Authorial Intent

Jim says that authorial intent is a complete dead-end, that seeking it
requires holding a set of critical assumptions that "just aren't held
anymore."

Yet it appears to me to be overwhelmingly the case that Homer did not write
the Iliad accidentally. Truly Great Books are not mistakes. I realize that
you did not assert the contrary, but it does seem to me that something like
it must be lurking for such a bold rejection of the relevance of authorial
intent. Unless a Great and Timeless thing was a slip of the pen, surely
the deliberate author is not irrelevant. If I am not permitted to ask,
"What did Homer mean by this?" then I am disallowed to know Homer
and disallowed to know his poems.

I suppose it is right to say that we can't KNOW the author's intent,
certainly not with so rigorous an understanding of knowing as we get from,
say, Socrates. All he knew was that he knew nothing, or so he reportedly
said. We can use this to reject quite nearly anything.

But I need not read archaeological or biographical theories or
presumptions -- get boggled down with still further Not Quite Knowing -- to
puzzle over the significance of Achilles' Shield. Homer presents the shield
in a puzzling way, he says puzzling things about it. He certainly meant
something, perhaps several things. I need only go to Homer, and ideally
also to other sincere and thoughtful readers, to puzzle out what. I suppose
I will never KNOW, but neither will the historian or the biographer. Homer
was, after all, writing for us. If we listen sensitively, he tells us what
he needs us to know. SOMETIMES historical or biographical things become
very important, but I do expect that these times are usually in less Great
books or less Great parts of books. Even then an occasional footnote can do
the trick, and if we're especially lucky, it will only refer us to another
writer contemporary to the fellow we're reading. The truly Great stuff is
written for me just as much as for some fellow in the author's time and
place, and it describes something just as true for me.

I do not mean to say, by all of this, that we should not involve ourselves
in historical research; but only that reading books IS historical research,
and that being sensitive to authorial intent is in fact quite important.

-robbie
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Received on Thu Oct 24 01:47:49 2002