SQN - Sine Qua Non - Issue 1 - Journal - Page 29
SINE QUA NON
due.
I have often been asked How do you know what the author means? My answer is, if by
know you mean know for certain, then you don’t. Ordinary language and literary language are
slipperier and trickier than that, which is why they have the power to give us pleasure. The
regimented, unambiguous languages of science, mathematics, and computer programming
serve their purpose well, but art, including the art of conversation, has no reason to envy
them. Art depends upon a language that is multiple, subtle, and unexpected in its meaning,
turning old usages to new and surprising ones. Uncertainty and the need for interpretation
are among the sources of its charm. There is finesse both in the writing and in the reading
of literary works, and there is no reason to wish it otherwise. The New Critics were right to
see the ambiguities of literary language as an essential asset. Where they went wrong was in
separating literary language too categorically from ordinary language by erasing the author,
the very person who turns language’s many wrinkles into assets for the reader’s pleasure.
John Farrell is the Waldo W. Neikirk Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna
College, where he has taught since 1990. He is the author of The Varieties of Authorial Intention:
Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), The Utopian
Dilemma in the Western Political Imagination (2023), Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to
Rousseau (2006) and Freud’s Paranoid Quest (1996). He is currently publishing the Substack
Thinking Out of School (https://farrelljohn.substack.com), free to the digital public.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” In Image-Music-Text, 142–48. New York: Hill &
Wang, 1977.
Bergonzoni, Gisela. La préparation du roman contemporain: présence de Barthes et retour de
l’auteur chez Gonçalo M. Tavares, Enrique Vila-Matas et Henri Raczymow. Thèse en Littératures
comparées, Université Rennes 2, 2017.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
———. Versions of Antihumanism: Milton and Others. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2014.
Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”
Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2004): 225–48.
Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review 54, no.
3 (July–September 1946): 468–88.
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