Intentional Fallacy
William K. Wimsatt Jr. + Monroe C. Beardley
1946, revised 1954
short essay...
page1
"We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of critical attitudes."
"It entails many specific truths about inspiration, authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship, and about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in which the critic’s approach will not be qualified by his view of “intention.” "
"Intention, as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide acceptance. “In order to judge the poet’s performance, we must know what he intended.” Intention is design or plan in the author’s mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author’s attitude toward his work, the way he felt, what made him write."
series of propositions summarised and abstracted to a degree where they seem axiomatic (self evident)
1
A poem does not come into existence by accident.
Yet to insist on the designing intellect as a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet’s performance.
2
One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the question about in- tention. How is he 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.
page 2
" “the poet’s aim must be judged at the moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem itself.” "
3
Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine.
4
The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a physical ob- ject like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.
5
There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his orig- inal intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows that his former concrete intention was not his intention. “He’s the man we were in search of, that’s true,” says Hardy’s rustic constable, “and yet he’s not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.”
“Is not a critic,” asks Professor Stoll, “a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author’s meaning of intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?
The poem is not the critic’s own and not the author’s (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it). 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. What is said about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement in linguistics or in the general science of psychology.
page 3
A critic of our dictionary article, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, has argued that there are two kinds of inquiry about a work of art: (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2) whether the work of art “ought ever to have been undertaken at all” and so “whether it is worth preserving.
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Simon Johnson
www.thephilosophicalphotographer.co.uk
Intentional Fallacy
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