Authorial Intent
Jon Tveite (jontv@ksu.edu)
Mon, 23 Nov 1998 10:21:56 -0600
Will wrote:
> I'm sorry but clinging to authorial intention is like clinging to
> patriarchy IMHO, and perhaps even more striking is that clinging
> to intention is religious...
I absolutely agree. Authorial intent is vital to the patriarchal model
of literature, which is that we, as readers, sit at the feet of the
masters to catch pearls of wisdom spilling from their mouths. You have
to infer intent in order to gauge whether that intent has been
fulfilled, because that's how you determine who's a master and who's
not. Writing then becomes a game wherein the authors who aim the
highest and come closest to hitting their marks get to be canonical and
the others don't. It's all rather silly and competitive in a way that
has nothing to do with art or the communion between two thinking,
feeling human beings -- what literature should really be about. To
follow up on Will's very apt comparison, the patriarchal canon-making
process is like religious dogma, and the intimate, intangible connection
between author and reader is like the true spirituality that transcends
religion.
Besides that, I have two big problems with basing literary judgments on
authorial intent. First of all, as others have pointed out, determining
authorial intent is a very dicey business indeed. Short of direct
cross-examination, there's no way to know exactly what an author
intended to communicate with any given work. It inevitably becomes a
game of linguistic and psychological hide-and-go-seek. Secondly, the
idea that meaning springs only from the fountain of authorial intent is
hopelessly reductive. Great literature doesn't happen by accident, but
there are limits to how much an author can pre-plan. A large amount of
the important stuff happens by spontaneous combustion in the process of
knocking out a draft; threads often are dropped or pursued because it
feels right, not just because it fits the master plan. And what about
revision? The author's intent is almost certain to evolve as the
project moves forward, leaving us with a 4-dimensional system of
overlapping and/or conflicting intents.
I don't mean to say that authorial intent is irrelevant or impossible to
say anything worthwhile about. But it's just one level of
interpretation -- a shaky one at that -- and not the whole ballgame.
I'm equally skeptical of any deconstructionists that would totally
disregard the issue of intent and just use the text as an occasion to
show off how brilliantly they can twist its meaning. That kind of
exercise may be interesting, but it's not literary criticism, in my
book.
Jon