“Death found an author writing his life” (E. Hull, 1827).
Since
the 1940s among professors of literature, attributing significance to authors’
intentions has been taboo and déclassé. The phrase literary work, which implies
a worker, has been replaced in scholarly practice — and in the classroom — by
the clean, crisp syllable text, referring to nothing more than simple words on
the page. Since these are all we have access to, the argument goes,
speculations about what the author meant can only be a distraction. Thus, texts
replaced authors as the privileged objects of scholarly knowledge, and the
performance of critical operations on texts became essential to the scholar’s
identity. In 1967, the French critic Roland Barthes tried to cement this
arrangement by declaring once and for all the “Death of the Author,” adding
literary creators to the long list of artifacts that have been dissolved in
modernity’s skeptical acids. Authors, Barthes argued, have followed God, the
heliocentric universe, and (he hoped) the middle class into oblivion. Michel
Foucault soon added the category of “the human” to the list of
soon-to-be-extinct species.
Barthes
also saw a bright side in the death of the author: it signaled the “birth of
the reader,” a new source of meaning for the text, which readers would provide
themselves. But the inventive readers who could replace the author’s ingenuity
with their own never actually materialized. Instead, scholarly readers,
deprived of the author as the traditional source of meaning, adopted a battery
of new theories to make sense of the orphaned text. So what Barthes’s clever
slogan really fixed in place was the reign in literary studies of
Theory-with-a-capital-T. Armed with various theoretical instruments —
structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, to name just a few — critics could now
pierce the verbal surface of the text to find hidden meanings and purposes
unknown to those who created them.
But
authorship and authorial intention have proven not so easy to dispose of. The
most superficial survey of literary studies will show that authors remain a
constant point of reference. The texts upon which theoretically informed
readers perform their operations continue for the most part to be edited with
the authors’ intentions in mind, and scholars continue to have recourse to
background information about authors’ artistic intentions, as revealed in
public pronouncements, private papers, and letters, though they do so with
ritual apologies for committing the “intentional fallacy.” Politically minded
critics, of which there are many, cannot avoid authors and their intended
projects. And this is just a hint of the author’s continuing presence. All the
while, it goes without saying, scholars continue to insist on their own
authorial privileges, highlighting the originality of their insights while duly
recording their debts to others. They take the clarity and stability of meaning
in their own works as desirable achievements while, in the works created by
their subjects, these qualities are presumed to be threats to the freedom of
the reader.
Fortunately
or unfortunately, it is impossible to get rid of authors entirely because the
signs that constitute language are arbitrarily chosen and have no significance
apart from their use. The dictionary meanings of words are only potentially
meaningful until they are actually employed in a context defined by the
relation between author and audience. So how did it happen that professors of
literature came to renounce authors and their intentions in favor of a way of
thinking — or at least a way of talking — that is without historical precedent,
has scant philosophical support, and is to most ordinary readers not only
counterintuitive but practically incomprehensible?
The
question would take a volume to answer, but any sketch, like the one I offer
here, would have to begin by admitting that authors certainly had it coming. In
modern culture — specifically, since the late 18th century — authors acquired a
status and importance that was entirely new. For the most part, authors of the
past, like other artists, relied for the content of their works upon familiar
stories and publicly accepted truths. In the European West, that meant the
truths of the Christian religion and of classical, aristocratic culture.
Literature was always a servant, never a master. Its messages and meanings were
not in doubt and did not depend upon the author alone, though many authors —
Dante and Milton come especially to mind — approached inherited truths with the
boldness of personal insight. Their grand vernacular works signaled a growing
rupture in the Christian consensus.
It was,
of course, traditional for religious authors to invoke divine inspiration, but
this only marked the author’s secondary role as the mere vehicle of higher
intentions. When the consensus about those intentions gradually dissolved
between the 16th and 18th centuries, authors were cast adrift from their higher
authorities, but they benefited from the very forces that signaled the change —
individualism in all its manifestations, the rise of Lockean empiricism, which
privileged immediate experience over metaphysical insight or tradition, and the
emergence of a middle-class audience of literate consumers. Freed from the
encumbrances of church and patron, authors could address a general audience
directly in print. Authorship became a profession, and authors became the
beneficiaries and privileged observers of the new freedom of modern life, while
inventing a great literary form, the novel, to express it. Poets were slower to
react to the new conditions, but eventually they found an untapped source of moral
authority and wisdom in Nature, to which their poetry could give vibrant
expression.
