Imagine this, if you will:
A fourteen-year-old girl writes a story about her favourite rock band. In the story, the lead singer of the band meets a sixteen-year-old girl, and he is so charmed by her beauty, her intelligence, and her obsessive knowledge about his music that he immediately asks her to marry him. She says yes, and they fly to Hawaii and have a fairytale wedding. Oh, and she also develops magical powers, and goes off to New York to fight crime. At the end she becomes queen of the world and the happy couple buys a mansion and have dozens of beautiful babies.
Most adults, when reading this kind of story, would consider it a pretty transparent expression of the girl's own wishes. She fantasizes about being a little older, marrying a rock star, becoming queen, and so on, and so she writes a story in which her fantasies come true.
However, if you were to try and tell the girl that this is what her story "means," or that this is what it is "really about," then she will probably deny it, and she might even be hurt or insulted. She will say that her story is no different and no worse than any of the other novels that you can buy in a bookstore; it is a love story, no more, no less, and it is her creativity, rather than her hidden desires, that drive its plot and its characterization.
So it seems that what the story says is somehow at odds with what the girl thinks it says. Where she expects her reader to look at the protagonist with admiration, he instead probably finds amusement and maybe a bit of pity. Where she expects her reader to suspend disbelief about the magical bits at the end of the story, he might just roll his eyes. If you were to interview her about her intentions in writing the story, and then interview an adult reader of the same story, not only would their interpretations differ wildly, but you (if you too are an adult) will probably come to the conclusion that the adult is a better judge of the story than the author is.
The thing is, authorial intent is very often conflicted in this way -- and not just in the cases of stories written by fourteen-year-old girls. How many times have you seen a movie in which a character is designed to be funny, but instead ends up just being annoying? How many times have you gotten the nagging feeling that an author is incredibly racist or homophobic or misogynist, even if that author claims in interviews that the work is "just a work of fiction" and bears no resemblance to his real opinions? How many times have you gotten the sense that an author is clumsily working out issues about her family or her background in ways that are completely invisible to her, and which indeed would surprise her if you confronted her with them?
Every time you have that sort of reaction to a work of fiction, you are asserting that your own opinion of the piece is actually more accurate than the author's. And this, in a slightly more radical form, is the position that was held by the school of literary theory that's known as New Criticism. In an even more radical form, it has been adopted by certain poststructuralists.
According to the New Critics, it is a fallacy to use an author's intentions to judge a work. For this early twentieth-century movement, anything that takes place "outside" the text is off-limits. They saw the academy's obsession with "historical context" and "the author's biography" as misplaced and misguided. When Alan Moore wrote V for Vendetta, to choose a modern and familiar example, he was writing in reaction to Margaret Thatcher's England. Who cares? say the New Critics. The text itself is all that matters. If it has something important to say about oppression, then it will say it whether Moore had Thatcher in mind or not. When the comic was adapted into a movie by the Wachowski brothers, it was transformed into a commentary on September 11, 2001. Who cares? the New Critics repeat. What we want to know is simply: what does the movie say? Don't go running to a newspaper for help analyzing it!
The New Critic perspective may feel pointlessly reactionary now, and indeed there are elements of it that go against all my instincts as a historian. At the same time, however, there is something very valuable about cutting off all links to "history" and "biography" -- valuable, ironically, even and perhaps especially for a historian. It is important for all of us, historians included, to clear the table of baggage, and to try and focus exclusively on what the text says and how it says it. Instead of running to 9/11 for an "explanation" for V for Vendetta, it's important to just take a deep breath and analyze the book on its own terms. If the book can be used to illuminate certain aspects of Thatcher's England, that's all well and good, but we shouldn't need to ask Moore if that's the case. And if it can't be used to illuminate certain aspects of Thatcher's England, then all of Moore's insistence to the contrary will come to naught.
This approach to literary criticism is most strongly associated with W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, who published an essay called "The Intentional Fallacy" in The Swanee Review in 1946. It has since been republished many times and should not be hard to find in a good library.
