Dictionary of World Literature:
Criticism — Forms — Technique
Edited by JOSEPH T. SHIPLEY
(1943)
[SK's comments]
I couldn't find the 1943 edition online, but I found a circulating copy at the Los Angeles Public Library. Sclerotic bureaucracies aren't all bad, all the time.
[326]
INTENTION. Judgments about the author's intention appear in the processes of interpretation and evaluation of literary works.
The present article examines the meaning of such judgments, their role in criticism, and their mode of proof.
In referring to the meaning of a literary work, one should distinguish between
(1)
the meaning of the work itself,
and
(2)
the meaning that the author intended to express in the work.
These two mean-
[327]
ings are here called
"actual"
and
"intentional"
respectively.
Evidence that the work has
a certain actual meaning
is derived from
a study of the work itself,
the words in which it is written
and their syntax.
Included in the meaning of the words will be
their whole history
as far as determinable,
and
all the uses and associations
of the words that went to make up their value when the work was produced.
The meaning of the work
is
all that the ideal reader
can find in it;
and the ideal reader is the one
fully aware
of
the accepted value
of the words and
least influenced
in his interpretation by
idiosyncratic associations.
Since
no reader will ever be ideal
and
no two readers will ever read the work in exactly the same way,
it must be said that the meaning of the work lies
within an area of readings,
and is, like the pronunciation of language sounds,
a norm
(cf. René Wellek, "The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art," Southern R., VII, 1942).
(In the course of years
a work may undergo
a shift of meaning
in some of its words,
so that
one may have to distinguish
between
the work "then"
and
the work "now."
It is obvious that
in most cases
the meanings of words "then"
will have more relevance
to the total work
than the meanings "now.")
Of more importance than
the idiosyncrasies of the reader
are
those of the author,
the meanings that attach to the words in view of
his special share
in their history and associations.
Biographical study will be part of the total historical study that makes the work fully intelligible.
The author must be admitted as
a witness to the meaning
of his work,
and
one may even grant special validity to idiosyncratic associations of the author,
since
at least they will be relevant to the total design.
This kind of evidence,
however, must be distinguished from
the author's "intention."
Even though it were known, for example, that a given author
intended
the word "glory"
to mean
a "knock-down argument,"
the word "glory" in his work
could not be said
to have that meaning in any sense valid for the reader or the work itself.
The work after being produced
must continue to exist
independently
of the author's intentions or thoughts about it.
The idiosyncrasies of the author must not be
repugnant to the norm
Well, how could they not
be
?
(Or, is that precisely the point?)
(but cf. Joseph Wood Krutch, Experience and Art, 1932, p. 180–9).
Evidence that a work has a certain intentional meaning may be distinguished as
"internal"
or
"external."
But this distinction is not one that can always be
applied with certainty.
(1) The
normal meanings
of words
as determined in an historical dictionary or by other historical study
constitute
internal
evidence—even though one must
go outside
the work itself to find the meanings.
The
work itself
'incorporates' these
meanings
but you won't
find
them there.
(2) But information about an author's intention
aсquired through his letters,
diaries, or conversations
(such, for instance, as
the fact that a given poem is addressed to a given lady)
is likely to be in the fullest sense external evidence,
in that
the intentional meaning revealed
will lie outside
the meaning of the words
as far as
normally determinable.
(3) A kind of middle ground is occupied by certain types of information regarding the author's life and work.
The fact that he habitually attaches a certain meaning to a word may not be external evidence
(if the meaning does not lie fantastically beyond the norm),
for
the author's biography
is part of
the whole history
that makes up the meaning of the word.
Again, even more particular associations which may be learned through a study of the author's reading or sources may fall within a reasonable extension of the norm.
Professor J. L. Lowes's Road to Xanadu, 1930, is a classic exploration of just these types of border-line evidence.
The distinction bеtween (2) and (3) will always be difficult, but
the drift toward (2) will
in the long run
produce
a vastly different sort of criticism
from that which is concerned with (1) and moderately with (3).
To
infer the author's intention
from internal evidence
presupposes that
the actual and the intentional meanings
coincide;
but
where there is no external evidence
the critic cannot determine whether they coincide or not.
He may argue that, since the author is a reader of his own work, he will probably not publish it
if it actually means
what he does not intend
it to mean,
but
the author may supply as highly individual an interpretation to his words
when he reads them
as
when he writes them.
To infer the author's intention from external evidence, however, presupposes either
that the external evidence is corroborated by the internal evidence
(in which case the latter is made the ultimate verification)
or,
where there is a conflict,
that external evidence supplies
a more convincing indication
of the author's intention than the work itself.
This can never be the case,
since such external evidence
(consisting of reports of what the author said at some time before or after, or in pauses between, the composition of his work)
cannot,
in the first place,
be
as specific and concrete
[328]
a revelation of the author's state of mind during composition as
the work
that issues from
that state of mind,
and may, in the second place, be utterly misleading where the author's
avowed intention
is not
his real one.
These considerations are ignored by critics that speak of a disparity between intention and result
("In every work
regard the writer's End,
Since none can compass
more than they intend,"
Alexander Pope,
Essay on Criticism,
II, 255;
cf. I. A. Richards on "defective communication," Principles of Literary Criticism, 1934, ch. 25).
The widely-held theory that literary works should be judged with respect to their success in carrying out the author's intention has been called by H. L. Mencken the "Spingarn-Croce-Carlyle-Goethe Theory" ("Criticism of Criticism of Criticism," Criticism in America, 1924, р. 181).
