Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

14.2 Intention
Unit 14 Authorship and intention
Section 3 Attributing meaning

The concept of the author is closely bound up with the notion of intention. Critical appeals to the notion of authorial intention are often made in order to authenticate the critic’s particular interpretation. But such appeals also indicate the anxiety that, if there was no way of accessing authorial intention as a guarantor of textual meaning, there would be no limit to the kinds of meanings that might be found, no way of judging whether we are misreading or over-interpreting, and no clear reason ever to stop reading the same text in endlessly different ways. But is this anxiety well founded? And if not, what factors other than authorial intention might serve to guide or limit interpretation? The history of literary criticism has typically approached the problem of textual meaning by focusing on three different aspects of the reading situation: the notion of authorial intention; the conventional forms or codes of the text itself; and the attribution or ascription of meaning by readers (or viewers). Different theories of interpretation typically differ in the respective degrees of priority they accord to one or more of these three elements. A consideration of these three aspects of reading can open up usefully different perspectives on the role of intention in shaping the meanings of a text.

14.2.1 Authorial intention

In the eighteenth century in particular, literary works were considered to be products of conscious intention. This assumption led to a particular way of reading, as encapsulated in another of Pope’s couplets in his Essay on Criticism: ’In every work regard the writer’s end / Since none can compass more than they intend’ (II, 255-6). At the close of the eighteenth century, however, Romantic writers began to claim that authors are not always fully conscious of the meaning or implications of their own literary works because they were produced in moments of ’inspiration’. The Romantic poet William Blake, for example, claims that, although John Milton tells us that he set out in Paradise Lost to ’justify the ways of God to men’, the poem itself reveals that Milton was actually ’of the Devil’s party without knowing it’. Yet the Romantics’ rejection of conscious intention still allows for interpretation to be anchored in authorial intention - as long as authorial intention is taken to include unconscious elements, such as the mysterious workings of the poetic imagination, that are not always readily available for conscious reflection, even by the author him- or herself.

In the early twentieth century, the view that creation emerges out of unconscious meanings or impulses not always available to conscious attention was given fresh impetus by psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung and others suggested that we are never fully conscious of our intentions because the unconscious mind can have an effect on what we say - and on what we don’t say - without our being aware of it. For Freud and Jung - though in different ways - the unconscious mind plays a major part in artistic creativity. Yet no agreed answer exists to the question of how far these claims undermine appeals to authorial intention. In some traditions of criticism and theories of interpretation (e.g. in hermeneutics), intention has continued to play an important part in claiming validity or legitimacy for textual interpretations. What seems certain, however, is that, in the light of psychoanalysis and other intellectual developments sceptical of authorial intention, straightforward confidence in the role played by intention in fixing meaning (for instance, the kind of confidence implicit in Pope’s couplet) can no longer be justified.

14.2.2 Intention versus the conventional forms or codes of the text itself

One common argument against the notion that the author’s intention is the ultimate arbiter of a text’s interpretation comes from the fact that meaningful forms are shared, social property. The words of a language, for example, exist and have conventional meanings before any particular speaker or writer uses them.

One development of this insight in literary criticism is the claim that the meanings of texts should be discoverable within texts themselves rather than by searching beyond them for an author’s intention. A particularly influential formulation of this view is the New Critical argument in W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley’s essay ’The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946). Concentrating on poetry (though similar arguments might be made about novels, films or other text types), Wimsatt and Beardsley set out the following reasons for not going outside the text in the search for authorial intention:

1 In most cases it is not possible to find out what the poet intended.

2 We are primarily interested in how a poem works, not what was intended.

3 A poem is a public rather than a private thing because it exists in language - which is by definition social rather than personal. The author does not own the text once it has been made public, and therefore does not have eternal authority over its meaning.

4 A poem’s meaning can only be discovered through its actual language, ’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’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946).

5 ’If the poet succeeded in doing [what he intended], then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do’ (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946).

The last of these points indicates, however, that Wimsatt and Beardsley were not rejecting the notion of authorial intention per se. They were, instead, trying to reject the practice of trying to look for intention outside the text itself - in diaries, anecdotes, biographies and so on. For Wimsatt and Beardsley, a successful poem embodies what its author intended. If we need to look outside the text to discover the author’s intention, then the poem has failed to embody its author’s intention and is therefore not worth bothering with.

