Mostly, though, what I don't understand is this willful self-separation of 'what I meant' from 'what I wrote' -- for someone who is lauded for using his words so precisely, and for being willing to confront the ugly truth, then why is he so reluctant to admit that some of those "self-validating interpretations" are of the nasty type? Not of him, but of those very characters he said weren't being criticised by his work?

Bakker is a philosopher. Maybe, he distinguishes between different layers of percieving a text. What the author is writing down, meaning the syntactical sturctures and the choice of words is never considered as synonym with the meaning of the story. (I got this comment to one of my papers that dealt with a text.) I also think, but I wasn't sure how to word it, that the author has no absolute control about what kind of issues surfaces in his work or what kind of subconscious problems. So, maybe, he is not totally aware of the problem you pointed out. *shrug*