Interpretation and Authorial Intent

Breaking news* in the literary world! A letter from Edith Wharton has been discovered that could alter how critics interpret the end of The House of Mirth!

Okay, so it's really only exciting to me (and other English-types), but it is a situation which makes me think of some of the issues we've discussed in Intro to Grad Studies. How much to we allow authorial intent to influence interpretation? Do we prescribe to the theory of the intentional fallacy (which means you ignore authorial intent), or do we try to figure out as closely as possible what the author wanted? And what role do letters and journals play into the editing/interpretive process?

As a critic, I want to take a more moderate approach. A work will always have plausible interpretations which we can never possibly validate according to authorial intention. Most of the works we discuss are written by those long gone. We can't dig up Shakespeare and ask him which version of Hamlet was the one he intended, so we have to muddle through it the best we can with the evidence we have.

To a certain degree authorial intent should influence how we interpret a work. For example, if an author created a female character, we can't really say that character is a man. If a character loves a woman, we can't argue that it's really a man--unless the woman turns out to be a man in drag. It just wouldn't make sense. There were times in my Intro to Grad Studies paper that I disagreed with a critic's interpretation because it didn't make sense in the text--they were reading what they wanted into the text**.

By the same regard, all we do have is the text. We can't necessarily postulate "what ifs" about it--we have to work with what is there. Which makes introducing letters, journals, etc into the interpretive process: we start moving into murky waters. Wharton's letter is certainly interesting, but should it change how we interpret the end of The House of Mirth? I'm not so sure--perhaps Wharton wanted it to be ambiguous when she reached that point in the novel's composition, but the letter reflected a phase where she was more certain about the character's fate. Plus, it just seems so much more cool for the ending to be ambiguous***. One reason I like Margaret Atwood is that her endings are often ambiguous, straddling the gap between dystopia and hope (The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake).

An author doesn't necessarily always have a final interpretation in mind. Most of our best literature is the stuff that leaves the reader with lingering questions, leaves us wondering how we should view the literature and the ideas. Those questions can be the spark of some great conversations, great articles, and great literary debates.

*So for two days in a row, my posts have been inspired by the NY Times. I'm okay with that--I hope you, my dear readers, are as well!
**This leads to my hatred of a good chunk of feminist and gender study criticism. No, Fitzgerald, you cannot argue that Theodore in The Monk is actually Agnes in drag. It's unsupported by the text and all we have is the text.
***Ambiguity is what we often base our publications on. If there's uncertainty, we can argue forever about it!

Poetics (Mine)

Poets have different goals. Some write to be satirical (Alexander Pope or John Dryden), some write to thwart traditions (Shakespeare's sonnets), some write for reasons only they know. Sometimes the same poet has different intentions, depending on the poem--Alexander Pope is the author of both the wildly satirical Rape of the Lock and the more weighty philosophical The Epistle on Man.

Lately, I've found myself with the same idea in mind as I compose poetry. When I write a poem, my main goal is to convey some feeling with words. If you read the poem from yesterday, you may notice that when I'm describing rain, I use several words that begin with S and end with -ing. My intention was to give the feeling of motion, of rain moving wildly and energetically. When someone reads my poem, I want them to feel the movement of the rain, to visualize rain, and to allow that to transport them into an experience of the poem.

The same theme is repeated in the second stanza. I hoped to inspire a visualization of gray sky, rain, and sidewalks suddenly broken with a brilliant red umbrella. Then people also break the plane of motion by disrupting the downward fall of water with their horizontal movement. Even though they are inside shelter, out of the falling rain, they still are "raining" as the water drips off of them.

The final stanza was meant to convey my situation: I was sitting in a coffee shop reading when the storm suddenly struck. There was lightning, there was thunder. But I was cozy and observant. The final lines of calm form a tension with the kinetic energy of the rest of the poem, which I like. I could move it to the beginning and start the poem off with that tension, but I preferred the feeling of plunging in--you, the reader, are dashing in from the storm toward my place.

Here's the fun thing about analyzing your own poetry: ideas and feelings I got when reading the poem, I pretended I actually consciously thought about all of it. However, the truth is probably I only had a vague notion that I wanted to convey feelings of motion; all other meaning formed as I wrote about it. So does that make analysis pointless? Not really. I created meaning out of my own poem that I truly believe is there. Another reader might create some other, similar meaning from their own experience.

This is not a license for wild interpretation, though. You can't put something into a poem that is not there, in the language. You notice I didn't pretend that the tension was reflective of a conflict with my mother, though some might argue that "rain/nature" equals "mother", which you possibly could get away with as a psychoanalytical approach, maybe. If anything, the tension is reflective of indoor/outdoor distinctions. Not a conflict, per se, but rather a relationship. If I were analyzing this poem as a scholar, I would probably take into account that the author (myself) is interested more in the relationships between opposing forces, not necessarily the conflict (even though conflict is often the center of a relationship). Perhaps I (as the scholar) would conclude that the author's intent was to create tension between the wild outside and the calm inside to demonstrate how the two are compliments of one another. The heavy rain would not be so "merry" and full of "wild joy" if the author was not safe inside observing it.

Anyway, just some thoughts on interpretation. As someone whose job it is to analyze literature, it is difficult to toe the line between feasible interpretations and just making something up. Hopefully I tend away from the "just making something up" (also known as the "it's about God, death, or sex" interpretation). This is a personal conflict I've dealt with on here before, and will likely deal with again...