Class 6: Interpreting Art

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Class 6: Interpreting Art

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Roland Barthes: “The Death of the Author”Thesis:

Interpretation of a work is independent of the author; rather, reading depends upon the reader.


Background:Barthes was a French literary theorist, who grew out of the background of New Criticism, and stretched the limits of structuralism into post-structuralism. “The Death of the Author” is probably his most famous work, and opened the door to deconstructionism, a school of literary criticism focused on intertextuality and the reader.

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The Place of the Author• Barthes argues that, when the Reformation began

focusing on the individual (thus the birth of Humanism), the author became privileged.

• The author became the authority on his work: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.” (143)

• “[I]t is language which speaks, not the author.” (143)


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Literature• Barthes argues that moves in literature have been

decentralizing the place of the author in favor of the reader.

• Stéphane Mallarmé – a French poet who drew on Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools of literature to produce works that relied heavily on interplay between the style and the content. The interplay between words (using homophones and other devices) produces new meanings not evident in the words, themselves. This anomaly makes Mallarmé’s work very difficult to translate into English, but more than this, places primacy in the reader at least as much as (and probably moreso than) the author.


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Linguistics• “Linguistically, the author is never more than the

instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it.” (145)


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The Author and the Text• Barthes compares the Author (“when believed in”) as the

historical parent of the text: “The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to the work as a father to his child.” (145)

• Historically, criticism has been the act of deciphering a text, to get at its meaning, and meaning was synonymous with author’s meaning.

• New Criticism• Auteur theory


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Multiplicity of Meaning• But the text is separate from the Author: “[A] text is not

a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (146)

• Reading is an interactive process with the text, not with the author. Reading a novel or a poem is like reading something on the Internet, where any term, phrase, or name might be hyperlinked to some other page – but in a book, the reader provides his own hyperlinks.

• Essentially, the reader creates the work as he reads it.


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Multiplicity of Meaning (cont’d)• “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a

text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.” (147)

• “In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered.” (147)

• Meaning comes from the reader, not the author: “The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a test’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” (148)


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Beyond the Text• “Text” and “Work”• Reader-Response Theory• Spots of Indeterminacy (Roman Ingarden)


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Questions & Problems(1) Does Barthes’ theory imply that there is never a right

or wrong interpretation of a text?(2) If Barthes is correct, can we ever meaningfully

disagree about what a book means?(3) Does the author’s background, or the context in which

a work is created, add to our interpretation of a work?(4) Is it right to say that a work is about my mother,

simply because it reminds me of my mother?(5) Could any literary work be ironic?


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Jerrold Levinson: “Intention and Interpretation in Literature”

Thesis:Theory of Hypothetical Intentionalism: that the meaning of a text is identified with the text’s utterance meaning.


Background:Levinson is responding to the extreme views that (i) an author’s intentions play no part in a “correct” interpretation (as with Barthes), and (ii) an author’s intentions are integral to a “correct” interpretation.

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Four Models of Meaning1. Word-sequence meaning: Roughly, “dictionary”

meaning – the meaning attachable to the sequence of words given the rules of that specific language, at that specific time.

2. Utterer’s meaning: What the speaker or writer has in mind to convey in a given work.


- Irony- Allusion

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Four Models of Meaning3. Utterance meaning: The meaning that a work ends up

conveying in its context of utterance (including who uttered it).

4. Ludic meaning: Any meaning(s) that can be attributed to a text or text-as-utterance, constrained only loosely by plausibility, intelligibility, or interest.


- Barthes

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Four Models of Meaning (cont’d)• Literary meaning is not word-sequence meaning:

interpretation presumes a single mind: we don’t treat literary works in the same way we do some random collection of words.

• Literary meaning is not utterer’s meaning – interpretation presumes a nonparaphrasable autonomy of text. Literary works are different than, say, conversation.


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Four Models of Meaning (cont’d)• Literary meaning (at least on a fundamental level) is not

ludic meaning – which presupposes meaning to get started.

• Utterance meaning (from Tolhurst) is our best-informed projection of the author’s intended meaning from our positions as intended interpreters.


- The most likely correct and/or charitable reading of the text, excluding what the author couldn’t have meant.

- Could Jane Eyre have been a comment on modern Communism?

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“Open Letter” vs. “Private Epistle”


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“Open Letter” vs. “Private Epistle” (cont’d)


• The literary meaning and utterance meaning of this letter are quite different – call the first the “Open Letter” and the second the “Private Epistle”.

• The texts of the Open Letter and Private Epistle, however, are indistinguishable.

• Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”

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“Open Letter” vs. “Private Epistle” (cont’d)


• Problem: Tolhurst’s argument still rests on the author’s actual intentions.

• Two possible responses by the Hypothetical Intentionalist:(1) Show that the intended audience is less problematic

than the author’s intentional meaning.(2) Change the notion of utterance meaning to reference

an appropriate audience, rather than an intended one.

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Appropriate Audience


• The appropriate reader…(1) … is generally well-versed in literature.(2) … is acquainted with the author’s oeuvre.(3) … is familiar with the author’s public persona.

• The appropriate reader is not…(1) … expected to know everything about every book ever

written.(2) … expected to be intimately familiar with everything

the author has written.(3) … expected to be familiar with the author’s private

life.

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Problem of Unintended Meaning


How are we to deal with the possibility of unintended meaning ascribable to literary interpretation?

(1) Acknowledge them, but qualify them as secondary.(2) Propose a broader notion of Hypothetical

Intentionalism, where unintended meanings must work in concert with intended ones.

(3) Ascribe perspectives which could belong historically to the author (though we know they don’t).