Once the
natural world and the life of individuals in society replaced traditional truth
as the source of literary meaning, novelists and poets found themselves in a
remarkably elevated position. It became the very definition of the artist to be
closer to the key elements of experience — Nature and Life. Divine faculties
like creativity, vision, inspiration, and the power to create living symbols
now became the possessions of individual writers. In America, Ralph Waldo
Emerson took this doctrine to its extreme. When the poet, he writes, takes up
the
“great
public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors,
and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he
caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is
law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.”
The
elevation of the literary author as the great purveyor of experience had
profound effects. Now the past history of literature could be read as the
production of superior souls speaking from their own experience. In the minds
of Victorian readers, for example, understanding the works of Shakespeare
involved following the poet’s personal spiritual and psychological journey,
beginning with the bravery of the early histories and the wit of the early
comedies, turning in mid-career to the visceral disgust with life evinced in
the great tragedies, and arriving, finally, at the high plane of detachment and
acceptance that comes into view in the late romances. Not the cause of Hamlet’s
suicidal musings but the cause of Shakespeare’s own disillusionment — that was
the question that troubled the 19th century. This obsession with Shakespeare’s
great soul was wonderfully mocked by James Joyce in the library chapter of
Ulysses.
It was
not only literary history that could be reinterpreted in the heroic manner. For
the boldest advocates of Romantic imagination, all of history became
comprehensible now through the biographies of the great men who made it. Poets
like Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton were no longer spokesmen for their
cultures but its creators; as Percy Shelley famously put it, poets were the
“unacknowledged legislators of the world.” To be a Romantic poet was to enroll
in this prophetic company, which included spiritual giants like Buddha,
Socrates, and Jesus, the imaginative men who set the vocabulary and meaning for
the rest of us. Emerson and Nietzsche brilliantly embroidered the theme; a
Freudian variant of it was still being championed in recent decades by Harold Bloom.
Unfortunately,
the role of legislator, increasingly acknowledged and increasingly demanding,
was a tall one for authors to live up to. Even Life and Nature as sources of
experience turned out to be limited resources for the artist because experience,
in order to be interesting, demands novelty. The traditional accounts of truth
offered by religion and philosophy made severe demands on the reader; they were
inherently inexhaustible and subject to endless repetition. Modern accounts of
experience, on the other hand, are simply consumed and thereby exhausted. This
consumption thus requires endless new products, new horizons. So modern
literary authors found themselves in competition with each other for novelties
of experience. By the late 19th century, they were reaching for more and more
extreme sources of inspiration — insanity, perversity, intoxication — and
moving into the less explored regions of the world — the colonies — in search
of variety and adventure.
With the
increasing pessimism and skepticism of the late 19th century, the most
scrupulous authors were struggling to impose meaningful shape on experience; as
a result, they felt compelled to make the very problem of storytelling a
central concern. Another artistic strategy was to leave the rendering of Life
to more popular authors while pursuing artistic experiments that would appeal
to a literary elite. The French Symbolists took refuge in the eccentricity of
private or mystic symbolism, while the practitioners of “art for art’s sake”
stressed style and form as substitutes for meaning. “Life imitates Art more
than Art imitates Life,” Oscar Wilde decreed, giving a last salute to the
legislator-poet while pulling the rug out with the caveat that “Art expresses
nothing but itself.”
So, to
return to the “Death of the Author,” not only did authors have it coming; they
largely enacted their own death by making the renunciation of meaning — or even
speech — a privileged literary maneuver. They set themselves above the vulgar
garrulity of traditional forms to pursue subtle but evanescent sensations in an
almost priestly atmosphere. Not all artists, of course, took this path. At the
same time that Gustave Flaubert was downgrading the subject matter of
literature to the status of a mere excuse for style, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was
developing the realistic novel to its fullest polemical potential. But the
avant-garde of the future would see itself in Flaubert and the Symbolists more
than in the realistic works of Dostoyevsky, Dickens, or Zola, and it was the
former conception of literature that would hold weight for literary critics in
the 20th century. This was especially true of poetry critics, the most
influential being T. S. Eliot.
