Intention and Interpretation Some Words Criticism: Is this a good work of art (or the opposite)? Is it worth preserving (or not)? Worth recommending? (And, if so, why?) Interpretation: What does this work of art mean? What is its semantic content? Hermeneutics: The art and science of interpretation (originally of scripture, later literature, still later human experience as such). 1
Literary Art vs. The Rest Virtually all literary art communicates by means of language a system of public signs. Yet works of literary art are (normally) the work of a private individual, an author. So perhaps it seems natural to ask certain questions about the meaning of literary art as part of judging its value: What did the author intend to say? Did she succeed in saying it? Assuming we have identified her meaning correctly, is it worth paying attention to? An Open Question: Does non-literary art also rest on a public system of signs? (Dewey, you ll recall, suggests something along these lines. Jung too, though in a rather different sense.) If so, then we might say that (mutatis mutandis), when it comes to interpretation: author artist. If not, then literary art (and other art insofar as it uses public signs) may be exceptional. 2
The Intentional Fallacy William K. Wimsatt (1907-75): English professor at Yale Monroe Beardsley (1915-85): Philosophy professor at Temple University, author/editor of several books in aesthetics Their essay (together with its sequel, The Affective Fallacy ) has become one of the central documents of formalist new criticism The Intentional Fallacy [is] a confusion between the poem and its origins...it begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. In fact, say W&B, the intentions of the author are neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art. (431) Of course an author is (usually) the cause of a poem, but we needn t (or shouldn t) look to the author s intention (or circumstances) to judge the worth of a poem 3
Some Axioms If the poet succeeded in realizing her intentions, then the evidence of those intentions will be seen directly in the poem. If the poet did not succeed, then the poem itself cannot be adequate evidence for her intentions. (We would have to look elsewhere: biography, diaries, history ) W&B: Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine, we ask only that it work (432) Three Types of Evidence 1. Internal: Public evidence "discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture. 2. External: Private or idiosyncratic evidence not part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations about how or why the poet wrote the poem. 3. Intermediate/Contextual: private or semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics by an author. e.g., special meanings assigned to words. 4
Internal evidence, including historical knowledge about, e.g., genre, meter, traditions of the art form is the appropriate subject matter for literary criticism. External evidence, being in principle private, is fodder merely for author psychology, literary biography or just gossip (436). Contextual evidence is where the greatest danger of committing the intentional fallacy lies: It easily shades into a concern with external, private evidence. It may contribute to our understanding of a poem, but it leaves the grounds for that understanding ambiguous. (E.g., Donne and the new astronomy, 437-8) The Upshot Preoccupation with the author and her intentions leads away from the poem. Criticism ought to focus first and foremost on what is there is the poem/art work. Reference to contextual information may be fair game in establishing a work s meaning, but it cannot be decisive. External evidence belongs not to criticism, but to literary biography (or publicity) 5
and, in any case, the intentions of poet are not decisive (or even necessary) is establishing a poem s meaning. A poem does not belong to its author, instead, it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it. The poem belongs to the public. (432) Barthes: The Death of the Author 6
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) French social and literary critic; taught at various places, including École Pratique des Hautes Études, the University of Alexandria, Johns Hopkins University. Principally interested not in aesthetic theory per se, but in semiotics (the study of signs and signification), which he applied to a wide variety of cultural, artistic, and literary productions: language, films, photography, fashion, politics. Associated with the term [post-]structuralism (locating cultural products within a [unstable] system of signs). The Author: A Creature of Modernity The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the human person. It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the person of the author. (383) 7
For us, by contrast, it is language that speaks, not the author (Compare: Hirsch s dismissal of semantic autonomy) The Author: The past of his own book, its source of nourishment, his offspring. The book is a performance attributable to him. The (Post) Modern Scriptor: The hand that inscribes the book, cut off from any voice except that of language itself. The book is a performative that he utters. The Text The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture The writer/scriptor does not, cannot write to express the originality of his genius, his only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such way as never to rest with any of them a text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author (385) 8
The Reader and The Author-god So, the text has no single theological meaning; it is a public space. The unity of the text, lies not in its origin but in its destination But: The reader too is simply a location in the system of signs and meanings: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. The Birth of the Reader For the New Critics (for Romantics? for intentionalists, formalists, and expression theorists of all stripes?) the writer was really the only important person in literature. Having dispensed with the Author-god, however, the text is no longer closed, no longer limited to a single theological meaning. A myth has been overthrown: The birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the author. (386) 9
