University of Virginia Library

I

The question of the meaning of "intention," both in general terms and in relation to works of art, involves many complex philosophical issues and has been widely debated.[7] Probably the best-known and most influential discussion of this subject in relation to literary works is W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley's 1946 essay, "The Intentional Fallacy," which takes the point of view that the author's intention is irrelevant to the process of literary interpretation and evaluation.[8] Although the essay is not as clear as it might be in distinguishing

among kinds of intention, it has become a classic statement of the position that the critic should not be influenced in his examination of the literary work itself by any information relating to what the author thought he was saying in that work. Other writers have argued the opposing view—notably E. D. Hirsch, Jr., whose Validity in Interpretation (1967) supports the position that the meaning of a work is the meaning put there by the author.[9] Discussions of this kind, however, regularly take the text as given and focus on the activity of the critic as he faces that text; they do not raise the question of the authority of the text itself, apparently assuming that the text in each case is the text as the author wished it to be.[10] Of course, a corrupt text could equally well be the subject of critical analysis;[11] but the question of the bearing of authorial intention on interpretation would hardly arise unless the text is assumed to be what its author wished.

One might at first conclude, therefore, that such discussions of intention are irrelevant to editorial work, conceived of as operating at an anterior stage and providing the material for the critic to analyze. If, in other words, one could assert that the editor's task does not involve critical decisions but only the recovery of factual information about what word or mark of punctuation the author wanted to have at each point in his text, one could then say that any effort to understand or assess the "meaning" of the text is an entirely separate matter and that the possibility of an "intentional fallacy" applies only to this interpretive and evaluative activity.[12] It is immediately apparent, however, that the job of the editor cannot be so regarded. If the aim of the editor is to establish the text as the author wished to have it presented to the public (and we shall postpone any consideration of other possible editorial aims), he cannot divorce himself from the "meaning" of the text, for, however much documentary evidence he may have, he can never have enough to relieve himself of the necessity

of reading critically. Suppose, for example, that the only extant text of a work is a fair-copy manuscript in the author's hand. The editor in such a case cannot simply reproduce the text mechanically, without thinking about its meaning: there is always the possibility that the author, through an oversight or slip of the pen, did not write down what he meant to write, and the editor who is reading critically may be able to detect and correct such errors, or at least some of them. It is an act of criticism, however elementary, for an editor to recognize that where the author wrote "the the" he actually meant "to the." In other instances it may be equally obvious that the author cannot have meant what he wrote, and yet it may be impossible to say with certainty which of several possible corrections conforms with what he had in mind. Yet the editor will probably find it necessary to make some correction, since the reading of the manuscript is plainly wrong. When two or more texts of a work exist and there are differences between them, there may be no conclusive evidence to show which differences are the result of the author's revisions and which are not. Yet the editor must decide which of the readings to accept at each point of variation. These decisions are based both on whatever external evidence is available and on the editor's judgment as to how the author was most likely to have expressed himself at any given point. This judgment in turn is based on the editor's familiarity with and sensitivity to the whole corpus of the author's work and on his understanding of the individual work involved. He may be specifically concerned only with the author's intended meaning in one sentence, or even one phrase, but the interpretation of that sentence or phrase may depend upon the author's intended meaning in the work as a whole.

It is clear, then, as soon as one starts to talk about "intention," that various kinds of intention need to be distinguished, and many of the recent discussions of intention in literature do attempt to subdivide the concept. Thus T. M. Gang differentiates between "practical intention" (intention "to achieve a certain result") and "literary intention" (intention to convey "a certain significance"); John Kemp distinguishes between "immediate intention" (that which a man "intends, or sets himself, to do") and "ulterior intention" ("that which he intends or hopes to achieve as a result of doing what he does"); Morse Peckham discriminates between "mediated intention" ("a statement or other sign") and "immediate intention" ("metaphorical extension of mediated intention into the area of 'mind'"); and Quentin Skinner, borrowing terms from J. L. Austin's How to Do

Things with Words (1962),[13] speaks of "illocutionary intention" (what a writer "may have been intending to do in writing what he wrote") and "perlocutionary intention" ("what he may have intended to do by writing in a certain way"), as well as of "intention to do x" (a writer's "plan or design to a create a certain type of work").[14]

Of such classifications of intention, one of the clearest and most useful has been set forth by Michael Hancher.[15] In his view, "author's intentions" can be divided into three types: (1) "programmatic intention"—"the author's intention to make something or other"; (2) "active intention"—"the author's intention to be (understood as) acting in some way or other"; and (3) "final intention"—"the author's intention to cause something or other to happen." The first refers to the author's general plan to write a sonnet, say, or a realistic novel;

the third refers to his hope that his work will change the reader's viewpoint, say, or bring wealth to himself. The second is the one which concerns the meanings embodied in the work: "Active intentions characterize the actions that the author, at the time he finishes his text, understands himself to be performing in that text" (p. 830).[16] Hancher's argument is that the first and third kinds of intention—programmatic and final—are indeed irrelevant to the interpretation of a literary work but that the second—active intention—must be taken into account in the interpretation (and evaluation) of the work.