Eliot
took his turn at deflating the legislator-poet. “Poetry,” he wrote, “is a
superior amusement.” At the same time, he offered a new and grand image of the
poet as participating in the creation of an “ideal order” of masterpieces, a
“tradition” held together not by a common doctrine but by a certain rightness
of feeling achieved by the suppression of self. The poet’s job, according to
Eliot, was not to express his own personality but to find in words an “objective
correlative” for the feelings demanded by the work. Poetry is not an expression
of but an “escape from personality.” Its quality is due not to the intensity of
the poet’s emotions but to the intensity of the artistic process. What moves us
in poetry is not ideas, not meanings, but words properly chosen for an artistic
end. In Eliot’s formulation, the great soul of the Romantic legislator-poet is
replaced by an impersonal craftsmanship of verbal impressions.
The
poetic form in which Eliot expressed his impersonality set a further challenge
to the familiar stance of the author. In the dense collage of The Waste Land,
he broke the authorial “I” into multiple voices floating unsteadily among
borrowed words. It was as if the broken fragments of Eliot’s tradition were
speaking all at once. Beneath this texture of suggestion, of course, the myth
of the Grail Quest loomed as a structuring metaphor. Meaning was by no means
banished, but it had become elusive, with an epicenter buried deep underground.
Here the story takes an interesting turn because the implantation of a mythic
substrate under the surface of The Waste Land — a method borrowed from Ulysses
— was itself indebted to psychoanalysis, the glamorous new psychology of the
time.
Psychoanalysis
gave a new lease to authorial biography and provided a new stance toward
authors. Instead of viewing artistic works in the Romantic manner, as the
exhalations of great souls, psychoanalysis claimed to uncover in them an array
of incestuous and aggressive fantasies, the disguised symptoms of neurosis and
childhood trauma. It should not be forgotten that Freud originally introduced
his theory of the Oedipus complex in an act of literary criticism directed at
Hamlet — the quintessential great soul — whose problem turned out to be not
that he was too good for this world, as Romantic readers believed, but that he was
struggling with hidden incestuous desires. Psychoanalysis thus offered a way of
continuing the modern obsession with biography while inverting its stance from
hero-worshipping to unmasking. No wonder the great modernists like Joyce,
Eliot, and Lawrence were so hostile toward it. From now on the critic, instead
of genuflecting to the genius-author, would take the upper hand, uncovering the
hidden and embarrassing sources of a decidedly non-divine creativity. Joyce
called this critical process “blackmail.” It is one of the puzzles of recent
criticism that scholars insist on the inaccessibility and irrelevance of
authors’ conscious intentions while exhibiting such confidence in the discovery
of unconscious ones, even long after Freudian “science” has been thoroughly
debunked.
So the
author’s role in the creation of literary meaning suffered a long decline,
partly because that role had been inflated and personalized beyond what was
sustainable, partly because authors found value in the panache of renouncing
it, and partly because critics welcomed the new sources of authority offered by
Freudian, Marxist, and other modes of suspicious decoding. Up to this point,
the dethroning of the author centered entirely on the relation between
authorial psychology and the creation and value of literary works; it did not
question that the author’s intentions played an important role in determining a
work’s actual meaning. That step was taken in a famous article called “The
Intentional Fallacy” by the distinguished literary critic William Wimsatt and
the philosopher of aesthetics Monroe Beardsley. Wimsatt and Beardsley argued
that authors’ intentions are “neither available nor desirable” in understanding
or judging a literary work, that all the critic needs is a dictionary and
whatever historical information is necessary to comprehend the words and
allusions in the text. Biographical information, under which they placed
authorial intention, was completely irrelevant. Since that time, the phrase
“intentional fallacy” has become a watchword for the taboo on intentions that
protects the sacred autonomy of the text.
