How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention? (theories And Methodologies Essay 1)

STUDENT: 391422

Year I

Theories & Methodologies Winter 2000

How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works? A short story of a young man – “who could not go to Oxford” – his struggles and ultimate failure. Suicide. There is something [in this] the world ought to be shown, and I am the one to show it to them – though I was not altogether hindered going, at least to Cambridge, and could have gone up easily at five-and-twenty Thomas Hardy This quotation states an author’s intention as he embarks on the creation of a literary work, one that will eventually become Jude The Obscure. This is a specific example of a broader issue. Whether it is useful in interpreting the resultant novel is highly contentious. It describes the basic plot and implies that autobiographic events are, to an extent, incorporated. Yet to interpret the main protagonist’s exclusion from university as the central event obscures key themes, such as destructive Fate, which are not mentioned in the quote. Using external information to establish Hardy’s intention may be invalid, but whether intent can be established from the text alone is also debatable. To decide the extent to which authorial intention is useful in literary interpretation requires definition of terms such as “interpretation” and “meaning”. “Interpretation”, here, will be the use of a sign system (language) to construct an independent “meaning”. The term meaning is more difficult to define, in relation to the cryptic triangle that links author, text and reader. Some modern critics see it as a reader’s subjective construction, negating the usefulness of authorial intention. Yet this is to apply general philosophy to literature, which works by its own perverse logic. E.D. Hirsch’s author-centred meaning is more constructive

Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

in conducting practical hermeneutics. This essay discusses the extent to which authorial intention is the key to objective meaning in literary works, when interpretation is made under certain conditions. Whether authorial intention can be established at all is central to the debate. I accept the consensus that an author’s mental processes at the time of writing are inaccessible. The text is certainly no basis for Freudian psychoanalysis of its author. However those who feel that readers construct individual meanings for themselves, psychologically or culturally detached from the creator’s meaning, incorrectly dismiss the presence of an author in an autonomous text. The weakness of Radical Historicist views, that a text only has a meaning for the time in which it was written, is demonstrated in the musings of Sartre’s Antoine Roquentin (1964, p.9): “Naturally I can no longer write anything about that business on Saturday and the day before yesterday – I am already too far away from it”. Such philosophic truisms are a barrier to practical interpretation. E.D. Hirsch brings this debate back into focus stating that, “the irreproducibility of meaning experiences is not the same as irreproducibility of meaning”. He differentiates between the “meaning” of works (i.e. what a text says, that Hamlet is a play about a Prince whose father is murdered and who seeks revenge) and the “significance” of its relationship to a reader (a modern reader citing Hamlet as suffering from a Freudian Oedipus complex). In practice, unfortunately, it is impossible to entirely separate these tidy categories. For Hirsch, authorial intention can be established as the author has set down his meaning as the words of the text (it can therefore be determined for anonymous works). As an interpretive tool, however, certain restrictions must be placed on the concept. First is the claim of the oft-misconstrued “The Intentional Fallacy”. It rightly dismissed the basis of Romantic literary criticism, which saw authorial intention as the standard by which a literary work should be judged. Jude The Obscure does not so much fulfil the intention laid down in the opening quote of this essay as distort it. The work turned out to

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

be a lengthy novel rather than the “short story” that was intended. However this allowed Hardy to achieve far more, expanding the breadth of Jude’s tragedy to the point that his university rejection is almost peripheral. While the novel could be seen as failing to fulfil its intentions then, it cannot be seen as a failure as a work of art. Moreover, if one evokes any kind of evaluating response to the text one has spilled outside the Hirsch-defined realm of “meaning” that concerns interpretation and into “significance”. Similarly, it is not the proper role of the interpreter to use authorial intention as a basis for investigating matters outside the work. Statements in a text should only be attributed to the dramatic speaker. If biographical inference subsequently attaches this to the author the interpreter has stepped over into the realm of criticism or misinterpretation. Meaning must be independent of author psychology. In writing, authors take on an artificial voice, which makes even naturalistic autobiography impossible. A writing process as mechanical as it is personal is imposed by the constraints that good prose and poetry necessitate. Vonnegut (1991, p.27) satirises his impersonal role as “a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and confrontations”. On the other hand T.S. Eliot's idea that artists should depersonalise their raw experiences, and that readers must approach texts impersonally, is an impossible ideal. Welleck1 demonstrates that while we are aware that the word "vegetative" has a different meaning in metaphysical poetry, we cannot prevent it evoking connotations of its modern sense. The authorial intention approach cannot therefore interpret an entirely objective meaning, but all a reader can do is accept their unconscious historical and subliminal self as a small but immovable barrier. Nor should authorial intention necessarily be the leading criterion for establishing meaning, though the derived meaning will be that intended by the author. Style and genre may be more important, and all interpretation must be sensitive to context. That is not to support, however, the Marxist view that social context is everything and the individual (therefore

