Artist's intention

« 3 Art and experience Argument (2) rightly assumes that the critic's task is to understand the work itself, and that for a claim about the artist (for example, one concerning the artist's intentions) to be relevant to criticism, theclaim must potentially make a difference to the way we experience the work.

But this only tells us that the critic'sinterest in the artist should be for the sake of understanding the work and not vice versa.

(An analogy: to inquirewhether someone's hand gesture was intended as a greeting, not an insult, is in a sense to look past the gesture tothe agent; but the answer would also help the inquirer to see the gesture itself more clearly.) Argument (2) alsoseems to assume that a realized intention will automatically make its presence felt in the work, whereas anunrealized one can have no bearing on the experience of the work.

These assumptions are called into question by acommonplace of the philosophy of perception, namely, that the way we experience an object is in part a product ofour mental orientation towards it.

In that case, even if an intention is realized we may sometimes not see that thework is the outcome of that intention unless alerted to the fact by external evidence.

And if it is not realized,external evidence about the unrealized intention could conceivably modify and enrich the way the work isexperienced.

It is worth noting, finally, that the very idea of a straightforward distinction between internal andexternal evidence is called into question once it is conceded that what is visible in a work is modified by what isknown about it.

Turning to argument (3), it must be conceded in its favour that in calling a piece of fiction or apoem cheerful we are not usually saying or implying that the writer felt cheerful at the time of writing it.

But in thecase of some personal qualities, the presence of the quality in the writing does seem to depend on whether thewriter wrote the piece in an appropriate state of mind.

Nor does it always seem possible to reconstrue the apparentviewpoint of the writer as a merely notional viewpoint within the work.

Perhaps the underlying principle of argument(3) is that in aesthetic matters what counts is whether the work presents an impression of a certain attitude, while it is irrelevant whether that happens to coincide with what the artist felt.

One difficulty with this is that theimpression is likely to vary with what we take the underlying attitude of the artist to have been.

A defender of theprinciple might now say that in that case the work is ambiguous, and that we should always apply the mostcharitable reading, again disregarding what the artist's actual attitude might have been.

But this may be simplistic.Suppose that according to the charitable reading a poem expresses sympathy for the victims of a war, but thatexternal evidence shows that rather than (a) expressing an actually felt sympathy, the poet had (b) perfectlycontrived the mere impression of sympathy in order cynically to exploit a general climate of concern for the victims.Someone tempted by the 'impression' principle should carefully consider whether it really is critically irrelevant thatwe have a case of (a) or (b).

Another difficulty with the 'impression' principle is that some of the features weascribe to writing cannot but be features of the writer.

We cannot ascribe virtues like intelligence, perceptiveness or wit to a piece of writing without being prepared to ascribe these to the writer.

And similarly, it is hard to avoidthe implication that, when we attribute certain shortcomings to writing - pretentiousness, sentimentality, narcissism- we are implicitly criticizing the writer. 4 Meaning and use Argument (4) turns on the claim that literary works are composed in a public medium.

Certainly, poets and novelists do not choose the meanings they give to words but work within the constraints of generalusage.

But defenders of (4) need more than this to make their case.

They need to establish that a knowledge ofsyntax, semantics and general usage is not merely necessary but also sufficient for interpretation.

Counting against this is a commonplace of linguistic theory, namely, that when a sentence is encountered in isolation, the semanticsand syntax of the language will enable native speakers to grasp only its propositional content, and that until theparticular circumstances of its use have shown the user's specific intentions, it has been understood only in anattenuated sense.

But perhaps a defender of (4) will argue that literary interpretation is not concerned with those aspects of meaning which are associated with intention.

This, however, seems implausible, because it threatens toexclude tonal features of writing like irony and sarcasm, as well as the import of metaphors, allusions and the like,all of which depend on the intentions with which words are used.

Alternatively, the claim might be that a work ofart can be said to have whatever features of meaning most enhance the resulting aesthetic impression, providedthat, given its syntactic and semantic character, the work can plausibly be seen or imagined as the outcome of intentions associated with that meaning.

But this is also an extreme claim.

Consider a painting that is a portrait ofA.

You could treat it as though it were intended as a portrait of B (the effect could be as satisfying as you like) butthis would not make it a portrait of B.

Returning to literature, a well-known problem case is Blake's use of the phrase'dark satanic mills' in his poem Jerusalem .

The phrase has often been interpreted as a reference to the factories of the Industrial Revolution, but it is now commonly accepted that this reading is historically impossible.

Suppose,then, that Blake was not indeed referring to factories, but that the impossible reading is, none the less, moresatisfying than more plausible ones.

One reason for ruling it out, despite its appeal, would be that it is not, strictlyspeaking, an interpretation ofBlake's poem, since we know that Blake's poem does not refer to factories.

Someonemight attempt to legitimate the unintended but supposedly more attractive reading of the poem by saying that it isa valid critical activity to view a poem simply as a timeless verbal configuration, ignoring constitutive features itacquired through the context in which it was written.

However, there appears to be only a difference of degreebetween a case like this and, say, the case of a free adaptation of Macbeth which transposes the play into a present day political setting with familiar contemporary politicians in leading roles - surely a case of a new playcreated out of the old.

We may still call this an 'interpretation' of Macbeth , but then we are talking about a special activity, whose existence, however welcome, is no threat or rival to interpretation as exegesis.. »