On one
level, the “Intentional Fallacy” offered a beneficial corrective to
biographical reductionism, one that should have applied to unconscious as well
as conscious intentions. Wimsatt and Beardsley were right to say that an
author’s personal associations with her subject matter are irrelevant to the
public meaning of her work: an author’s private papers, however interesting in
themselves, need not be authoritative for critical understanding. They were also
right to say that our standards for judging a literary work need not be the
same as the author’s. Unfortunately, however, Wimsatt and Beardsley made a
crucial mistake when they missed the distinction between an author’s artistic
and her communicative intentions. For the most part, literary works aim to
achieve artistic effects by saying something — telling a story, describing a
scene, expressing a thought. When we interpret literary works, we are trying to
understand which among the possible meanings of the verbal text are the ones
actually being transmitted. Such communicative intentions succeed simply if the
audience recognizes what they are. Transparency of meaning is enough. Wimsatt
and Beardsley got this right regarding what they call “practical messages,” but
they denied that this method applies to literary works because, in their view,
literary works do not actually say anything and because their authors’ minds
are inaccessible outside of the text.
They
were, in effect, conforming to the Wildean maxim that “Art expresses nothing
but itself.” What they missed is that texts, like other verbal utterances, are
composed with the understanding that the reader will be able to infer what the
author means; the text cannot be considered a free-standing avatar of meaning.
As Paul Grice later explained, it is the knowledge that the speaker has chosen
the utterance with the intention to be understood on a particular occasion that
enables the audience to infer a determinate meaning. It is only because you
know I have chosen these words to mean something definite that you bother to
figure out what it may be. Few sentences in natural languages have only one
possible interpretation regardless of context, and the possibilities for
interpretation increase as sentences are joined together. So the collaborative,
mutually anticipatory efforts of authors and readers cannot be eliminated.
Only by
grasping what a work is saying do we access what a work is actually doing. The
distinction between communicative and artistic levels of intention, between
saying and doing, is easy to grasp in the case of an oral genre like the joke.
Jokes fail on the communicative level if we don’t get them, if we are unable to
determine what the joker means to say or even that she is making a joke. But
the joke can succeed on this level and still fail as a joke if the audience,
while getting the meaning, does not find it funny. Being funny requires more
than communicating the intention to be funny by saying a certain thing; the
intended meaning has to satisfy an aesthetic requirement — that it be, in fact,
worth laughing at. But that will never happen if the intended meaning doesn’t
get across in the first place. Seven decades of critical confusion could have
been avoided if Wimsatt and Beardsley had recognized the distinction.
Authors’
intentions are of special interest to critics because critics want to know
which among the text’s possible meanings were intended by the author and which
were not. To determine this, they need the most sensitive possible grasp of the
author’s context and expected audience. The author’s larger artistic designs do
also have an undeniable interest, but recognizing what they are is not crucial
to deciphering the work in the same way that communicative intentions are.
Wimsatt and Beardsley were right: poems and novels, like jokes, have to do more
than communicate. They have to work. But in order for them to work, we have to
grasp what they are in the first place.
Just as
the Symbolists and decadents of the fin-de-siècle sought to purify their
writings from the vulgarity of didactic meaning in pursuit of a certain
decadent spirituality, so there was a tinge of religious asceticism among the
motives of major literary theorists during this period. Their aim was to
marginalize both authorial intention and literary statement in favor of
something higher. For C. S. Lewis, the most openly Christian among them,
leaving behind authorial intention allowed an escape “from the vulgarity of
confession to the disinfected and severer world of lyric poetry.” There was
also a positive aspect to this process, since the claim that literature does
not make statements — that it works by dramatic tension and internal irony
rather than by offering a view of the world — provided a new defense of
literature. Indeed, it provided a new literary ideology, which came to be known
as the New Criticism, the key claims of which were that literary language is
too complex and ambiguous to be reduced to a simple statement and that such
irreducible complexity and ambiguity are not drawbacks but give literary
language its special value. To state the meaning of a poem or a novel would be
to deflate its tensions though the “heresy of paraphrase”; the critic’s job is
to discover the poem’s internal riches — its ironies, ambiguities, and tensions
— not to resolve but to rehearse them in a somewhat ritual fashion.
