‘Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be μóρφωσις, not ποίησις. The rules of the IMAGINATION are themselves the very powers of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible, present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children only put it to their mouths.’ [Coleridge, Biographia ch. 18]

‘ποίησις’ (poiēsis) means ‘a making, a creation, a production’ and is used of poetry in Aristotle and Plato. ‘μóρφωσις’ (morphōsis) in essence means the same thing: ‘a shaping, a bringing into shape.’ But Coleridge has in mind the New Testament use of the word as ‘semblance’ or ‘outward appearance’, which the KJV translates as ‘form’: ‘An instructor of the foolish, a teacher of babes, which hast the form [μóρφωσις] of knowledge and of the truth in the law’ [Romans 2:20]; ‘Having a form [μóρφωσις] of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away’ [2 Timothy 3:5]. I trust that's clear.

There is much more on Coleridge at my other, Coleridgean blog.

Tuesday 22 November 2016

"The Lord of the Rings" as Pastoral


One of the courses I'm teaching this term is on Pastoral. We start with 'classic' examples of the mode: touch on Theocritus, go into Vergil's Eclogues in some detail, devote a week to Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, and then another to As You Like It. Then we look at some 'anti'-pastoral, with Goldsmith's Deserted Village and Crabbe's The Village. After that we delve into Wordsworth, trying to understand his 'spots of time' and going through 'Michael' in depth. Last week was Adam Bede, and this week is: Tolkien.

Now, you may ask 'but is Tolkien really an example of pastoral literature, Adam?' A reasonable question. Part of the point of this week's session will be to try and tie-together some of the 'what becomes of pastoral?' discussion we've been having in class. And one of the things I'm trying to argue, with this syllabus, is that pastoral in its bare-bones form, as (that is) a set of recognised conventions, of the happy shepherds, sunny countryside, song contests, wine, food, sex and love-longing type, evolves into something broader, something shaped by a number of particular cultural forces, and two in particular. One is a fetish for 'authenticity': so Wordsworth's rural spaces are arduous, difficult places in which to live and work, but that enables precisely a hard-won existential authenticity, focused via the spot-of-time, which replaces hedonism as the transcendent value of the pastoral itself. Man is closer to his true being in the countryside than the city, Wordsworth thinks, and his true joy is spiritual rather than material. And that transcendence picks up on the second major force: the way Christianity itself has styled itself as a pastoral religion. Christ is the good shepherd, and we are the sheep: as a shepherd looks after material sheep, so Christian priests, pastors, look after spiritual sheep—us. So it is that Wordsworth's 'Michael' tells a story of physical and emotional endurance and hardship in order to ground the pastoral value of the life of the elderly shepherd title character, but also parses that tale as a story of quasi-Christian covenant: Michael with the angelic name, his son Luke with the apostolic one, the lost sheep, the sheepfold as covenant, and the sense throughout that although Luke strays never to return, and Michael dies, and even his sheepfold falls to ruin, yet there is something beyond the realm of matter that endures, and which finds expression in the body of, in the very existence of, Wordsworth's pastoral poem.

My sense is that pastoral, now, can't help but fold together these two traditions: the pagan and the Christian, the 'pastor' as rural shepherd and as priest. Adam Bede is, in part, a hymn to the beauty and existential wholeness of rural village life (Middlemarch is too); but Adam Bede literally begins with a sermon, preached by a woman no less, and the 'story' grafted into the fundamentally story-less literary-pastoral space, is a moral one of seduction and sin, death, pilgrimage, atonement and salvation. It's not coincidental that this all happens 'in Nature'.

It's also relevant that Eliot sets her 1859-published story in 1799. Pastoral starts as another, better place, a rural arcadia defined in contradistinction to the city, or (as in Shakespeare's play) the court. But soon enough it becomes another, better time—a past time, of course. This temporal mode of pastoral has the advantage of being unfalsifiable, but it also connects with the backward tug of human experience. That so many of share a sense that things were better 'back then' exerts a gravitational pull on the arcadian mode. This also chimes with Christianity; for Eden is of course the prime, originary locus amoenus; and Christianity as a faith is about not the omnipresence of God in the world so much as the past-historical arrival of God into the world and His departure therefrom, ascending post-crucifixion.

Now all this, it seems to me, has an important bearing on Tolkien's novel. The Lord of the Rings is, as he wrote to his Jesuit friend Robert Murray in 1953, 'of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.' I would argue that it is a profoundly pastoral work in a similar way to this.

