Wednesday, January 16, 2019

On the vicissitudes of authors and intentions in literary criticism

John Farrell, Why Literature Professors Turned Against Authors – Or Did they?, Los Angeles Review of Nooks, 13 January 2018. The opening paragraphs:
SINCE THE 1940s among professors of literature, attributing significance to authors’ intentions has been taboo and déclassé. The phrase literary work, which implies a worker, has been replaced in scholarly practice — and in the classroom — by the clean, crisp syllable text, referring to nothing more than simple words on the page. Since these are all we have access to, the argument goes, speculations about what the author meant can only be a distraction. Thus, texts replaced authors as the privileged objects of scholarly knowledge, and the performance of critical operations on texts became essential to the scholar’s identity. In 1967, the French critic Roland Barthes tried to cement this arrangement by declaring once and for all the “Death of the Author,” adding literary creators to the long list of artifacts that have been dissolved in modernity’s skeptical acids. Authors, Barthes argued, have followed God, the heliocentric universe, and (he hoped) the middle class into oblivion. Michel Foucault soon added the category of “the human” to the list of soon-to-be-extinct species.

Barthes also saw a bright side in the death of the author: it signaled the “birth of the reader,” a new source of meaning for the text, which readers would provide themselves. But the inventive readers who could replace the author’s ingenuity with their own never actually materialized. Instead, scholarly readers, deprived of the author as the traditional source of meaning, adopted a battery of new theories to make sense of the orphaned text. So what Barthes’s clever slogan really fixed in place was the reign in literary studies of Theory-with-a-capital-T. Armed with various theoretical instruments — structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, to name just a few — critics could now pierce the verbal surface of the text to find hidden meanings and purposes unknown to those who created them.

But authorship and authorial intention have proven not so easy to dispose of. The most superficial survey of literary studies will show that authors remain a constant point of reference. The texts upon which theoretically informed readers perform their operations continue for the most part to be edited with the authors’ intentions in mind, and scholars continue to have recourse to background information about authors’ artistic intentions, as revealed in public pronouncements, private papers, and letters, though they do so with ritual apologies for committing the “intentional fallacy.” Politically minded critics, of which there are many, cannot avoid authors and their intended projects. And this is just a hint of the author’s continuing presence. All the while, it goes without saying, scholars continue to insist on their own authorial privileges, highlighting the originality of their insights while duly recording their debts to others. They take the clarity and stability of meaning in their own works as desirable achievements while, in the works created by their subjects, these qualities are presumed to be threats to the freedom of the reader.

Fortunately or unfortunately, it is impossible to get rid of authors entirely because the signs that constitute language are arbitrarily chosen and have no significance apart from their use. The dictionary meanings of words are only potentially meaningful until they are actually employed in a context defined by the relation between author and audience. So how did it happen that professors of literature came to renounce authors and their intentions in favor of a way of thinking — or at least a way of talking — that is without historical precedent, has scant philosophical support, and is to most ordinary readers not only counterintuitive but practically incomprehensible?
Farrell the goes on to sketch out how that happened, beginning with the late 18th century. One thing that happened is that the stock of the author soared to impossible heights:
The elevation of the literary author as the great purveyor of experience had profound effects. Now the past history of literature could be read as the production of superior souls speaking from their own experience. In the minds of Victorian readers, for example, understanding the works of Shakespeare involved following the poet’s personal spiritual and psychological journey, beginning with the bravery of the early histories and the wit of the early comedies, turning in mid-career to the visceral disgust with life evinced in the great tragedies, and arriving, finally, at the high plane of detachment and acceptance that comes into view in the late romances. Not the cause of Hamlet’s suicidal musings but the cause of Shakespeare’s own disillusionment — that was the question that troubled the 19th century. This obsession with Shakespeare’s great soul was wonderfully mocked by James Joyce in the library chapter of Ulysses.