Many poems,
naturally, do have speakers recognizably different from the author, and many
novels do have narrators who are also characters in the story. Other poems and
novels do not, and readers have to figure out, on a case-by-case basis, which
is which. But the New Critics suppressed such distinctions. For them, all
literature became dramatic, voiced by dramatic speakers and therefore subject
to the same method of interpretation — the teasing out of multiple ironies and
ambiguities. The ability of the New Critics to provide a single, clearly
delineated procedure was one of the chief reasons for their success. That
method depended especially upon “close reading,” focusing minutely on
linguistic texture to the exclusion of history, biography, and intellectual controversy.
New Criticism thus came as a relief from Cold War ideological tensions, and it
launched a grand project — the irony-oriented reinterpretation of all previous
literature, which in the United States furnished a neatly streamlined task to a
professoriate rapidly expanding under the G. I. Bill. However esoteric the
conception behind the New Criticism, its effects were strikingly democratic.
It is
interesting to note that the figure of the poet marginalized in the New
Criticism was not necessarily a generic practitioner from the distant past.
Since the 1930s, poetry criticism in American periodicals and academic journals
had been dominated by a distinguished cadre of poet-critics, some of them
offering their own brands of close reading — figures like John Crowe Ransom,
Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, William Empson, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell,
Robert Penn Warren, R. P. Blackmur, and W. H. Auden. The label “New Criticism,”
invented by Ransom, originally referred to this trend toward close reading, but
once “The Intentional Fallacy” established that it was not poets but poetic
speakers who speak in poetry, non-poet-critics were no longer at a
disadvantage. Poets would henceforth be debarred from their legislative office
even in the realm of poetry.
New
Criticism offered a standardized method for everyone — poets, students, and
critics alike. Eliot called it the “lemon-squeezer school” of criticism. His
grand, impersonal stance, which governed the tastes of a generation, had
undoubtedly done a great deal to shape the detached attitude of criticism that
emerged in the wake of “The Intentional Fallacy,” but his influence as a
poet-legislator was also one of that article’s targets. Not only were Eliot’s
critical judgments the expression of an unmistakably personal sensibility, but
he had inadvertently stirred up trouble by adding his own notes to The Waste
Land, the poem that otherwise offered the ideal object for New Critical
decipherment. In order to short-circuit the poet’s attempt to control the
reading of his own work, Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that the notes to The
Waste Land should not be read as an independent source of insight into the author’s
intention; instead, they should be judged like any other part of the
composition — which amounts to transferring them, implicitly, from the purview
of the literary author to that of the poetic speaker. Thus, rather than
providing an undesirable clarification of its meaning, the notes were to be
judged in terms of the internal drama of the poem itself. Few scholars of Eliot
took this advice, showing once again the difficulty of abiding by the
intentional taboo.
The
marginalizing of authorial intention in favor of the empirically concrete text
was part of a wider mid-20th-century intellectual trend — the suspicion of mind
itself. Since the 1920s, philosophical critics like John Dewey and I. A.
Richards had been looking for ways to explain art, including poetry, in vaguely
evolutionary terms, as a homeostatic mechanism for maintaining the balance of
the psyche. In the United States, the 1930s and ’40s were dominated by
scientistic philosophies — logical positivism, pragmatism, and behaviorism —
which sought not just to explain mental processes but to explain them away. Not
till the late 1950s, with Noam Chomsky’s attack on behaviorism and the development
of Grice’s account of intentionality in conversation, followed by the rise of
Speech-Act Theory and cognitive science in the 1960s, would the concept of mind
make a comeback.
In
literary studies, however, the return of mind and the study of language as a
communicative medium were largely thwarted, first by the delayed arrival of
structuralism and then by deconstruction as instigated by Jacques Derrida and
Paul de Man. Deconstructionists, in a spirit akin to the New Critics,
discovered necessarily elusive and paradoxical qualities not just in literary
language but in all language — often accompanied, in canonical texts, by a
knowingness about language’s essentially figurative and myth-making qualities.
Deconstruction thus provided another author-marginalizing way of decoding
literary and philosophical works. Though Derrida’s own attitude toward
authorial intentional was complicated, professors of literature leaned heavily
on his saying, “There is nothing outside the text”: both authorial intention
and reference to the extra-textual world were short-circuited by an analysis of
linguistic function.
