SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 27
SINE QUA NON
actions fulfill multiple purposes. Intentions can exist in a preliminary form, before the action
is taken, but they almost inevitably adjust to the circumstances of their execution. They evolve
in process.
If doing always means doing one thing in order to do another, what is the doing that
constitutes the goal of literary performance? Undoubtedly there are many, but the key one,
the one that makes success for all the others possible, is the creation of a valuable experience
for an audience, an experience at least valuable enough to keep it reading. Goals beyond that
may differ from author to author, power, fame, glory, and profit being common candidates,
along with the joys of communication itself. But giving pleasure is the final intention no
literary work can succeed without. This is the type of goal that William Wimsatt and Monroe
Beardsley aimed at in their famous article “The Intentional Fallacy,”3 saying that we have no
need to think about authorial intentions because “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”—
in other words, it doesn’t matter what authors are aiming at if they don’t succeed in giving you
pleasure. They were right, of course. Literary works don’t succeed just because we recognize
their authors intend them to. But Wimsatt and Beardsley didn’t recognize that, in order for
works to succeed in doing anything at all, they have to fulfill prior, communicative goals.
Giving literary pleasure doesn’t come of itself.
That’s where the saying comes in.
The person at the next table has just said “It’s nine o’clock in Paris.” Do you understand
this sentence? If you have basic competence in English, you know what information the
sentence typically conveys. That is unambiguous. Still, there is something which separates
this sentence from your typical experience of meaning. Unlike (I hope) the sentences of
this article, you have no idea why “It’s nine o’clock in Paris” is being said. The relevance of
the information it conveys, and therefore its true meaning, is opaque. To give it relevance,
we have to hear it in context. In one context it might imply “It’s not too late to telephone
your friend in Paris.” In another it might imply “Even if it’s early for a drink here, it’s already
nine in Paris, so we might as well have one now.” Without being able to recognize these
implications, the sentence loses its point. There is no speaker behind it. It has no voice and
says nothing.
Examples like this have been given by distinguished literary critics—Stanley Fish in
particular—to argue that it’s the reader, or the community of readers, who determine linguistic
meaning, but readers have no reason to bother interpreting them if there’s no speaker or
author in context for them to be right or wrong about.4 Fish started his career espousing the
author-less text of the New Critics, changed horses from texts to individual readers, then to
“interpretive communities,” only to come home to authors at last.5 It is perfectly true that
sentences taken as mere pieces of language can mean any number of things depending on
context. But that is precisely why we need a context to make them worth interpreting. And
that context can only be the relation between an author or a speaker whose intention is aimed
at an audience that can potentially identify it. It is not for extra-textual clues that authors are
indispensable. It is for the animation of the text itself. With their attempt to limit authors’
3
W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Sewanee Review 54, no. 3
(July–September 1946): 468–488.
4
Stanley Fish, Is There A Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980).
5
For his late position, see Stanley Fish, Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014), 1-6.
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