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

authorial intention) nothing. Nor do I agree with Hirsch's analysis of decontextualised works, in which it is difficult or impossible to establish authorial intention. In this scenario even he claims that the reader becomes the author of meaning. However I contend that external and biographical information can be used to estimate authorial intention (though this is much less reliable than intention derived from the text), creating some standard of validity in this most subjective area of interpretation. Authorial intention stretches into another text’s meaning when external information is required for unpacking allusions to other authors. Some genres seem more suited to establishing authorial intention through textual autonomy than others. Novels, even when they are part social commentary like Dickens’ satires, establish a more self-contained context for autonomous textual interpretation. External information is not useful in establishing authorial intention except in the case of decontextualised texts. Authors can easily misconstrue their own intentions. They may cite an intention that was unsuccessfully conveyed and is therefore not part of the text's meaning. Intentions may change during the writing process. Interestingly Hardy edited the Jude The Obscure quote once the novel appeared. As Alexander Pope puts it: "Sir, let me see your work and you no more!”2 Hirsch's narrow definition of intention usefully excludes external comments, such as Hardy's note, terming them authorial plans. This disproves a leading example in the argument against the usefulness of authorial intention. A love poem may be written for money rather than love, but this cannot be determined from the lines of the emergent poem. Hirsch would argue that the poet's primary intention was to write a love poem, and this can be determined from the text. Need of money is an external plan, the motivation for an intention rather than the intention itself. So to interpret Jude The Obscure we should derive authorial intent from the novel itself, discarding Hardy's note. There is also Gadamer’s argument3, which defines interpretation as a circular experience between text and reader where it is effectively the reader who is interpreted. If this

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

were the case authorial intention would not be useful at all, but I disagree. Gadamer has a point insofar as the reader has to construct meanings from the symbols of a text. However, an author who intended these symbols to mean something laid them down purposefully. Meaning should not transcend the limited possibilities of an author’s language. While Hirsch himself admits that his clinical definitions are muddied in reality, they make more sense than combining interpretation, understanding and application into one entity. The biggest shortfall of Gadamer’s theory, however, is that no reading of a text can be more valid than another. Authority can only lie in the readings of past critics, incorrectly elevated above the author. Dismissing the author has particularly important implications in interpreting religious texts; they lose their moral authority. On a Christian website Dr Michael Bauman angrily attacks critics “who think that the Bible’s meaning has nothing to do with the intention of either the God who inspired it or the people who wrote it”4. Whether Gadamer reflects the way things are is immaterial. If we can only speak to ourselves using others’ words, then analysis not only of authorial intention but everything we encounter in our lives is useless. Conversely, I do not agree with Hirsch’s assertion that a text meaning anything is tantamount to it meaning nothing. More accurate is that, in the practice of textual hermeneutics, a text meaning anything is no more useful than if it meant absolutely nothing. The concept of authorial intention can certainly be useful in literary interpretation, principally in assigning an objective meaning to works. Objective meaning is the sharable aspect of authorial intention that different readers of different eras can reach through their individual interpretive processes. Meaning should be interpreted on the basis of what authors successfully lay down in their texts. Hirsch emphasises that this does not prevent a text’s meaning being ambiguous, incomplete or profound. From this standpoint it could be said that T.S. Eliot’s poetry has an incomplete meaning but much scope for evaluation. Equally, there is such a thing as unconscious intention; a meaning sensitive to the language possibilities of the