It is, for example, a love letter to the English countryside, as rendered fictionally as 'the Shire', the most amoenus of all loci, as far as Tolkien was concerned. It finds not just beauty but a kind of wholeness and transcendent value in 'Nature', and goes further than most pastoral in gifting not just life but motion, speech and thought to such normally unthinking uncommunicative entities as trees. As pastoral traditionally does, it intersperses its text with songs, and insofar as pastoral is allergic to 'narrative' and 'plot' it is striking that the story doesn't really get going until Frodo and his friends have passed out of the Shire, and moved into other, still beautiful but less specifically pastoral locations. Indeed, re-reading it for the hundredth time to teach it again this year, I have been particularly struck by just how long Tolkien's novel tarries in the Shire—by, that is to say, how reluctant the story is to let go of its pastoral starting-place and actually become story. The Peter Jackson movie trilogy is, of course, much more impatient to crack on with things, so much so that it cuts out great chunks of the first half of Fellowship of the Ring: not just Tom Bombadil, but also the sojourn with Farmer Maggot and family, the Hobbits' misadventure with the barrow wight, and even the fact that Frodo initially leaves Bag End not to depart on some great quest, but only to move to a new house in Buckland. The movie is much more in thrall to Plot than the novel. Which is to say, the novel is much more invested in Pastoral than the movie.

So, yes, there are obvious things that can be said about Lord of the Rings as pastoral: the way it defines its value as anti-urban, anti-machine and nostalgic for the past, something with which it has endowed subsequent Fantasy novels (crudely: SF is urban, materialist, machinic, future-oriented and satiric; Fantasy is rural, invested in transcendent or 'magical' value, past-oriented and Pastoral). I could spool this out into a much longer discussion about Fantasy vs SF, but this blogpost is already really pretty lengthily unspooled. So I'm going to limit myself to noting a couple of things.

Say for the sake of argument that you buy my thesis that Lord of the Rings is pastoral. Say you agree that this explains the reluctance of the novel to leave its Shirey pastoral space and crack on with the notional 'story', and why the ending of the novel is so invested not only in returning to the Shire, but in restoring it specifically as rural idyll, tearing down the factories and re-seeding the land. Say that you read, or re-read, Tolkien's novel in this light and are struck, as I am, by how much textual space he gives to (often lovely!) descriptions of the natural scenery, by how much it is precisely Nature that externalises Value in the novel, such that people who work with the grain of Nature are good by virtue of doing so, and people who work against it are defined as bad. Say you agree with all that.

One puzzling question remains. Where are all the sheep?

There must be sheep in Middle Earth, at least in the north-west corner of it where we find the Shire. In The Hobbit the Trolls Bilbo stumbles upon complain about having nothing but sheep to eat ('Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer'). More, we can read the landscape Tolkien so lovingly describes. It's based on England, yes; but England doesn't look the way it looks now at random. Once, and not so very long ago in the larger scheme of things, England was all forest. The forests were cleared partly so we could grow crops, but mostly so we could graze animals, and the key animal for the history of England is the sheepish one. (Not for nothing does the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sit on an actual woolsack). The Enclosures, one of the key events in British social history, happened largely because sheep were so much more profitable than peasants. So, reading across to Tolkien's alternate England, the fact that the ancient forests are so often interrupted by open grasslands must be because that territory has been cleared for sheep. It's a classical pastoral landscape in fact.

And yet, with an exception which I'll come to in a moment, there are no sheep in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien describes the landscape through which his characters walk with loving precision, but always in terms of landscape, never in terms of livestock. Horses and ponies are mentioned, but only in terms of their passengers. At one point the narrative even switches-out p.o.v. with a fox, startled by the wandering Hobbits:
A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.

'Hobbits!' he thought. 'Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There's something mighty queer behind this.' He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it. [85]
But no sheep! Fields, open to the sky, but no sheep in them. Isn't that odd, for a pastoral?

Well one way of addressing that would be to say: it's not a pastoral. But bear with me. I'm wondering if there is something studied in this absence of sheep, in the same way that there is something studied in Middle Earth's absence of churches, temples and all the paraphernalia of religious worship. I am, of course, both aware of, and wary of, that rhetorical strategy that goes: 'evidence of x proves my thesis, but the absence of evidence of x is even more conclusive proof of my thesis!' Still, might it be that the novel's lack of in-story references to shepherds and sheep indexes a larger story in which it's all shepherds and sheep? Since the novel is not allegorical, there is no simple Aslan-is-Christ correspondence between the characters in Lord of the Rings and Christian doctrine, but the two most obviously Christ-like figures are Gandalf and Aragorn. Can we read them as two lords-are-my-shepherd individuals? Gandalf 'shepherds' his flock, leading the other eight members of the Fellowship through the landscape (he even has a crook. Well a staff); and when he falls in Moria things go awry for his sheep. Aragorn, like the Good Shepherd, goes to immense pains to recover the two lost sheep from his flock, when the orcs seize Merry and Pippin. Does 'flock' oversell it? How many sheep make a flock anyway? (More than two; but eight would surely be enough). And 'flock', as Tolkien certainly knew, is an interesting word, linked to two closely-related Old English terms, flocc ‎(“flock, company, troop”) and folc ‎(“crowd, troop, band”), the latter being the root of our 'folk'. That's a significant convergence of meanings, I think.

