whose lives interweave through the generations, in Egypt, Canaan, Greece, Babylon, and elsewhere.
But there was one point where one of the novels foreshadowed that the next one would feature the Samson & Delilah story... and the next novel did no such thing. Different writing style, the event took a time jump of more generations than I could figure out (the earlier books made it possible to draw up a family tree of the two sets of characters), and the series ceased to be about two distinct dynasties in any way that made sense. At some point outright magic was brought into it... excuse me? These people were artisans, not Jedi. Sorry, but kissing goats on the nose does not cure plague.
Anyway, by the time it was evident that there would be no 20th book, I was actually a bit relieved. There's enough there that if I ever decide to do any fanfic to fill in the blanks or do a What Happened Next for any character, it's doable.
Some science fiction/fantasy shared-world projects come out better. The authors know that to some extent they have to cooperate and let the others tell their own stories as well, weaving in and out to make a coherent whole. C.J. Cherryh's Merovingen Nights did this well for the most part. Cherryh wrote a novel called
Angel With the Sword, to kick it all off - introduce the setting, the protagonists she would work with (and allow others to use as secondary characters), the political and social backgrounds people are dealing with (imagine Renaissance Venice on another planet where nobody dares use too-sophisticated electricity for fear of attracting the attentions of aliens who scoured the planet centuries before to try to rid it of humans).
This shared universe worked well, mostly. There's the odd mischaracterization here and there, but as Cherryh said in an interview that it's best to end these projects while the authors are still speaking to each other. This is why one major plot development was abruptly dropped... but there are some pretty good fanfic authors who like playing in Cherryh's universes, so maybe someone's written a story or two to finish that off.
