Intentional Fallacy

The editors of the Norton collection had this to say about the fallacies:

As with many key New Critical precepts, one of the appeals of "the intentional fallacy" is pedagogical. A teacher and a class can concentrate on the text at hand without feeling that the students' interpretive work needs the support of information about the author and the historical period in which the text was composed. Wimsatt and Beardsley have a convenient rule of thumb: if information about the author or period is relevant, it will be in the poem; if it is not realized in the poem already, the it is not relevant. Thus they regard as extraneous all reference to psychology, social history, and anthropology... (1372)

This is very much like the approach of many CW instructors. In some workshops, the author is instructed to remain silent unless the instructor asks him/her a direct question. The author's questions, opinions, defenses, explanations and intent are all "external" and therefore irrelevant. This often leads to wasted class time, in my opinion. Workshopers spend their hour finding ways to "fix" the poem or story at hand in ways that are entirely foreign to the author's interests. This is too strict an application of New Critical ideas. Wandor or someone commented that you can't simply transfer critical tools meant for finished works to works in progress without misreading the unfinished work. Tools can't simply be shifted from interpretive to productive ends w/o attention to the differences between these two orientations.

The intentional fallacy works on finished poems, but not so much on poems in progress. It seems to me that asking the author "What did you hope to accomplish?" assures efficient and effective workshops. The distance between intent and effect must be measured if the author is to know how to revise.

I suppose that is the distance between the two fallacies...

To the essay:

Wimsatt and Beardsley define intent like so: "Intention is design or plan in the author's mind" (1375).

While they consent that "a poem does not come into existence by accident" they still feel that there ought to be a distinction drawn between assigning cause to the author and adopting intention as a standard for criticism.

How is [the critic] to find out what the poet tried to do. If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.

Then, famously:

Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.

I suppose a pudding "works" if it tastes good and has the right texture, no? So a poem works if it tastes good and feels right in the mouth.

Interestingly:

poetry differs from practical messages,which are successful if and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are more abstract that poetry. (1375)

And we always thought poetry was the most abstract. Very clever, W&B.

I think this point represents an important development of their idea of intent:

If there is any sense in which an author, by revision, has better achieved his original intention, it is only the very abstract, tautological, sense that he intended to write a better work and now has done it. (In this sense every author's intention is the same.) (1376)

They don't say what "better" means, and so it would seem that they mean it in the commonest of senses. "More good." I like my poem, says the author, but I think it could be better somehow. He/she doesn't really know exactly what they mean, maybe, but trial and error reveal a poem that is more good. Ahh, says the poet, there it is, just as I intended.

Here's a bit that feels quite contemporary:

The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about the human being, an object of public knowledge. (1376)

It seems to anticipate a lot of Theory, especially reader response, but only because I come to it after reading Fish and others first. They mean "public" as in "not private," for the author's intent is a private thing. Things public are things "in" the poem, oddly enough. But we're getting to that.

Cute but irrelevant:

From A.E. Housman they draw the following formula for writing poetry:
Drink a pint of beer, relax, go walking, think on nothing in particular, look at things, surrender yourself to yourself, search for the truth in your own soul, listen to the sound of your own inside voice, discover and express the vraie verite. (1380)

How romantic. But W & B maintain that "psychology of composition" is a field separate from criticism. "Judgment of a poem is different from the art of producing them" they say (1380). Although, they seem open to the possibility that one day (has the day yet come?) criticism may one day be able to unify itself with the psych of comp; I have to say the terms by which this union would be made possible are not clear to me from reading their brief treatment of the matter....any way, it's beside the point.

Beside the point except for one thing: they seem to miss a move that a contemporary critic would not. In reviewing Housman's recipe, it should be clear that many poets do not arrive at their poems by way of "intent" as many critics understand it. Housman doesn't "design" or "plan" his poems. He has a beer and goes for a walk. And I think his process is not completely idiosyncratic. Even if the "inner voice" and "true truth" stuff rings false these days, the idea that you can arrive at a poem without really designing it will resonate with many poets. This strikes me as a good argument against reading poems for the author's intent. Maybe poems arrive more by "accident" than W&B wanted to admit. At least for some authors.

