The two versions of John Keats’ poem ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’ reveal the ways that the original fragment, written on the manuscript page for an unfinished poem, was altered by editors before its publication. In addition to eliminating the crossed-out ‘I’ and the dash becoming a full-stop, the editor has also changed words; ‘calm’d’ becomes ‘calmed’ and, most importantly perhaps, ‘thine heat own’ becomes ‘thine own heart’. These alterations encourage vital questions about the importance and nature of intentionality, specifically the extent to which an author’s intention can be known and should be respected. Though the actions of the editor appear, at first glance, to be small changes which clarify the text, they also override the choices made by Keats himself. The relation to intention is twofold: the editor arguably shows a lack of respect for Keats’ intentions by changing his work, yet it could be argued that the editor is attempting to create a text which better reflects Keats’ original intention. Ultimately, they raise questions about the extent to which authorial intention is important when considering a text’s meaning.
I consider the relationship between intentionality and meaning, particularly whether an author’s intention can be known and, if it can, whether it should affect meaning. I argue for a pluralistic approach to meaning, and argue that, although evidence relating to authorial intention can be helpful when developing a view on the meaning of a text, the author does not control meaning. Though the formalist and historicist schools of thought both tend to minimise the importance of authorial intention outside of what is tangible from the text, they can also tend towards a monistic view of meaning. I also consider how deconstructions of the Author challenge the importance of intentionality.
Cleanth Brooks argues in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) Chapter 11, “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, that it is crucial to closely analyse the language of the poem itself, and not to paraphrase the message. Meaning is rooted in the language itself, so ‘the relation of each item to the whole context [of the poem] is crucial’(207). This view suggests that intention outside the text is not important, but that instead meaning can be taken from the text itself. The author had power over meaning when they chose the words, but the text now stands alone. For example, the statement ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ from Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1820) is often ‘detached from its context’ (208), causing misconceptions. In contrast, when analysed in the context of the poem, a resolution can be reached through ‘working out of the various tensions—set up by whatever means – by propositions, metaphors, symbols’ (207). Although this viewpoint has merit, it assumes that the words on the page are exactly as the author intended them to be, and thus their work is done. This is complicated by the kind of alterations which occurred in relation to Keats’ ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’, where the ‘context’ of the poem as published is different to that of the poem originally written. Thus, the concept of context as a fixed entity can be challenged. For example, in addition to the immediate context of the poem, it could be argued that a reading of Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ would be enriched by a contextual understanding of the image of the sacrifice of a virgin cow in the fourth stanza.
William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley also confront the question of intentionality and who has authority over meaning in “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) and “The Affective Fallacy” (1949). In the former, their argument that we cannot use the author’s intention to inform a reading of a literary work because the work is a public utterance, rather than a private one which would take meaning from the intent of the author, shows the ways that formalist approaches can diminish the importance of the author’s intention. As ‘the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art’ (468), not only is private intention unimportant to judging a literary work, but it is impossible for the critic to truly know an author’s private intentions, making the poet’s aim at the moment of the creative act the only one worth judging. Thus, they dismiss attempts to find ‘evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem’ (469) through contextual analysis or biographical evidence. After all, ‘If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he was trying to do.’ (469) This argument, although strongly against attempts to find meaning through outside evidence of intentions, does also champion the authority of the writer at the moment of writing the text, as their intentions are successful through their choices, and thus would attribute more authority to Keats and his original manuscript than an editor’s attempts to improve an aspect of the poem that the poet did not succeed in. Compagno (2012) summarises that ‘The value of literature lays in the formal configurations words produce by themselves, independently from subjective plans and associations in the writer’ (39).
However, such formal analysis is limited because it neglects the importance of contextual information which may inform and dramatically alter the meaning of a text. Stephen J Greenblatt argues in “Resonance and Wonder” (1990) that, whilst aesthetic analysis has its uses, a reading of a text can be enriched by a knowledge of the conditions in which it was written, as literary texts are ‘textual relics’ (13) created in a web of cultural practices. New Historicism reveals, according to Greenblatt, that ‘the apparently isolated power of the individual genius turns out to be bound up with collective, social energy’ (15), challenging the concept of literature as separate from intention, since the author’s intentions were influenced from outside factors. For example, knowledge of Seamus Heaney’s intentions can significantly alter the perceived meaning of the Bog Body Poems, as detailed in his essay “Feeling Into Words” (1980 [1974]) and Times article ‘on being haunted by the bog man’ (2010). His inspiration from P. V Glob’s The Bog People (1965) is clear in poems such as “Bog Queen”, “Grauballe Man”, “Punishment”, and “Strange Fruit”, detailing the preserved bodies which were found in bogs across Northern Europe. However, his assertion in “Feeling Into Words” that ‘the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles’ (57-8) dramatically changes their meaning.