Before pursuing the implications of that argument, we should pause long enough to note that what editors in the tradition of Greg are likely to call "final intention" does not correspond to what Hancher here calls "final intention." Rather, the intention with which editors are concerned is Hancher's "active intention," the intention that the work "mean (and be taken to mean) something or other" (p. 831). The fact that an editor, as briefly suggested above, must examine both the author's intention to use a particular word and the author's intention to mean a particular thing in the work as a whole—indeed, must make decisions about the first in the light of the second—is adequately accommodated in Hancher's concept of "active intention." Hancher's initial illustration of the concept includes comment on Hopkins's intention in using "buckle" in "The Windhover" as well as on his intention for the meaning of "the whole action of that poem." Because an intention regarding the meaning of a work as a whole may not always seem distinct from a programmatic intention, Hancher later recognizes that a programmatic intention may "involve a kind of active intention" (p. 836) but distinguishes between such "projected active intention" and the "active intention that ultimately defines the meaning of the completed text" (p. 837). Therefore "active intention," as he defines it, does cover the authorial intentions with which an editor has to deal. Accordingly, whenever I speak of "intention," unless otherwise specified, I am referring to the kind of intention included in Hancher's concept of "active intention"; even when I use the term "final intention," in conformity with the common practice of editors, the word "intention" still refers to the same concept (and not to what Hancher calls "final intention")—though just what "final" may mean in the phrase remains to be examined later.

It can readily be inferred from what I have already said about Hancher's conclusion that he does not belong to that group of critics

who believe in "semantic autonomy" (to use Hirsch's phrase)—the idea that a verbal construction carries its own inherent determinate meaning regardless of what meaning was intended by the author. As Beardsley puts the idea, "texts acquire determinate meaning through the interactions of their words without the intervention of an authorial will."[17] Hancher's argument for the relevance of active intention to literary interpretation shows that he defines "the" meaning of a work as the meaning intended by its author.[18] It is difficult to refute such an argument without taking the position that the language of a literary work operates in a different way from the language of ordinary discourse; yet that position cannot convincingly be taken so long as it is impossible to draw a distinct line between works which are literary and works which are not.[19] Language, after all, consists of symbols, which must be invested with meanings if they are to mean anything. At the same time, a reader does not have access to an author's mind, and, if he understands a text to mean something, it is (at least to begin with) as a result of certain conventions of language which both are following.[20] Yet texts (or utterances) do not have to be complex in order for the conventions involved to be capable of more than one interpretation. The possibility is raised, therefore, that the meaning or meanings a reader finds in a text do not correspond to the meaning or meanings which the author intended.[21] To reject "semantic autonomy" (or "immanent meaning") is not to deny that texts are capable of multiple interpretations. Indeed, the fact that multiple interpretations are possible is a refutation of the idea that a text embodies a determinate meaning.

How, then, is the author's intended meaning to be discovered? In answering that question, one is inevitably drawn back to the work itself as the most reliable documentary evidence as to what the author intended. If he made no statement setting forth his intention, one has

nowhere else to go for direct evidence (though of course one can take into account various historical and biographical circumstances); and if he did make a statement, it may, for a great variety of reasons, not be accurate. As Morse Peckham has pointed out, any attempt, by the author or someone else, to explain the intention of a work ("an utterance") constitutes an inference about an event which took place in the past; the author's account carries greater weight "only because he is likely to have more information for framing his historical construct, not because he generated the utterance."[22] Furthermore, as William H. Capitan has noted, "what an artist gives us as his intention is subject to the artist's limitations in putting his intention into words."[23] The position has been well stated by Quentin Skinner: Hirsch, who does not recognize as "meanings" any meanings other than the author's, decides what Wordsworth "probably" meant in "A slumber did my spirit seal" by turning to "everything we know of Wordsworth's typical attitudes during the period in which he composed the poem" (p. 239). Contemporary statements about these attitudes may of course be useful, but are not Wordsworth's poems the chief source of information about his attitudes? And if a given body of writings can provide such evidence, is it not possible that a smaller body of writings—or even the single poem—could provide it? As Hirsch admits, "A poet's typical attitudes do not always apply to a particular poem" (p. 240); so one is inevitably thrown back on the poem itself. I do not think it necessary to review here the various arguments for or against "semantic autonomy"[25] in order to make my point: all I am suggesting is that a rejection of the notion of "semantic autonomy" is not incompatible with the position that the work itself provides the best evidence of the author's intended meaning.