The poststructuralists went much further, as they were wont to do, claiming that not only is authorial intent not fair game for analysis, it is actually inaccessible. Think once again about the girl in my opening example. The reasons she wrote that story are not clear even to her. If the author herself is not a reliable or trustworthy source of information on her own writing, then who can be? The poststructuralists answer: Nobody! We are all adolescent girls writing about our fantasies without necessarily being aware of it. We are all working stuff out about our own little obsessions. We are all letting our prejudices and biases "leak" into our writing (and our reading), no matter how vigilant we try to be against them. We all misjudge the extent of our own humour, insight, and intelligence sometimes.
In other words, the situation I described in my first paragraph doesn't just apply to grade-school children; it applies to the greatest authors that our culture has ever known. Hamlet represents a struggle, and the reason it represents that struggle so beautifully is precisely because Shakespeare could not plumb all the depths of the character he created. Only shallow characters and shallow authors can be understood on the first pass. Books that have something important to say are necessarily beyond the understanding of their authors as well as anyone else.
Poststructuralists of this stripe (these include, among others, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) assert that we should never privilege an author's understanding of her story over any other reader's. An author may have interesting and important things to say about her work, but her view is just one among many, and it is not necessarily the most insightful. Saying an author automatically has a better understanding of her work than a critic is like saying that a runner necessarily has a better understanding of her leg muscles than a physiotherapist. Such an assertion is much more often false than true, even though it might feel true to the runner who lives inside the body to which those legs belong. At any rate, the insights that a runner has and the insights that a physiotherapist has are going to be different, and they will serve different purposes.
In the case of authorial intent, the situation is even more complex, because authors might be lying to themselves or to others about their motivations and intentions in a way that is not often true of runners.
Does all this sound Freudian? It should.
All this talk about finding the "hidden meaning" of a text -- "you're just writing about a girl marrying a rock star because you want to marry a rock star" -- may feel like the critic is trying to do therapy on a book. This is, in some sense, true; it's no coincidence that what takes place on Freud's couch and what takes place in a university English department are both called analysis.
"But wait!" you might say. "I thought that Freudian theory claims that the unconscious is accessible to the analyst. You sit around doing dream interpretation or whatever and you figure out what was buried before. You realize that the cigar is a penis and the code is cracked. Right?"
Freud could be infuriating, and he was wrong about plenty of things, but he was never this crass. He never thought of dreams or fantasies as simple ciphers, and he was always careful to try and understand the richly-textured meanings at play within them.
Even taking that into account, though, Freudian theory has gone far, far beyond Freud in the decades since his death. Neo-Freudians like Jacques Lacan are much more pessimistic about the unconscious than Freud ever was, building on his assertion that the human mind has developed elaborate systems designed to hide and redirect any feelings that might be painful or embarrassing for the neurotic. Latent meaning is a wriggly, slippery thing, dodging the analyst's questions and surrounding itself with nearly-impenetrable defenses.
According to twentieth-century literary critics, texts can do all this too. Like the figures in dreams, fictional characters and plots can simultaneously reveal and conceal truths about themselves. Asking the author point-blank "what it all means" is a crude and ineffective way of figuring out what is going on, since the author is just as much a bystander as the rest of us.
By the way, this does not mean that "anything goes."
A frequent accusation levelled against poststructuralists is that they are completely relativist -- in other words, they assume all interpretations are of equal value. This may be true of not-especially-bright first-year graduate students who are discovering Derrida for the first time, but I promise it doesn't apply to the best thinkers in the discipline. Barthes, to choose just one example, was a careful and sophisticated reader, profoundly interested in what a text said. (In his case "texts" could include billboards and TV commercials as well as works of "literature.")
In fact, just like the New Critics, smart poststructuralists are consciously trying to avoid being misled by outside influences: if the text has an obsession with race or violence or incest or what have you, then it, not the author, is brought to the witness stand to speak on its own behalf. Poststructuralists are notoriously allergic to allegory, finding no value at all in the "Colonel Kurtz represents Ireland" school of litcrit. Instead, they tease meaning out of the text through a technique known as close reading. If it's done well, then it can be playful or sly, but it is never purely random.
Though I'll be the first to admit that it's not always done well.
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