In
hindsight we can see that the long-term result of the trend Barthes called the
“Death of the Author” was that meaning emigrated in all directions — to mere
texts, to functions of texts like poetic speakers and implied authors, to the
structures of language itself apart from speakers, to class and gender
ideologies, to the unconscious, and to combinations of all of these, bypassing
authors and their intentions. While following these various flights, critics
have nonetheless continued to rely upon authorial intention in the editing and
reading of texts, in the use of background materials, in the advocacy of
political agendas, in the establishing of their own intellectual property, and
in many other ways. The persistence of the author has been vividly in evidence
during the last year, for example, in the bicentennial discussions of Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein. Not only have Shelley’s personal politics been a focus
of attention, but her personal experiences, especially the experience of
motherhood, have played a great part in the reading of her famous work even
though they are not among its explicit subjects. This is just the kind of
“intentional fallacy” that Wimsatt and Beardsley were determined to squelch.
While
they were in the ascendant, both New Criticism and deconstruction had a
leveling effect on literary interpretation. All works of literature turned out
to be either demonstrations of literary ambiguity or of the referential
instability of language itself. These practices have left their mark upon
current critical attitudes, but few scholars and teachers are still reading
strictly by their lights. So why does it matter at this late date if literary
scholars continue to reject the notion of intention in theory, given that they
no longer avoid it in practice? Of the many reasons, I will note four.
First,
the simple contradiction between theory and practice undermines the
intellectual coherence of literary studies as a whole, cutting it off both from
practitioners of other disciplines and from ordinary readers, including
students in the classroom. In an age when the humanities struggle to justify
their existence, this does not make that justification any easier.
Second,
the removal of the author from the equation of literature, even if only in
theory, facilitates the excessive recourse to hidden sources of meaning —
linguistic, social, economic, and psychological. It gives license to habits of
thought that resemble paranoia, or what Paul Ricoeur has called “the
hermeneutics of suspicion.” Just as the New Critics feared the stability of
meaning they associated with the reductive language of science, so critics on
the left fear the stability of meaning they associate with the continuing power
of metaphysics and tradition. Such paranoia is a poor antidote to naïveté. It
puts critics in a position of superiority to their subjects, a position as
unequal as the hero-worshipping stance of the 19th century, giving free rein to
what E. P. Thompson memorably called “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
Third,
the question regarding which kinds of authorial intention are relevant to which
critical concerns is still a live and pressing one, as the case of Frankenstein
suggests.
Fourth
and finally, objectifying literary authors as mere functions of the text, or
mere epiphenomena of language, is a radically dehumanizing way to treat them.
For a discipline that is rightly concerned with recovering suppressed voices
and with the ways in which all manner of people can be objectified,
acquiescence to the objectification of authors is a temptation to be resisted.
As Hegel pointed out long ago in his famous passage on masters and slaves, to
degrade the humanity of others with whom we could be in conversation is to
impoverish our own humanity.
Why
Literature Professors Turned Against Authors — Or Did They? By John Farrell.
Los Angeles Review of Books , January 13, 2019.
A book published in 2008 carried the provocative
title French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the
Intellectual Life of the United States. The claim that any set of French
thinkers since Montesquieu and Diderot has transformed intellectual life in the
United States — as welcome as that proposition may sound to some — would not
seem to bear serious consideration in the early decades of a century that began
with a concerted attempt to establish “freedom fries” as the designation for
potatoes in their most ubiquitously edible form. That is, one would laugh the
title off the shelves were it not for the acceptance in university and college
humanities departments across the country of assumptions about and attitudes
toward literature that came to full flower in Paris contemporaneously with the
Vietnam War and its immediate aftermath. Those assumptions and attitudes
reflected a deepening hostility to the conception of authorship that had
prevailed in Europe and North America for at least two centuries, the
conception of authors writing works intended to represent the world as those
authors saw it, or to embody meanings of their choosing in what they considered
the most appropriate language for those meanings.
Though
these new assumptions are old hat by now, it might be worth laying them up
succinctly, with the help of an authoritative source. In his essay “The Death
of the Author,” which was published in English in 1967, Roland Barthes wrote:
“[A]
text is made 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. The reader is the space on which all the quotations
that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s
unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”
Here the
critic was elaborating a literary theory that had been gradually developing,
and not entirely in France, for about 50 years, one that moved the center of
attention away from the author — her personal history, her other writings, and
her opinions — and toward the text as the sole site of meaning and importance.