But it is significant that, though Spingarn, in his lecture on "The New Criticism," 1910 (in Criticism in America, p. 43), called this "the only possible method" of criticism, he later modified his position (in "The Growth of a Literary Myth," 1923, Creative Criticism, 1931, p. 167-8) by adding that
the work itself is the "intention,"
and that
the author's aim can be detected internally in the work even where it is not realized.
A key move towards Eco-Semiotism,
perhaps already in 1923.
The story stays the same while the
evidence
changes!
This is surely a self-contradictory proposition [... many more citations ...]
A work may indeed fall short of what the critic thinks should have been intended, or what the author was in the habit of doing, or what one might expect him to do,
but
there can be no evidence,
internal or external,
that the author had
conceived something
which he did not execute.
Statements to the effect that a given work does not coincide with the author's intention
contain an ambiguity
in the word "intention."
In some cases the statement is relatively trivial, and means, say, that the author intended to write a novel of the breadth and power of War and Peace, but succeeded only in producing a large but ill-assorted collection of incidents.
But though it might be interesting to know how mistaken the author was
in his appraisal
of the work or of his intention,
such knowledge is not
knowledge about the work as such.
In other cases "intention" is
an abbreviation for
"whole actual meaning";
and though critics have found this a convenient abbreviation, it would be less misleading to speak of
the "intent of the work."
A judgment in which the term "intention" is used in this sense is likely to mean that certain parts of the work
could be changed,
and conceivably might have been changed
by the author, so as to improve the work as a whole.
What is "intended" in a given detail is, then,
what,
on grounds of relevance to
the whole meaning,
ought to be said.
It is what the work itself ought to say at a given point, or, if we like, what the author ought to say.
Such value-judgments often take the form:
this technique
[...]
is good (or bad)
in that
it helps (or does not help)
to secure the effect as a whole.
And such judgments often appear to
assume a distinction
between
elements of the work
that are to be called
'means'
and others that are to be called
'ends,'
between
the 'how'
and
the 'what'
[...]
And this distinction is a very slippery one.
We may be tempted to say,
for example,
that the solemnity of a certain elegy is marred because the poem is written in a certain meter,
and that,
since the effect of the meter interferes with the solemnity, the meter is a bad means of achieving the solemn effect.
Yet
since the quality of the meter is just as much an element of the whole meaning
as the solemnity of certain words,
we have not really separated means from ends,
but have segregated
two aspects of the whole or the end
(because we feel a conflict between them)
and have
judged one with respect to the other.
We may have good reasons for selecting one quality as the essential quality of the work, with respect to which other qualities are to be called the means:
the solemn elegiac quality may predominate,
despite the meter,
and
it may seem sensible,
in judging how the whole could be made a more effective unity,
to wish altered that aspect which may be more easily altered.
Nevertheless, the end-means distinction remains an abstract one.
For
the ends and means in poetry are never actually separable from each other,
as are the things in the physical world which are usually and literally called ends and means [...]
[329]
The point becomes clearer when the
problem is approached from the side,
not of technique,
but of what is called 'subject-matter'
[...]
А commonly occurring type of judgment implies that two works
have the same 'subject,'
while
one expresses it better
than the other.
It is possible to compare two lyrics expressing a lover's melancholy, to abstract this common characteristic, to express it in prose, and to call this the 'common subject' of the two lyrics.
The fallacy arises if we then proceed to
take the abstraction
as the 'what'
of the poems
and to treat
everything else in them
as the 'how'
to be judged with reference to the 'what.'
For
the point at which we have here drawn the line between the 'matter' and the 'manner'
is even more arbitrary than that in the preceding paragraph:
for
it does not here, as it did there, mark a distinction between a set of elements that possess a certain unity and other elements that conflict with this unity.
We might think of the same poems as expressing simply melancholy, and then we should have
a more general 'what,'
and more of the meaning of the poem would go into the 'how';
we could say that the poet used a good means of symbolizing melancholy when he chose the case of the lover.
In like manner, if we were to compare only poems that express the melancholy of adolescent love, we should have
a more specific 'whatness'
and a more restricted 'howness.'
For particular purposes of focussing attention on different 'whatnesses,' it is convenient to draw the line at different points on different occasions—though the more general the classification, the less illuminating will be the comparison.
It would be fruitless to compare a lyric and a novel in so far as their common subject is conflict, and then to ask which expresses conflict the better.
At the extremes we have to admit, on the one hand, that
all poems express experience
of some sort,
and, on the other, that
the 'whatness' of each poem is unique,
and
there is no residue of 'howness.'
If
we have two poems that differ in only one word
(as in two editions of a poem),
we must say that,
taken as a whole,
we have two 'whatnesses,'
and
what we may call a technical judgment about the change of the word is really a judgment that one 'whatness' as a whole is better than the other.
In summation:
(1)
It is difficult to distinguish between internal and external evidence of the author's intention,
but
it can be said that
to rely on certain types of evidence is to go in the direction of biography and to rely on other types is to stay close to the actual meaning of the work itself.
(2) For
the meaning of a work
resides within the work;
no judgment of intention has relevancy unless corroborated by the work itself, in which case it is supererogatory.
It is therefore
circular and misleading
to speak of judging the work with respect to its success in carrying out the author's intention.
(3) The word "intention” is often used as an abbreviation for "whole actual meaning" so that in some instances a judgment about the disparity of "intention" and result is really a judgment about the whole meaning or plan of a work as seen in the work itself.
These are judgments of evaluation,
and
(4) such judgments refer not to the relation of
means to ends,
or of manner to matter,
but to the relation of
parts to whole.
M.C.B. and W.K.W., Jr.
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