Hirsch: In Defense of the Author E.D. Hirsch (1928- ) Professor emeritus of literature at the University of Virginia; longtime critic (though a very sensitive critic) of continental fashions in aesthetics and literary theory; lately an exponent of cultural literacy ( core knowledge ) In recent years, a critic of (certain aspects of, or the worst excesses of) poststructuralism and postmodernism. 10
In In Defense of the Author (from Validity in Interpretation (1967)), Hirsch focuses on the idea of semantic autonomy, an idea variously connected with continental philosophy (Heidegger and Gadamer), the Jungian idea of collective unconscious meanings, and New Critical fashions founded on Wimsatt and Beardsley Against all of these views, Hirsch argues for the sensible belief that text means what its author meant Hirsch s argument proceeds by way challenging four arguments that purport to establish the semantic autonomy of the work and/or the interpretive irrelevance of the author. What is at stake, for Hirsch, is the very idea of validity in interpretation. Meanings, says Hirsch, must be publicly verifiable affairs of human consciousness 11
A text must represent somebody s meaning, if not the author s, then the critic s (or the reader s) This is because meaning occurs not in words, but in consciousness: A word sequence means nothing in particular until somebody either means something by it or understands something by it (373) People make meaning, and this does indeed leave room for variability in interpretation. But, says Hirsch, we need to seek a valid interpretation. Otherwise what grounds will the professor have for claiming that his reading is better than that of his pupil!? Four Arguments Against the Author 1. The meaning of the text changes even for the author If the meaning of text for its author does change, this would be fatal to the normative claim that the author s meaning ought to guide interpretation. But the author s meaning does not really change: The author s response to her text may change, her evaluation of its significance may change, but, says Hirsch, what this shows is precisely she can still identify her original meaning (e.g., in order to repudiate it, or restate it) 12
2. It does not matter what an author means only what his text says An author e.g., Eliot may claim that he has no special privilege to assign an authoritative interpretation to his text. But, Hirsch asserts, an author would never go so far as to say that she didn t mean anything in particular by her writings. OK. We might then say, with Wimsatt and Beardsley, that we ought to look to the text itself (and, so far as possible, only to the text) for evidence of its meaning That s fine, says Hirsch, when it comes to judging artistic success or failure (i.e., to judging value), but the intentional fallacy has no proper application to assessing the verbal meaning of a text. Similarly, an author may sometimes intend a certain text to mean X, while virtually everyone who reads that text takes it to mean Y. In view of such cases, we might be tempted to say that the meaning of the work is whatever attracts a public consensus (Cf. reader response criticism) 13
But appealing to the vox populi cannot provide us with stable normative concept on which to base interpretation: In interpreting texts, people (necessarily) all use the same public norms, the same system of signs, yet they disagree about meaning. Yet, pace new criticism/formalism, we cannot simply look to the text in order to establish its meaning. Once again, linguistic signs must be interpreted by someone before they can become meaningful. That someone, if we are after a valid interpretation of a literary text, should not be the critic, it cannot (reliably) be the public so, sensibly, it should be the author. 3. The author s meaning is inaccessible True: We cannot get inside an author s head. We have no access to genuinely private meaning experience. But, Hirsch asks: a) Does any actual criticism truly try to get inside an author s head? and b) Is private meaning experience (as opposed to intended meaning) what authors actually express? (Compare: Expression theory à la Collingwood) 14
None of us, author s included, can have complete, certain access to all aspects of experience that might be affecting our utterances (or that we might have in mind when writing). What we actually say (what authors actually write) is normally what we understand to be sharable meaning (as opposed to everything that happens to be going through our mind ). We may not be able to know an author s meaning with certainty (and none of us can know all of the meaning experiences that may condition meaning), but that does not mean that meaning is inaccessible in principle. 4. The author often does not know what he means If we could show (as Plato suspected) that authors often do not really know what their works mean, then, once again, this would be fatal to the normative claim that the author s meaning ought to guide interpretation. But in what sense can authors be said to be ignorant about the meaning of their work? 15
A critic may draw out new implications of a work with respect to its subject matter (Kant, e.g., may see implications of Plato s philosophy of which Plato himself was apparently unaware), but this is then about the subject matter, not the meaning of the work. A critic may draw out unconscious meanings in a work, but Hirsch insists, we must see these as the unconsciously intended meanings of the author But Why? Why? Why the author and not, say, language or culture (as reflected through/channeled by the author)? Possibly this is simply a reassertion of Hirsch s view that the author s meaning must turn out to have normative semantic value. The meanings that are actualized by the reader are either shared with the author or belong to the reader alone (382) 16