For Barthes, giving credit to an author for a work of imagination amounted to
propaganda on behalf of capitalist ideology.
It would
be unfortunate if the somewhat dry and retrograde title of John Farrell’s book
The Varieties of Authorial Intention (2017) were to discourage the general
reader from buying it — and anyone not discouraged by the title might be by its
price, which on Amazon is $99. At that price, it ought, one may feel, to
include four-color fold-out maps of every continent and island on the planet,
along with variorum reproductions of every article and essay discussed. Lacking
these attractions, it relies on Farrell’s ability to summon a persuasive
account of how literary criticism has developed over the past century and to
focus a sustained attack on the textualist school of literary theory, which
has, as Farrell notes, so far triumphed in academia that it is unusual to find
any professor of literature who has resisted it. If the textualists like
Barthes deny the relevance of an author’s intentions to her work, Farrell, a
professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College in California, does not
hesitate to investigate their intentions, which are, he believes, in part
defensive:
“For
many scholars, the fact that a literary work is grounded in stable authorial
intentions seems to portend the closing off of possibilities, and the fact that
authors create the substance which later interpreters work upon threatens to
devalue studies of mediation and reception.”
In
short, scholars who subscribe to the textualist credo betray an anxiety about
having to follow the author’s lead. If the author’s intentions have to be, at
the very least, considered, the reader’s (that is to say, the scholar’s) field
of operation is accordingly narrowed, whereas if the author’s intentions can be
ruled out of court as inadmissible, the reader may do as he pleases with the
text. Indeed, the reader may consider himself to be as necessary to the text as
the author, which amounts to a substantial advancement of the reader’s prestige
and a concomitant devaluation of the author’s. If nothing else, signing on as a
textualist assures the reader of an immediate boost in status.
As a
historian of ideas, Farrell — whose previous books dealt with the history of
paranoia in Western literature and the formation of some of the crucial
concepts in Freud’s theory of the psyche — looks back to T. S. Eliot, C. S.
Lewis, and the so-called New Criticism to descry the initial moves in the
theoretical marginalization of the author. Eliot’s aim, Farrell says, was “to
free art, and himself, from the ordinary life of emotions and practicalities.”
The disenfranchisement of the author achieved fuller form in 1946, when William
K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled “The Intentional
Fallacy,” asserting that a poem, once it is published, belongs to the public,
not the author. “It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the
public,” they wrote, “and it is about the human being, an object of public
knowledge. What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any
statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology.” Wimsatt and
Beardsley argued that the “intention of the author is neither available nor
desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art”
Two
decades later a few French philosophers and literary theorists carried this
idea even further. Michel Foucault, in a lecture delivered at the Collège de
France, proclaimed that “the writing subject cancels out the signs of his
particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to
nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of
the dead man in the game of writing.” In his book, Farrell submits the
textualist argument to rigorous scrutiny, building the case against it with
meticulous scholarship. Underlying the textualist position is, he maintains, a
hostility both to the rational bourgeois individual, the most public
manifestation of which is the author, and to the common terms on which the
bourgeois author and reader must agree:
“Mistrust
of language is a signature of modernity, but language does not have the
autonomous power to shape reality that its theorists often claim. It requires
the guarantee of intention behind it in order to license the interpreter’s
remarkable powers of inference, and these inferences require common knowledge
of the world shared by author and audience, the knowledge against the
background of which their language developed in the first place.”
Farrell
distinguishes between three types of authorial intention: the communicative,
the artistic, and the practical. The author’s communicative purposes are the
most basic: they supply the meanings of the sentences and the work as a whole.
Only after these meanings have been grasped does the reader begin to appreciate
the work’s artistic qualities. Through these artistic maneuvers, the author
conveys her mastery of language, imagery, metaphor, and narrative forms. The
author’s practical intentions are those that lie behind her decision to write a
literary work, and they may include elements of narcissism, egotism, financial
need, or idealism. Literature operates, Farrell contends, in much the same way
jokes do. “Jokes can fail because we don’t get them or because even when we do
get them they fail to be funny. Mere recognition of the joker’s intention is
enough for success on the first level, but the second level requires much
more.”