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

time must have been intended by the author, irregardless of whether he or she accepts it. Author centred meaning does not prevent interpretation by creating historical and psychological gaps, it is more of a bridge. It is therefore reasonable to maintain that the “best” meaning of a text is that the author intended. Hirsch’s delineation between meaning and significance (evaluation) can be used to iron out ideological disputes about authorial intention. Radical historicism defines shifts in significance rather than meaning; it is not that the author’s intention is inaccessible, but that we cannot respond to a text in the same way an author’s contemporaries would have done. Similarly, the psychologist view should contend that each response to an author-based meaning is different. T.S. Eliot, seen as pioneer against interpretation based on authorial intention, has been misinterpreted. He merely saw textual autonomy as favourable to author psychology. The following words do not seem those of one who rejects an author: “To enjoy a poem under a misunderstanding as to what it is, is to enjoy what is merely a projection of our own mind . . . that to say one “gets enjoyment from” poetry does not sound quite the same as to say that one “enjoys poetry” ". Moreover, Eliot did not feel that meaning shifted between readers but as part of a changing literary tradition, where a new text changes the way some previous texts are perceived. In a Hirsch sense, Eliot is actually talking about a shift in significance here, and the use of authorial intent remains intact. Finally, authorial intention is useful for judging the validity of different interpretations. No interpretation can be either complete or definite, but the intention of the author is a normative principle against which likelihood can be gauged. Pierre Macherey5 views such ideals as a “normative fallacy”. He believes that since all texts are jagged and incomplete their gaps and omissions should also be included in interpretation. I contend however that interpretation should be based around what is unquestionably there, leaving other aspects to the field of criticism.

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

To sum up, in such an abstract field a counter-argument can be derived against any theory. Gadamer’s anti-author notions are not the “blunderbuss utterances” (De Molina, 1976) that they have often been condemned as. Nevertheless, this stance may be of more use in the field of philosophy than applied interpretation. Conversely, the main weakness of Hirsh’s theory is that he constructs an artificial framework around interpretation with his strict delineation between meaning and significance. It could be argued that Hamlet’s Oedipus complex is the result of Shakespeare’s extraordinary instinct about human behaviour, depicting sexual neurosis before Freud defined it. The anachronistic use of Freud is actually a valid piece of interpretation rather than evaluation, merely described using Twentieth Century jargon. Overall however Hirsch’s direction of thinking is the more convincing. The concept of authorial intention is therefore extremely useful, if not vital, in the interpretation of literary works, as it is the key to objective meaning.

2, 112 Words.

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

Bibliography Bauman, Dr. Michael (2000). The Ethics of Meaning: The Case for a Conservative Hermeneutic SUMMIT MINISTRIES http://www.summit.org/Resources/EthicsofMeaning.htm [Accessed 13/11/2000] Hammond, Brean S. Pope: Harvester New Readings Brighton: Harvester, 1986 Harris, Wendell V. Literary Meaning: Reclaiming The Study Of Literature London: Macmillan, 1996 Hardy, Thomas Penguin Classics: Jude The Obscure England: Penguin, 1998 Hirsch, E.D. Jr “Objective Interpretation” in Newton-de Molina, ed. On Literary Intention: Critical Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976 Hirsch, E.D., Jr. Validity in Interpretation New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967 Newton-de Molina, ed. On Literary Intention: Critical Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976 Poggemiller, Dwight, (1995). Hermenteutics and Epistemology: Hirsch's Author Centred Meaning, Radical Historicism And Gadamer's Truth and Method PREMISE II (8), 5. Pg. 10. Uniform Resource Locator http://capo.org/premise/95/sep/p950810 [Accessed 13/11/2000] Sartre, Jean-Paul, trans. Baldick, Robert Nausea Great Britain: Penguin Books, 1965 Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse 5 London: Vintage, 1991 Wimsatt, W.K., Beardsley, M.C. “The Intentional Fallacy” in Newton-de Molina, ed. On Literary Intention: Critical Essays. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1976

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Student 391422 Theories & Methodologies Essay: How Useful Is The Concept Of Authorial Intention In The Interpretation Of Literary Works?

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1 Described in Hirsch, E.D. Jr “Objective Interpretation” 2 Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, line 68, in Abrams, M.H. & Greenblatt, S ed. The Norton Anthology Of English Literature: Seventh Edition, Volume 1. USA, Norton, 1999 3 Described in “Gadamer’s Theory of Interpretation” in Hirsch, E.D. Jr, Validity In Interpretation (1967); and also Poggemiller, “Dwight, Hermeneutics and Epistemology: Hirsch's Author Centred Meaning, Radical Historicism And Gadamer's Truth and Method” (1995) 4 Bauman, Dr. Michael (2000). “The Ethics of Meaning: The Case for a Conservative Hermeneutic” 5 Mentioned in Hammond, Brean S. Pope. Harvester New Readings. Brighton: Harvester, 1986