SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 28
extra-textual utterances about their intentions, they left the texts themselves—theoretically, at
least—without a voice.
So much for saying. As a communicative act, the literary work can only achieve its further
goals—having a valuable effect for an audience—if it achieves its preliminary goal of saying
something the audience can pick out from the many possible meanings of the text as the one
intended. It is interesting to note that Wimsatt and Beardsley did not rule out recognizing
intention as the key to what they called “practical messages.” It was only in literary works that
intentions were unwelcome. In a key footnote they conceded that, unlike works of art, the
intentions of practical messages succeed simply if the audience recognizes what they are. But
they were wrong about that too. Neither practical message nor literary works succeed simply
through the mere recognition of intended meaning. If I ask you “Can I borrow ten dollars?”
and you say no, my communicative intention succeeds but my practical intention to borrow
ten dollars has failed. Even the clearest and simplest practical messages—“I love you,” for
example—can fail if the hearer doesn’t believe you mean them. Here we see the same chain of
intentions as in the literary work. In order to have a hope of getting ten dollars, my intention
has to be recognizable, even though that’s not enough for my further intention to succeed. And
in order to create a valuable experience for the audience, the intended meanings in a literary
work have to be recognizable, even though that’s not enough for the literary work to succeed.
Success in saying is necessary for doing even if it’s not sufficient. Another way of putting this is
to say that all utterances, literary or otherwise, have two types of requirements, transparency
and effectiveness. Where the first one is lacking, the second must be too.
What about making? Here we confront the fact that literary performances come in
many different types which give authors all kinds of intermediate goals. They aim to achieve
particular artistic effects by writing a sonnet, for example, or a comedy, or by telling a story
with a certain kind of ending. Their saying, in other words, is constrained by the form of the
work they are making. Since literary forms tend to have a certain tonality which conditions
their reception, they do not generally succeed when the audience cannot pin down the work’s
genre and catch its tone. So form, or genre, comprise part of the intention that must necessarily
be recognizable for the work to have its effect.
But the relation between form and meaning is more complicated than it is in cases where
x is simply necessary to do y. Literary statements do not simply fill out literary forms the way
crossword puzzle makers fill out boxes. In the process of composition, form and meaning
are candidates for mutual adjustment. It is as true to say that authors look for the proper
meaning to fill out a form as to say that they look for the proper form to express a meaning.
Expressive and artistic goals can barely be distinguished. This is just one more way in which the
complexities of literature are occluded when authors are left out. Authors do, indeed, as myth
critics and many others have observed, work by borrowing well-known forms, patterns, and
conventions, but they must always find a way of renewing them with contents of their own.
They have to realize meaning and form together.
Now it seems as if the saying and the making elements should be thought of as coincident,
leaving only doing in the future, when the reader actually arrives on the scene to enjoy the
benefits of the author’s work. In fact, however, the x-to-do-y separation between the saying/
making and the doing in the process of composition is also overly schematic because authors, as
they negotiate between the exigencies of statement and genre, undoubtedly adjust the artistic
effects they are aiming at as well. All three of our elements, then, seem to be up for mutual
negotiation. So, with the reader’s permission, I will revise my slogan to saying/making/doing.
This is a model of intention internally complex enough to satisfy any textualist critic, allowing
the text to remain the literary phenomenon par excellence while giving authors their creative
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