Farrell
denies that the text of any literary work is self-sufficient, having slipped
away from the author and no longer under the sway of her intentions, whatever
they may have been:
“When we
read literary texts it is people we are trying to understand — people under
varying historical circumstances. It is their creative actions we are trying to
appreciate, not mere collections of words. These actions come to us having
already made their impact on many other people in intervening generations who
have inflected them in their own ways. Dealing with people as historical agents
is uncomfortable, difficult, exasperating; making judgments about them can be
even more so.”
About
the time of World War II, philosophy began to rub elbows with linguistics —
specifically, Claude Lévi-Strauss encountered Roman Jakobson at the New School
for Social Research in New York, and the former found in the latter possible
insights into the way concepts are formed. One of the lessons that philosophers
drew from linguistics was that there is no necessary relation between the
signifier and the signified. Some philosophers eventually satisfied themselves
that language describes nothing but itself. It is language that speaks through
literary works, not the person whose name is on the title page. Not
surprisingly, Farrell rejects this form of Whorfianism: “It is one of the
ironies of literary theory that the surface intentions of authors have been set
out of bounds as inaccessible while unconscious intentions, though inaccessible
to the artist, have become routine for theorists to decode.”
Farrell
is also dubious about what he calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” the
eagerness of scholars to detect subtle forms of coercion and oppression in
literature. “For modern intellectuals,” he writes, “the very discovery that a
belief can be questioned is often sufficient to discredit it. Perhaps our
greatest credulity has been our reflexive openness to doubt.” Almost anything
written about a literary work should, according to the textualist rules of
criticism, look for evidence of its duplicity; the richest resources of
hermeneutics are those that subvert the surface meaning of a work of literary
imagination. But what drives this desire to subvert? It is rooted, Farrell
maintains, in a fear
“that if
we cannot change the meaning of texts inherited from the past, we cannot escape
their influence. We remain ruled by them. There is a deep metaphysical problem
with this idea, for the implication is that if we cannot change the past we
cannot act in an effective way regarding the future. But if we know anything
for sure, it is that we cannot change the past.”
Each
generation, Farrell points out,
“overthrows
the theory about the secret of art provided by the previous one, and each finds
itself overthrown in turn. All of the talk about the true nature of an art
depending upon expressing emotions or corresponding with social realities,
estrangement effects, or objective correlatives, was destined from its birth to
be fodder for the literary historian, providing background for the explication
of artistic intentions but without the explanatory force the author intended.”
The
author’s intentions, even when confidently known, do not wholly explain or
justify a literary work, but they do more or less illuminate it, and to rule
them inadmissible is perverse and foolhardy. “However difficult it may be to
discover what the author intended, his intentions do provide a stable object
for interpretation, and interpretations that do not accommodate that intention
cannot be correct,” he concludes.
Readers
of John Farrell’s books — Freud’s Paranoid Quest (1996), Paranoia and Modernity
(2003), and The Varieties of Authorial Intention (2017) — may be surprised to
find them largely innocent of the academic jargon. Literary theory, Farrell’s
chosen field in Varieties, is especially choked with verbal snares and muddy
patches where previous explorers have spun their wheels to little avail.
Indeed, one might imagine that almost everything being written about literary
theory today is intended for a select audience of Illuminati who are entirely
unacquainted with the books ordinary people read on airplanes or in buses or in
bed before turning out the light. The pages of Varieties are dense, but
Farrell’s writing is consistently clarifying and straightforward in its
presentation of ideas and arguments that are not, after all, difficult to
grasp. In this, his writing style contrasts with the oracular prose of the
“Death of the Author” school of critics as sharply as his conclusions differ
from theirs. The Varieties of Authorial Intention is a timely plaintiff’s
argument against the approach to literature and literary authors now heavily
favored on most college and university campuses in the United States, and while
Farrell’s case may be ignored in academia in the short run, confidence in the
ability of sound thinking ultimately to prevail over faddish theorizing must be
an article of faith with independent-minded readers.
The
Author Is Not as Dead as Claimed. By Robert Daseler. Los Angeles Review of Books, July 17, 2018.
Review
of the book : The Varieties of Authorial Intention : Literary Theory Beyond the
Intentional Fallacy. By John Farrell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
