SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 25
SINE QUA NON
Saying/Making/Doing: What Authors Are Up To
John Farrell
Sometime during my days as a graduate student in the 1980s I realized that many of
my teachers and fellow students had a way of thinking about the reading of literature, indeed
about the experience of reading itself, that was completely different from mine. They saw
themselves as interpreting texts as free-standing semantic objects without reference to what
their authors intended them to mean. My experience, however, was that reading, in addition
to recognizing the common meanings of words, always meant having to guess what those
words meant in context, along with the tone with which they were invested, and that such
guessing inevitably centered upon an author. By author I mean a person with historical
coordinates, an identifiable audience, and a mind similar enough to my own to justify my
sense that, with any individual sentence, one possible meaning was more likely to be in play
than others. For me, reading, however difficult, was and still is a matter of getting in touch
with another mind.
My contemporaries had many reasons for being suspicious of authors and their minds.
The Romantic cult of individual genius had become a vulgar antique, derided by Marxists
as bourgeois. Sigmund Freud had buried authorial intentions so deep in the unconscious
that they no longer seemed intentional, allowing critics who were skeptical about retrieving
conscious meanings from literary works to have uncanny confidence unearthing meanings
not even stated in the text. The great modernists, for all their individuality of style, pushed
the boundaries of language seemingly beyond the place where authorial intentions could
hold off the proliferations of meaning and myth. That opened the way for Northrop Frye and
others to declare that literary works were made out of other literary works, casting authors
as mere artifacts of bourgeois property law. During the anti-mentalistic Forties, when logical
positivism, pragmatism, and behaviorism were in vogue, the New Critics found professional
dignity promoting literary language per se as their object of study. Literary language, they
believed, was a special form of language, being inherently ambiguous and ironic, and
therefore richer than the tediously clear, speaker-dependent utterances of practical life.
Structuralists and post-structuralists followed suit in focusing on language per se. Was it not a
grander mission for literary scholars to rise above preoccupation with the historically limited
productions of individual authors and gain access to more scientific objects of study like
language or myth? And wasn’t it a relief being able to short-circuit the biographical reductions
of hasty undergraduates with a taboo against stepping outside the text? There was even a
certain professional convenience in being able to marginalize the elite cadre of poet-critics
who then reigned in the academy: Pound, Ransom, Tate, Winters, Jarrell, Auden, and, above
all, T. S. Eliot, who had the temerity to add explanatory notes to The Waste Land as if he had
some special privilege to decide its meaning.
These anti-authorial developments made the field of literary criticism exciting and gave
it influence across the humanities.
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