The Intentional Fallacy Fallacy

At university, 40+ years ago, we were very much 'educated' that the study of literature was the study of texts. The 'Intentional Fallacy' by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M.C. Beardsley was 'gospel' and, it seemed to me, propounded by the work of Lancaster's then highly fashionable tutors on the Stylistics and Criticism course, Geoffrey Leech and Mick Short. Their book was the set text for the course. Why wouldn't it be if that's what you were teaching and they could sell a copy to every student that signed up for it.

I tended to believe what teachers told me. Giving them back in essays the ideas that they had provided seemed the safest way of achieving passable marks. Having understood that a liberal, humanities education in the 1970's showed one 'how to think' and not 'what to think', we'd like to think, my doubts that it really did have accumulated ever since.

It wasn't only in The History Man, filmed at Lancaster on a suitably contemporary shopping precinct of a campus, that there was a given way of thinking, it existed in the predominantly Marxist Sociology Dept. there in the slightly less fictional world and in the Linguistics Dept., too.

I've not had much sight of what constitutes university education since then but it's possible that the education is delivered more than offered with concomitant 'correctness' advisable in exchange for a good grades.

I was taken aback ( ! ) at a conference in 1997 when presented with the proposition that the Intentional Fallacy, that the reader should not refer back to anything the author intended, was nonsense.

But, surely...the Death of the Author, Roland Barthes, the text.

No. I just went quiet.

 

Following up Anna Karenina with the great A. N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy, of course you can't have the text without the life of the author it came from. Texts can't possibly be free-floating things that just happened. They came from a time and place and an author. That much has been apparent for quite some time but not often as clearly as it is in the case of Tolstoy. How far that should lead us into investigating the author and all their darkest corners is another matter because we are still reading the text rather than them but the idea that it exists in suspended isolation is absurd.

'Education' is a good thing, I'm sure, but for me carries the overtones that 're-education' in totalitarian states did and still does. In the same way that saying, 'I'm sure', implies some equivocation. All it can do is present you with what seems right at the time. One has to spend the rest of one's life unlearning what one was taught.

Collating the Collected Poems has shown me how I very gradually unlearnt what a poem ought to be like.

Universities have Theology Departments that train potential vicars, presumably predicated on the idea that there is a Christian God. Still. In this day and age. In some ways we are still medieval.

For all we know, in a phrase from Shirley Bassey, we congratulate ourselves on being wise by escaping one fallacy but only to potentially land ourselves in another. That might not be quite what Tolstoy meant but that's what I'm getting out of him. Maybe it's that condition that makes us 'human', for better or worse.

Maybe Carol Ann Duffy had more of a point than I thought she had in her 'poetry is the music of being human'. It first sounded to me like the most vacuous, self-congratulatory defintion one could provide in support of one's own position in a minor industry but, no. If and when poetry tries to come to terms with being human and succeeds in making music out of it, that's what it must be.