In order to make the intentional fallacy work as a fallacy, W&B make a distinction between "internal and external evidence for the meaning of a poem" (1381). Internal evidence is "public" as discussed above. This evidence is "discovered through the semantics and syntax of a poem, through our habitual knowledge of the language, through grammars, dictionaries, and all the literature which is the source of these dictionaries, in general through all that makes a language and culture." Clearly, such a statement can no longer stand. To think that "all that makes a language and a culture" is some how "inside" a poem strikes us now (I think I can speak for all of us, right?) as rather silly. Everything on the list is outside a poem. Or, with Derrida, the reverse: nothing is outside the text. Which has essentially the same effect for the distinction between public and private evidence.

So the thing can't stand, can it?

The Norton folks list Kenneth Burke, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Harold Bloom, and Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar as critics who worked in various ways to challenge the intentional fallacy, especially in terms of its distinction between internal and external evidence.

In an effort to hear them out, we can pay closer attention to what W&B call external: "external is private or idiosyncratic; not a part of the work as a linguistic fact: it consists of revelations...about how or why the poet wrote the poem" (1381). So, really they aren't trying to draw ontological distinctions about "inside" and "outside" of poetry. They are saying, once again, that there are somethings that should be excluded from criticism. Language is in, poets are out.

But then there is a third category, which W&B have to admit for discussion. Poets, like anyone, have each a private language, a way of thinking about and using particular words that is special to their own history or to a group of fellow poets. To do work that unearths the particular meaning of a word for a particular poet is "an intermediate kind of evidence." Both public and private. Right up Derrida's alley. In fact, he likes the Levi Strauss for the same thing: demonstrating the untenability of his own oppositions. And Derrida had similar tastes as well: language was "in" for him as well. And nothing was out.

A final note on intention:

There is a gross body of life, of sensory and mental experience, which lies behind and in some sense causes every poem, but can never be and need not be known in the verbal and hence intellectual composition which is the poem. For all the objects of our manifold experience, especially for the intellectual objects, for every unity, there is an action of the mind which cuts off roots, melts away context—or indeed we should never have objects or ideas or anything to talk about. (1382)

Though there is a cause of a poem, it is unknowable, even through the best scholarship. Even with the author's own report. In context, they are discussing Road to Xanadu which tries to piece together the sources of Coleridge's poems. And they conclude with the above. The poet's own brain cuts off the roots of the poem so that it can be a poem, an object separate from the wash of language and dreams and whatnot that burbles about in the poet's brain. Again, they point to the "intention-less intentionality" that is often poetic creation. By stating that the final cause of the poem is unknowable, they make a strong case against relying on intentionality as a guide for criticism.

Here's the rub: if so much of what we know as the CW workshop rests on this New Critical stuff, and if New Critical ideas can't really hold up to the pressure of even casual contemporary readings, then what are we doing in CW?

When workshops only allow discussion of what is on the page, they are working to make the same distinction as W&B, that between internal and external evidence. There is what is already "in" the poem and there is everything else, irrelevant and external. But there isn't anything in the poem. The poem is language; language is social; society is political; therefore, the poem cannot be excused from larger considerations. It is never just what is on the page, because what is on the page only exists as a social and linguistic act.

Sitting quietly while classmates haggle over a word choice issue on page five of a 8,000 word story is not a productive use of a writer's time. Is nothing like an education. But to challenge that author and ask: "How does this fit? Where does this fit?" this is a beginning. What is the poem in the context of "all that makes a language and a culture?" How does it participate in that "all"?

Maybe that's the connection. The New Critics instructed us to pay close attention to language and to leave authors be. Much of Theory does exactly that. But in paying close attention to language over the years, certain features of language that were not apparent to the New Critics have become evident to us.

I am totally rambling. What's my point?

1) intention ought to be allowed into the classroom since the texts there are still under development.

2) we can take from this essay the idea that what is "in" is all that makes language and culture.

That's pretty much it.