This is an assignment I wrote for my PGDES classes in EFLU. Some of the points appear to be still relevant.
It is interesting to note how the various schools of literary criticism have dealt with the problem of intention. Impressionistic Criticism or Romantic criticism, a practice which appreciated the author’s fidelity to his experience, or which involved the readers’ own enchantment with his experience of reading the literary work of art fell out of fashion with the emergence of Formalism. Broadly called Practical criticism and new criticism, the Formalist approaches to Literature, regarded intention to be neither available nor desirable in understanding literary texts. It is not available because, a text doesn’t contain internal evidence of it, and it is undesirable because it restricts the immense richness of meaning a text is capable of yielding. Formalism thus disregards the author as a valid entity in the Production of literary meaning.
In the analysis of literary works, Structuralism restricts itself to focussing on the language in which the texts are embodied. How meaning is caused in literary texts is a matter of the interplay of words, as also the differences and contradictions they generate. Hermeneutics and other reception theories take the question to the other extreme of the plane. The text moulded in intentional co-relatives at the level of sounds, words, images, objects and sentences, offers a dazzling breadth of possible concretizations and what is achieved is solely the responsibility of the reader. “What the literary text means for a reader, is what that has been concretised by the reader”. Post-structuralism, the most recent of all critical approaches takes the stand that, there is no experience prior to language, the implication being that intention doesn’t exist at all as a prior entity. Experience and expression, content and form are regarded as indivisible. What the author intends has to be shaped only through the language of the text, and language has such a tendency for ‘difference’ that it demolishes intended meaning as a potent monolithic structure which could help in the understanding of literary texts.
In the history of literary theory, the nature and function of authorial intention has been debated quite a bit. The commonsense assumption that what it means, is what the author had intended it to mean has been thoroughly refuted more by the recognition of the fact that, Literature is a totally different mode of perception and representation. “What is Literature is, in short, what is its literariness”. Crucial to the stand of the anti-intentionalists is the fact-that literary expression is different from practical expression, since practical expressions in Language are referential in nature. Practical expression seeks information, or provides information, or requires an act to be performed. A sentence like, ‘Get me a glass of water’ for example carries a heavy, undeniable load of intention in it. Literary expression however doesn’t function within the confining clutches of intention. It is not to be understood from its causal matrix. Language functions in naturalised sphere of public conventions, and the words on the page, along with their immense potential generate as many interpretations as possible in readers who are not constricted by the guiding (or misguiding) presence of intended meaning. Broadly the words of a literary work do not carry intended meaning. (It is a controversial task however to debate whether an author really had any idea or intention in writing a particular work.)
But generally intended meaning as a single essential meaning is refuted at different levels.
1)
At the level of language. Language doesn’t always tend towards a single direction. It has its ambiguities, differences. Poly semantic essences etc.
2)
At the level of the author. A conscious author doesn’t choose to fix the meaning of his work himself.
3)
At the level of the critic who chooses to severe the poem from its origins and treats it as an organism.
4)
At the level of the readers, who interpret a work in different ways.
Modern criticism and Poetry influenced to some extent by T.S. Eliot’s impersonality theory has tended to be anti-intentional. The theory states that hankering after intended meaning blurs the readers’ vision towards the distinctive, unique properties of literary works.
“Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation should be directed not upon the poet, but upon the poetry of the poet.” Anti-intentionalists put forth three major arguments regarding intention.
1)
A text doesn’t possess internal evidence of intended meaning
2)
Though plenty of external evidence could be available to establish intention, it is not to be sought.
3)
A disregard for intention is the first step towards a formalist approach to literature. The major essays ‘The International fallacy and the Affective fallacy’ by critics W.K.Wimsatt and Monroe. C. Beardsley argue these points.“Intention as we shall use the term corresponds to what he intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. In order to judge the poet’s performance, we must know what he intended’. Intention is design or plan in the author’s mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author’s attitude towards his work, the way he felt, what made him write.
A poem doesn’t come into existence by accident. The words of a poem as Professor Stoll has remarked, ‘Come out of a head, not out of a hat’. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet’s performance.”
Distinguishing between internal and external evidence, the critics say, ”There is a difference between internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem. And the paradox is only verbal and superficial, that what is (1) internal is also public, it is discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammar, dictionaries and all the Literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture, while what is (2) external is private or idiosyncratic, not a part of the work as a linguistic fact; it consists of revelations (in journals for example or letters or reported conversations) about how or why the poet wrote the poem, to what lady, while sitting on what lawn, or at the death of what friend or brother. There is (3) an immediate kind of evidence about the character of the author or about private or semi private meanings attached to words or topics by an author or by the coterie of which he is a member. The meaning of words is the history of words and the biography of the author, his use of a word, and the associations which the word held for him are part of the word’s history and meaning.
Rejecting the argument about applying biographical evidence, to understand a poem better, the critics say. ‘There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away contexts – or indeed we should never have, objects or ideas or anything to talk about.”
Citing allusiveness, one of the techniques in modern poetry as one of the more abstract issues of intentionalism, the critics argue that it is not all that relevant to look for the sources of allusions that occur in poetry. What is important about allusions is not their source, from what context they have been culled, but whether they serve the purpose of the poet. The argument is summed up by Wimsatt and Beardsley in another essay of theirs, ‘The affective fallacy.’ ”The intentional fallacy is confusion between the poem and its origins, a special case of what is known to Philosophers as the Genetic fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography and relativism. The poem itself as an object of specifically critical judgement disappears.
In spite of the modern banishment of the author and intended meaning, some critics have attacked the anti-intentionalists from specific grounds of contention. Though their attack of is not a reinstatement of intended meaning, it is in a way the proper recognition of what an author is for his work. Their attack is more against the critics who have dismantled terms like intended meaning etc., but created new, individual, idiosyncratic interpretations. One of them E.D. Hirsch has an interesting question to ask. He says modern ‘new’ criticism has traversed in such a way that, it became fashionable to talk about a critic’s reading of a text and by an inner necessity the study of ‘what a text says’ became the study of what it says to an individual critic. “If the author had been banished, the critic still remained, and his new original, urbane, ingenious or relevant reading carried its own interest.
“The text came to represent some body’s meaning, if not the author’s, then the critics”. The critic has in fact become the ‘author’ of the best meaning. From this Hirsch says, it follows that, if the meaning of a text is not the author’s, then no interpretation can possibly correspond to the meaning of the text, since the text can have no determinate or determinable meaning. The argument of the anti-intentionalists has been the public and private dimensions of textual meaning. According to this argument, it would be a mistake to confuse a public fact, namely language with a private fact-namely the author’s mind. To this Hirsch says. Whenever an interpretation manages to convince another person, that in itself proves beyond doubt that the author’s words can publicly imply meaning and if the interpreter manages to do his job thoroughly the meaning can become available to a very large public. What happens is an erasure of the two domains; the critic, the creator, the public and private. The private finds acceptance in the public, and becomes a necessary way of comprehending. Hirsch conveys that it is not necessary for the critic to dig and unearth all the various possible meanings the words on the page convey. The most obvious meaning which can be shared by all readers, is the one that ‘is’ and can be called valid, in the sense that the author intended that meaning when he wrote those lines.
To sum up, using Hirsch’s words it may be said that, linguistic signs can never speak their own meaning. Intention is inescapable in interpretation either of the author, or the critic, or the reader.