It was not only literary history that could be reinterpreted in the heroic manner. For the boldest advocates of Romantic imagination, all of history became comprehensible now through the biographies of the great men who made it. Poets like Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton were no longer spokesmen for their cultures but its creators; as Percy Shelley famously put it, poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
And so we arrive at the late 19th and early 20th century:
So, to return to the “Death of the Author,” not only did authors have it coming; they largely enacted their own death by making the renunciation of meaning — or even speech — a privileged literary maneuver. They set themselves above the vulgar garrulity of traditional forms to pursue subtle but evanescent sensations in an almost priestly atmosphere. [...] So the author’s role in the creation of literary meaning suffered a long decline, partly because that role had been inflated and personalized beyond what was sustainable, partly because authors found value in the panache of renouncing it, and partly because critics welcomed the new sources of authority offered by Freudian, Marxist, and other modes of suspicious decoding. Up to this point, the dethroning of the author centered entirely on the relation between authorial psychology and the creation and value of literary works; it did not question that the author’s intentions played an important role in determining a work’s actual meaning.
And then came the intentional fallacy and the New Criticism:
New Criticism offered a standardized method for everyone — poets, students, and critics alike. Eliot called it the “lemon-squeezer school” of criticism. His grand, impersonal stance, which governed the tastes of a generation, had undoubtedly done a great deal to shape the detached attitude of criticism that emerged in the wake of “The Intentional Fallacy,” but his influence as a poet-legislator was also one of that article’s targets. Not only were Eliot’s critical judgments the expression of an unmistakably personal sensibility, but he had inadvertently stirred up trouble by adding his own notes to The Waste Land, the poem that otherwise offered the ideal object for New Critical decipherment. In order to short-circuit the poet’s attempt to control the reading of his own work, Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that the notes to The Waste Land should not be read as an independent source of insight into the author’s intention; instead, they should be judged like any other part of the composition — which amounts to transferring them, implicitly, from the purview of the literary author to that of the poetic speaker. Thus, rather than providing an undesirable clarification of its meaning, the notes were to be judged in terms of the internal drama of the poem itself. Few scholars of Eliot took this advice, showing once again the difficulty of abiding by the intentional taboo. [...]

In hindsight we can see that the long-term result of the trend Barthes called the “Death of the Author” was that meaning emigrated in all directions — to mere texts, to functions of texts like poetic speakers and implied authors, to the structures of language itself apart from speakers, to class and gender ideologies, to the unconscious, and to combinations of all of these, bypassing authors and their intentions. While following these various flights, critics have nonetheless continued to rely upon authorial intention in the editing and reading of texts, in the use of background materials, in the advocacy of political agendas, in the establishing of their own intellectual property, and in many other ways.
And in conclusion:
So why does it matter at this late date if literary scholars continue to reject the notion of intention in theory, given that they no longer avoid it in practice? Of the many reasons, I will note four.

First, the simple contradiction between theory and practice undermines the intellectual coherence of literary studies as a whole, cutting it off both from practitioners of other disciplines and from ordinary readers, including students in the classroom. In an age when the humanities struggle to justify their existence, this does not make that justification any easier.

Second, the removal of the author from the equation of literature, even if only in theory, facilitates the excessive recourse to hidden sources of meaning — linguistic, social, economic, and psychological. It gives license to habits of thought that resemble paranoia, or what Paul Ricoeur has called “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” Just as the New Critics feared the stability of meaning they associated with the reductive language of science, so critics on the left fear the stability of meaning they associate with the continuing power of metaphysics and tradition. Such paranoia is a poor antidote to naïveté. It puts critics in a position of superiority to their subjects, a position as unequal as the hero-worshipping stance of the 19th century, giving free rein to what E. P. Thompson memorably called “the enormous condescension of posterity.”

Third, the question regarding which kinds of authorial intention are relevant to which critical concerns is still a live and pressing one, as the case of Frankenstein suggests.

Fourth and finally, objectifying literary authors as mere functions of the text, or mere epiphenomena of language, is a radically dehumanizing way to treat them. For a discipline that is rightly concerned with recovering suppressed voices and with the ways in which all manner of people can be objectified, acquiescence to the objectification of authors is a temptation to be resisted. As Hegel pointed out long ago in his famous passage on masters and slaves, to degrade the humanity of others with whom we could be in conversation is to impoverish our own humanity.

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