• Three strategies:

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What Kinds of Intention?


We need to distinguish two kinds of intentions relevant to the production and reception of art:

(1) Categorical intentions – as with Walton’s “Categories of Art,” these intentions are how the author frames and positions his product vis-à-vis his projected audience.

(2) Semantic intentions – an author’s intention to mean something in or by a text.

• Meaning is not determined by semantic intentions – the author might be a bad author.

• But whatever a text ends up meaning, it is clear that this meaning is not independent of its categorical intention.

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Inside & Outside the Work


• “[N]ot all intentions relevant to appreciation of a work of literature can be effectively located internal to the work or its process of production.” (207)- Semantic intentions may be largely locatable within the

work itself, but categorical intentions lie outside the work.

• The force of an utterance is part of the utterance meaning, not the utterer’s meaning, when this is derived from the text, itself.

• The utterance meaning may be mistaken – utterance meaning is not ultimately reducible to utterer’s meaning.

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Do Actual Intentions Trump Hypothetical Ones?


• Iseminger: “If exactly one of two interpretive statements about a poem, each of which is compatible with its text, is true, then the true one is the one that conforms to the meaning intended by the author.” (208)- The determinacy in question “can just as easily and

reasonably come from an audience’s best contextually informed hypothesis of authorial intention in a given passage, all things considered.” (208)

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Do Actual Intentions Trump Hypothetical Ones? (cont’d)


• There are two advantages of Hypothetical Intentionalism over Actual Intentionalism:

- This illustrates the crucial difference between the author’s meaning and the work’s meaning.

(1) HI preserves the difference between what is said and what is intended to be said.

(2) Works of literature retain a certain autonomy from their authors, at least so far as resultant meaning is concerned.

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Work & Text


• Iseminger: “a poem is the sum or complex of the text and the specific literary content of which it is the vehicle, that is, a set of thoughts or ideas.” (209)

• The work has become as much a conceptual object as a verbal one.- Problem: if a poem isn’t, at base, a structure of words, we

lose the fundamental activities proper to poems.- Levinson: A poem is a text-as-indicated-in-a-context,

which, as a result, has meaning and conceptual content without being that content, even in part.

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Work & Text (cont’d)


• For two word sequences to count as different requires context (of creation and understanding), not merely authorial intent.

• Krausz: The literary work, or object-of-interpretation, changes as interpretations vary.- Levinson: This is to confuse a property of the thing with

the thing, itself. A literary work will generate meanings under different interpretations, but the work, itself, is not to be identified with such meaning.

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Context


• (Contra-Carroll) There are differences between the rules and procedures of literary discourse, and those of ordinary discourse.- In ordinary discourse, the utterer’s meaning counts for

nearly everything, where the meaning of the vehicle, itself, counts for nearly nothing.

- The vehicle of meaning in literature is indispensable: “not something to be bypassed in favor of more direct access to personal meaning when or if that is available.” (211)

† Literature loses meaning when its vehicle is paraphrased.

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“[A] virtue of hypothetical intentionalism stands out clearly, which is to mediate between a position, actual intentionalism, which gives just a little too much to authors as persons, and a ludic position such as that of Shusterman (or, more extremely, Rorty, Barthes, or Derrida), which gives altogether too much to readers, and threatens to undermine the motivations of authors for upholding their end of the implicit literary contract.” (211)

Death-of-The-Author

ActualIntentionalism

HypotheticalIntentionalism

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Working Out the Details


• (With Carroll) Aberrant authorial pronouncements do not serve as counterexamples to hypothetical intentions.- “[T]he intentions most relevant to literary or cinematic

works are ones that are largely evident in the works themselves.” (212)

• Implied Speaker: We should first attribute the “nonfictional” elements of a fiction to an “implied speaker” or narrator, and not to the author.- The narrator may or may not have some of the same

views as the author.- The narrator still refers to fictional things as if they were

nonfictional.

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Working Out the Details (cont’d)


• Authors expect readers to take (some) biographical information into account when interpreting a work:- The author’s ancillary theoretical pronouncements.- The rest of the author’s corpus.- The work of the author’s contemporaries.- The social/political movements at the time that had a

demonstrable effect on the author.- The author’s participation in/identification with artistic

movements.

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The Problem of Allusion


• Hermerén: Allusion is tied up with actual intentions:(1) Allusions are actions.(2) Actions require agents.(3) Allusions are bound up with intentions.(4) Meaning in allusion depends on intention.

• Levinson: Work allusion can be understood to operate contextually, not requiring the artist’s will or knowledge to secure the reference involved.- The work alludes, regardless of the author’s intentions –

we attribute the allusion to the author, being more appropriately informed than he is.

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Conclusion


“Thus we arrive finally at neither intentionalism nor anti-intentionalism but at the form of non-intentionalism I call hypothetical intentionalism. Anti-intentionalism is right in thinking actual intention is not strictly determinative or criterial of a work’s basic meaning, but intentionalism is right, first, insofar as our notion of the meaning of an artwork is one that makes essential reference to the artist’s intentions, as plausibliy projectible by an informed audience, and second, insofar as, in many cases (“successful ones”), artistic meaning and author’s actual concrete intent happily coincide.” (218)

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Questions & Problems(1) If an author says he intended something in a given

work, and that isn’t evident in the work, do we think of the work as a failure?

(2) Are Levinson’s expectations of the “appropriate audience” well-grounded?

(3) If a work is not to be identified with meaning, what is a work? How is it to be differentiated from a text? Or is there no difference?

(4) Who presents a better case, Barthes or Levinson?


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Class 6: Interpreting Art

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