The bearing of these ideas on the task of the editor is worth making explicit. At the start, the editor has settled one important question through his definition of his goal: he is concerned with establishing the text as intended by the author, and thus he has no doubts about the relevance of the author's intention to his undertaking. But then he recognizes that the most reliable source of information about the author's intention in a given work is that work itself. He will take other information into account, but he must always measure it finally against the very text which is the subject of his inquiry. The editor may at first feel that his job is different from the critic's in that he is concerned with establishing intended wording, not with explicating intended meaning. That is, he may think (in Austin's terms) that he is dealing only with the author's locutionary act, not his illocutionary act. But he soon realizes that his discovery of textual errors or his choice among textual variants involves his understanding of the intended meaning of the text. For if either of two alternative words makes sense at a given point, the determination of which the author intended clearly involves more than his locutionary act.[26] Greg's

rationale tells an editor what to do when he is at an impasse, but it does not eliminate the need for judgments; indeed, it relies on them. So the editor finds himself in the position of the critic after all. Merely because he has already decided that his concern is with the author's intention does not mean that the issue of "semantic autonomy" is irrelevant to him, for he, too, will be turning to the text itself as his primary evidence.

The key to the use of the work as evidence of its author's intended meaning must lie in the approach which the critic (editor) takes.[27] One critic may believe that he has found through internal evidence the most satisfactory explication of a work and may not be interested in whether or not this meaning was intended by the author.[28] Another critic, who wishes to find the author's intended meaning, will read the work in the light of all the historical and biographical evidence he can locate and may thereby eliminate certain meanings as ones which the author could not have intended;[29] his interpretation of the text is thus limited by certain external information, but his positive evidence still comes from the text itself. If I hastily dash off a message for someone and the recipient finds it ambiguous, he will attempt to rule out certain meanings on the basis of what he knows of me and of the circumstances which occasioned the message; what he finally concludes to be my intended meaning, however, cannot be based merely on what the external evidence suggests I would be likely to say in that situation but must rest on the words I actually did use. Furthermore,

if I mistakenly wrote one word while intending another, it may be that the external evidence would cast doubt on my use of that word, but any correction of the error would have to be justified by the context. The work itself is the controlling factor in statements made about its meaning, whether or not those statements aim at elucidating the author's intended meaning.

The scholarly editor is in the same position as the critic who is concerned with the author's intended meaning. Regardless of how many meanings he finds in the text, the scholarly editor makes corrections or emendations on the basis of the one he judges most likely to have been the author's intended meaning. Hancher speaks of a science of interpretation, in which the critic's aim is to determine the "authorized" or intended meaning, and an art of interpretation, in which the critic's aim is to find the most satisfying meaning according to his own "norms of value."[30] Some critics would protest that all meanings are part of an intended complex combination of meanings, intended in the sense that the author, whether consciously or unconsciously, created a structure in which they could be discovered. But this appeal to "subconscious intention," as T. M. Gang has indicated,[31] implies a universal set of relationships between consciously produced patterns and their subconscious origins—relationships which, if they are always in operation, cannot be specifically intended and are always available for anyone to discern. One need not deny that such meanings can be found in the work and that they may be valuable (and offer revealing insights into the author's personality and motivation) in order to believe that "intention" cannot be a useful concept if it is made so broad as to cover all potentially discoverable meanings. It is certainly true that neither the author nor anyone else can construct an explanatory paraphrase which is the exact equivalent of the work itself; but

it does not follow that the intended meanings of the work are inexhaustible.

An editor could, of course, emend a text so that it would, in his view, be a more successful expression of that meaning which he finds most valuable in it; but his activity would have nothing to do with the author. In Hancher's terms, he would be engaging in the "art" of interpretation—or, rather, editing on the basis of that kind of interpretation. A scholarly editor sets as his goal the reconstruction of the text intended by the author. In Hancher's terms, he is engaging in the "science," not the art, of interpretation—but it is still interpretation and entails critical thinking. His defined approach is what controls the use he makes of what he finds in the work. He will probably find more than one meaning there, but his specialized knowledge places him in a privileged position for assessing which of them can most reasonably be regarded as the author's.[32] The text he produces can, like any other text, be the subject of critical speculation by those who have no interest in the author's intention; but it can also serve the needs of those critics who are concerned with the work as the product of a particular mind. That an interpretation by one of the former turns out to seem more satisfying to many readers than an interpretation by one of the latter has no bearing on the importance or desirability of the task which the scholarly editor has set himself.

These considerations suggest, first of all, that editing is a critical activity and that the scholarly editor cannot avoid coming to terms with the critical problem of authorial intention. Second, there is a specific and clearly defined aspect of the broad concept of "intention" which is the appropriate concern of the scholarly editor—the intention of the author to have particular words and marks of punctuation constitute his text and the intention that such a text carry a particular

meaning or meanings. Finally, the scholarly editor will amass all the evidence he can find bearing on each textual decision; but, whenever the factual evidence is less than incontrovertible, his judgment about each element will ultimately rest on his interpretation of the author's intended meaning as he discovers it in the whole of the text itself. What controls the editor's freedom of interpretation is his self-imposed limitation: he is concerned only with that intention which his knowledge of the author and the period allows him to attribute to the author.