This was originally written a comment on an episode of the wonderful Partially Examined Life (“A podcast by those who were once considering doing philosophy for a living, and then thought better of it”) – specifically Ep. 189 on Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al).
Thanks guys for the great conversation: you do your usual wonderful job of presenting compelling readings for positions I am not particularly sympathetic to. In the same way as Robert Williams’ comment on part one – and as alluded to by Wes during towards the end – my general impulse is to bemoan the baleful influence some of these have had on the practice of criticism. I think you made good points on the potential breadth of “intention” and how it could be broader than the conscious. What I found curious though is that the survey (while seeming to be sufficiently broad to take in all of “art”) seems to leave out some very specifically intentional works.
This particularly chimed with me as I read Brian Boyd’s wonderful criticism on Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (a previous Phi Fic read!) – “The Magic of Artistic Discovery”. Now Wes and Mark described several scenarios where the artist either (i) deliberately uncouples intention from the creative process, (ii) uses free association as a source of raw material which they actively shape into the product or (iii) act as readers of their own work, and create meaning therein. I don’t doubt that this is a major origin in many types of works. But I would argue that in writing prose and poetry, it is not a necessary component.
Nabokov was a notorious perfectionist. He wrote on individual index cards, and would work and re-work everything he wrote, composing (generally fairly short) novels over years of work. His control over everything in the text was legendary [ambiguity intended]: in an interview, he asserted that his characters “are galley slaves”. When the novels were complete, he generally destroyed all his drafts. Whatever the original inspiration of any particular idea, the final product was the polished result of laser-like analytical conscious intention.
I don’t think this is so rare (though it may be one extreme end of the spectrum) – for every Karouac writing spontaneous prose, there will be plenty who agonise in a very conscious fashion over every word – whatever the deceptive appearance of the final result. And does the latter produce inferior art? Given that Pale Fire has been called “The Novel of the [20th] Century”, and Nabokov is generally recognised alongside Joyce as the master of post-modern (!) fiction – indeed, his reputation seems to have well outlasted the fashionable work of the 60s.
Moreover, Nabokov absolutely did see his art as a means of enciphering an intended meaning. He lay traps to show up interpretations based on theories he disliked (e.g. Freudian), and explicitly compares the relationship between the author and the reader of [his] novels to that of the composer of chess problems and a solver. Indeed, the act of finding the *intended* meaning: *solving* the puzzle – is key to his art. He believed that “the unravelling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind”.
Boyd’s thesis is that criticism can be a kind of artistic discovery: he’s a biographer of Popper, and this shows. I would wonder how Barthes and Foucault would deal with the example (which in my ignorance I had never before spotted) below:
The homely poet John Shade, having tragically lost his daughter, is fond of taking walks with his German friend and his young son in the local Dulwich forest. His daughter had a formative paranormal experience in the wood. As he reaches a grotto, the boy remarks “informatively”: “here Papa pisses”. The commentator Kinbote remarks how “pointless” this story is.
Boyd points out this is a reference to Browning’s “Pippa Passes”. Browning was inspired to write the poem when walking in Dulwich Woods; John Shade lives on Dulwich Road. The Spoonerism reflects a major theme of the novel, connected to Shade dead daughter, who is also associated with Pippa. Nabokov almost leaves a big flashing sign pointing to this: as well as “informatively”, as Boyd points out, any time when a Nabokov character refers to something as “pointless”, we should take notice.
Now this is an interpretation. Is it a good one? I would argue that the intentional nature of the Browning allusion above is irrefutable. Why? Because the weight and multiple lines of evidence, from both within and without the text, is so strong. Simultaneously, it seems clear that Nabokov intended us to take notice of this evidence, and that his intended allusion is important to understanding of the work – in other words, that this is a *correct* interpretation – even if it is superficially hidden to an ignoramus like me.
Now, if we are to assert that the intention of the author cannot be used to ground an interpretation, how do we regard the example above? There are of course arbitrarily interpretations we could apply to the material above. Are we really happy to disregard such strong and multi-line evidence of authorial intention, and to commit to say, a Marxist interpretation of Dulwich wood as an equivalent explanation?
I think (was it Mark?) really hit the nail on the head in the comparison of the epistemic vs ontological question. Of course it can be hard (or sometimes impossible) to know the author’s intentions – but we can perform an epistemic task by gathering evidence, and subjecting our theories to that evidence in a way that tests them in a Popperian fashion. Distinguishing between good and bad interpretations then seems to be the key question, and in many works – though certainly not all – evidence of authorial intent must surely count heavily.
It may be an unhappy accident that the kind of identity-based lit crit that Wes regrets has come out of this. My response was initially very similar to Dylan: why would you want to do eliminate the evidence of the artist’s intention? Perhaps I am being uncharitable, but to me there is one glaring answer: because the critic has an axe to grind, and carefully gathering evidence doesn’t serve that axe. If you’re obsessed with power like Foucault then it’s all about the “tyranny” of the author. If your hobby-horse is a particular type of politics, then you can use whatever text you are looking at as a political lens. If you’re into psychoanalysis, then the unconscious must figure everywhere (sorry Wes).
Personally, this gets old for me fast: I’m much more into literature (at least) taking me to new places and meetings of minds through the power of the imagination.