Such a detail could be deemed undesirable or irrelevant by proponents of New Criticism such as Wimsatt and Beardsley, which would deprive the reader from accessing a richer understanding of potential meaning. However, a pluralist response to meaning is necessary, as the notion that an interpretation of meaning in line with Heaney’s private intentions is the only genuine meaning does not account for the various other interpretations which could be gleaned without such knowledge. Indeed, Keats’ intentions are not accessible in the same way, and yet multiple interpretations of his work have been established. For example, in John Barnard’s exploration of Keats’ letters, he references the literary quality of ‘This living hand, now warm and capable’ and comments that ‘If this is a poem, the addressee is necessarily the reader… the poet demands the death of the reader in order to re-animate him’ (2001: 133). His assertion that the reader is ‘necessarily’ the one being addressed rejects the notion that intention is necessary to derive a clear meaning, because meaning is inherent in the text. However, his cautionary opening, ‘If this is a poem’, acknowledges that suggesting that a singular interpretation of the meaning of the text would be unrealistic.
Edmund Husserl in Ideen (1913 [1982]) separates intention from meaning, albeit in terms of language rather than literary language. He also constructs an ideal speaker, who could use language in a fully conscious and clear way, with no private intentions to conceal meaning, a ‘“transcendental ego” … who “precedes” anything worldly’ (1929 [1969] 238). However, Husserl’s conception of an ideal meaning that is shared between speakers and recievers, autonomous of intention, is as unrealistic as his ideal speaker. For Husserl, author intention muddies the true meaning of language, whereas a reader adopting a strong New Historicist view could argue that a lack of appreciation for context muddies the true meaning of the text, as selves are ‘fashioned and acting according to the generative rules and conflicts of a given culture’ (Greenblatt, 15). Both viewpoints, then, have the possibility of tending towards a prescriptive view of a “true” meaning of a text, minimising the importance of intention in the process. Roland Barthes’ suggestion in The Death of the Author (1967) that literary value lies in the potential to stimulate thought for the reader places emphasis on a pluralist approach to meaning. The text, contrary to a space where the subjective author’s intentions can be removed to make way for formal objective analyses, becomes a place for revolutionary readings, freed from the dull, objective meaning imposed by the Author. By arguing for ‘the birth of the reader’ (147), Barthes does not suggest that the reader should stop thinking about the author, but only that the ideal consciousness of the ‘Author’ is dead, creating room for speculation about what is hidden in the individual sub-consciousness. Similarly, critical pluralists such as Stecker (2003) hold that multiple meanings can be attributed to a work, even conflicting meanings, since interpretation does not have one unified goal.
Alternatively, it could also be argued that a text can stand alone without investigations into intentionality, not because the author’s intentions are irrelevant or impossible to discern, but simply because they are expressed in the language of the text itself. This argument offers a more realistic view of the relationship between the author and the language, rather than the distinct separation advocated by Wimsatt and Beardsley and Husserl. It also evokes the sentiment of Brooks’ emphasis on the necessary context of the poem, whilst acknowledging the context of the language itself beyond the text. Intentions are not private and contingent, impossible to express or discern through biographical and cultural context, but are revealed in the language choices of the writer.
The possibility of studying the author through their language is further explored through Burke (1998), Irwin (2002), and Bennett (2005). As they suggest, considering authorial intention is important not only because they are expressed in language choices, but because avoiding them could lead to searching for a singular ideal meaning in vain. Foucault (1969) argues that the author is the result of culture and interpretation, as is language, and thus ‘The author’s name serves to characterise a certain mode of being of discourse… that must be received in a certain mode.’ (107) This viewpoint combines an understanding of how intention contributes to meaning with an acknowledgement that the realms of ‘intentionality’ and meaning, often placed in conflict with each other, cannot be easily separated. As a result, intentionality is important when considering meaning, not only because the author’s intention can reveal meaning, but because the author’s intention created meaning.
Unlike the more prescriptive view of New Historicists such as Greenblatt, this approach allows the reader to consider a text within its cultural context without disregarding the author’s intentions in favour of the historical events which shaped language. Author intention is still important, as they chose to use the words they did, but context plays a significant role in the meaning of words. For example, Nick’s narration of Gatsby and Wilson’s death in Chapter Eight of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) must be considered in context in order to consider the author’s intended meaning: ‘It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.’ (112) The date of composition and publication is pre- World War Two, giving the word ‘holocaust’ a markedly different set of connotations than those available to a modern reader. Contrasted to the opinion of Robert Eaglestone (2004), that modern literature is in some way ‘still striving to respond the Holocaust’ (3), additional information about previous connotations to the word, such as the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry of ‘A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire’, are extremely valuable (holocaust, n., OED).