New Criticism, Part 2: The Intentional Fallacy

Left: My Grandmother?

The Singer and the Song

So you say you love Faulkner? Me too (or at least I went through a mild Faulkner phase). Therefore, you want to know what he intended by blah blah about blah blah in this or that work? Who was the real Benjy, and was he in fact a savant?

In a PBS interview with Faulkner’s daughter a couple decades ago, when she was middle aged, she talked about being a young girl and trying to stop one of her father's drinking binges—she’d learned to recognize the beginnings.
“Pappie,” she said, “please don’t. Please stop.”
His reply? “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.”

Although it’s not relevant, I want to add that Faulkner's daughter, all those years later, was dignified and restrained in narrating this tale. Dignity and restraint are valuable weapons.

The point is, artists and writers full of psychopathologies have produced stunning works—Van Gogh, Plath, Sexton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nietzsche—the list seems endless. In fact, we commonly assume—don’t we?—that great artists have led unusually troubled, often mean lives, unless we hear otherwise. Presumed guilty (i.e., neurotic) until proven innocent. Somehow that mollifies and elevates our own troubles and meanness, I suspect; we are of a kind with Faulkner, or something like that. Never mind that he'd probably prefer we be of a kind with his characters.

Further irony: don’t we assume that literature offers wisdom, whatever else it might do? Yet we expect this wisdom to come from our looniest fellow travelers. The looniness produces the wisdom. Why else Lear's fool? And from there, it's only inches to: "I am loony; therefore, I am wise."

Of course some of that might be true. The point is, however, in being a good reader, it is wasteful to speculate much about the author’s life or his intentions, titillating as that can be, because authors are not completely aware of the correlation between their intentions and the object they’ve in fact created.

The work is on the page; read it. The writer is dead or dying or too flawed to believe, or simply unaware of precisely what he’s wrought. So what he says about his work is of limited value. Think of his commentary as literary fortune cookies, party favors, mints on the pillow. Do not think of his remarks as the entrée; that’s pointless idol worship. That's Hollywood. That's fawning from the mosh pit. Instead, read the damned poem. Over and over. Out loud. Can you chant it? Why not? Wallow in it. If it's too shallow for a long-wallow, there's your answer about how good the poem is, at least for you; and in arriving at that evaluation, you've probably come to understand it fairly well.

Was that too impressionistic? How about this hypothetical: a writer intends to compose a merely literal chronology of his grandmother’s life, but does it so well that he ends up with a brilliant novel about man’s inhumanity to man. Why should we deny his achievement simply because it was not his intent to produce so grand an object?

Of course the evaluation game usually goes the other direction, with the author trying for canonical greatness, but achieving only a superficial sketch of his grandmother’s life. In either case, his intent is irrelevant. The work product "is what it is," as we say these days; it may or may not be what its creator intended it to be. It sits there trying to come alive on its own terms, begging us to participate in it, not its creator's daydreams or the facts of his life.

More coming? You betcha. (I speak Alaskan).