A more radical development of the notion that meaning does not originate in the intentions of individual minds but in the shared conventions of language can be found in the structuralist literary theory that emerged in France in the 1960s. Developing Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim in the early twentieth century that individual speech acts are made possible by a pre-existing language system that is shared by all users of the language, structuralism argued that individual

literary texts are made possible and meaningful by a pre-existing literary system made up of conventional techniques and devices, such as the conventions of genre and the general symbolic codes of the culture. Structuralist literary theory minimized the role of the author and authorial intention in order to focus on the way individual literary texts relate to and help us understand the pre-existing literary system.

14.2.3 Inferencing: the attribution of meaning (and authorial intention) by readers

At the outset of this unit we said that it is our sense that a text (or art object) was designed by human agency that encourages us to believe that it will be worthwhile spending time interpreting it. This remains the case, even if we take into account the various critiques of authorship and intention that we have examined. Even if the unconscious mind does have an impact on literary creativity (and on everyday language usage), the conscious mind also plays a crucial role. Even if the author’s conscious mind is reduced to juggling the promptings of the unconscious mind on the one hand and mixing and reworking available codes and conventions on the other, it remains the case that successful authors do this with great skill and with conscious intentions about the effects and meanings of the resulting text.

Reading a text generally begins, then, by assuming that an author (or a group of authors) has designed that text in order to communicate meanings and effects that a reader will find it rewarding to discover or respond to. (If we were presented with a literary text written entirely by a computer, would we read it in the same way that we do texts written by human beings?) Assuming that the effort will be worth it, an interpreter searches for a text’s relevant implications by focusing on aspects of the text itself and of the immediate context (what kind of text is this? in what form does it appear? where is it from? who is its author? and so on). In addition, the interpreter may need to draw on more specific cultural knowledge that the text is also drawing on. Such interpretive activities allow the interpreter to select - often quickly and without conscious effort - the meaning that the speaker is likely to have foreseen in formulating the utterance or text in that way rather than any other.

The process of inferencing that we are describing here can be illustrated by a fictional example. Imagine the following dating ad in a magazine: ’Captain Kirk seeks Lieutenant Uhura to boldly go on voyages of discovery. Report to the command deck. Box 162.’ The immediate context is the magazine’s ’soul mate’ column: the column is recognizably one of a type in which men and women seek to establish long-term romantic relationships, and the reader assumes that this text is one of that type. To understand this particular advert, however, the reader has to access another kind of specific, culturally formed background knowledge - in this case the second or third Star Trek TV series (or one of the films). Thus the reader draws on general cultural assumptions plus more specific intertextual references that trigger what might be called ’subcultural’ assumptions. If a reader is able to interpret this ad in this way it reveals that both the reader and the author are co-members of a restricted subculture. In other words, reader and author have something in common, and this might indicate that they may be compatible romantic partners.

Such an account of interpretation therefore combines aspects of ’coded’ meaning with a further level of inference. Decoded meanings are used as input into an inferential process of filling out and constructing a relevant meaning in the particular context inferred for the text by the interpreter. To the extent that the text-producer and interpreter share assumptions that can be activated in interpretation, the interpreter’s computation of meaning is likely to resemble the author’s intention. Where assumptions mobilized differ significantly, however, the interpretation produced is likely to diverge from authorial intention. In the case of some texts or utterances (especially poetry, religious or mythical discourse, or other kinds of figurative or evocative language), the search for relevant meanings may produce a wide range of weakly implied meanings that border on meanings not intended by the author at all. In addition, in constructing a reading of a text or utterance, of any sort, the interpreter can always make inferences that will not have been in any way intended (or even foreseen) by the author. Such inferences may produce ’symptomatic’ interpretations that generate meanings for the text that are highly relevant to the reader - and possibly of great interest in the reader’s context - regardless of what the author may or may not have been trying to say. As a consequence, it would seem that, while the process of inferencing offers a good account of what readers actually do when trying to work out an author’s intention, it is not a fail-safe process and does not provide us with a clear-cut way of deciding between authorial intention and the reader’s own projections onto a text.