So far as I can see, there are only two specific references to sheep in the novel (there may be others that I'm missing). The first comes, significantly I think, when the Hobbits stay with Tom Bombadil, and listen to his wide-ranging tales. He narrates 'many remarkable stories' and spends a good deal of time on the woods.
Suddenly Tom's talk left the woods and went leaping up the young stream, over bubbling waterfalls, over pebbles and worn rocks, and among small flowers in close grass and wet crannies, wandering at last up on to the downs. They [the Hobbits] heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight. [145]
Hence, you see, the illustration at the top of this post. Sheep lived once in this landscape, but not anymore. What this means, I think, is that the novel's pastoral is inflected by a flavour of elegy. The old ways are passing. That's one of the novel's big themes.

One other datum, from Bombadil's house, which is relevant to the question: who is Tom Bombadil anyway? It concerns the Hobbits' bedding. They sleep, we're told, under sheepskins, or at any rate under 'blankets of white wool' [142] (not exactly the same thing, I know). So who is Bombadil? He is the oldest being in Middle Earth, closely connected with precisely the natural landscape the hobbits are about to leave (he himself leads them to the edge of his land, but will not cross over). When Gandalf calls-in on him at the novel's end, we discover that he has no interest in the seemingly great events that make up the bulk of The Lord of the Rings as a novel: 'quite untroubled,' Gandalf reports, 'not much interested in anything that we have done and seen'. But there's an exception, one thing that does interest him, and it's the group's encounter with the Ents.

Of course the Ents are, precisely, shepherds: or, more precisely herders of the trees ('arboriherds' I guess; or maybe a more Tolkienian neologism would be 'trēowherds'). As Treebeard tells Merry: 'Sheep get like shepherds, and shepherds get like sheep. ... But it is quicker and closer, with trees and Ents' [489]. That's the second specific reference to sheep in the novel. [Over on FB my friend Edward James points out another, elvish reference: “'To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different,’ laughed Lindir.”]

If Bombadil has an affinity to the Ents, that's because he is himself, as spirit of the natural world, a shepherd of sorts—a kind of meta-shepherd we might say. (It relates to the fact that these are all characters in a world shepherded by the author, Tolkien: it's always struck me that the name 'Tom Bombadil' is a soundalike Bombadilized version of the name 'John Ronaldreuel' ... let's sing together, shall we? "Old Jom Ronaldrill is a merry fellow;/Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are ..." Alright, alright. Maybe not). A short answer to the question who, or what, is Tom Bombadil would be to say: he is pastoral. He is the idiom of the beautiful natural spaces that are the locus of value in Tolkien's imaginarium, from which his characters have to depart to fight evil, but to which they must also return.





Appendix

A blogpost on The Lord of the Rings would hardly be complete without an appendix, preferably one quite dense and rebarbative, only glancingly relevant to the main body of text, sitting there inviting the reader to skip over it. And here's mine. It has to do with Timothy Morton's account of the novel as an 'environmentalist' work. This is one small part of Morton's hectic but stimulating Ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics (Harvard University Press 2007), situating Tolkien both in terms of the longer tradition of ‘Romantic nationalism’ and environmental art. For instance:
As the idea of world (Welt) became popular in German Romantic idealism, so the nation-state was imagined as a surrounding environment. The idea of the nation as “homeland” … demanded a poetic rendering as an ambient realm of swaying corn, shining seas, or stately forests. Nature appeared sublime “there” and yet fundamentally beyond representation, stretching beyond the horizon and back into the distant, even pre-human past. It was a suitable objective correlative for the je ne sais quoi of nationalist fantasy. Walter Scott’s invention of historical novels, realist fictions generating an entire world in a bubble of past-tense narrative, did as much for environmental nationalism as explicitly Romantic criticisms of modern society and technology. [Morton, 97]
He goes on to read Tolkien in this light.
The Shire, in J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings depicts the world bubble as an organic village. Tolkien narrates the victory of the suburbanite, the “little person,” embedded in a tamed yet natural-seeming environment. Nestled into the horizon as they are in their burrows, the wider world of global politics is blissfully unavailable to them. Tolkien’s work embodies a key nationalist fantasy, a sense of “world” as real, tangible yet indeterminate, evoking a metonymic chain of images—an anamorphic form. The Lord of the Rings establishes not only entire languages, histories, and mythologies, but also a surrounding world. If ever there was evidence of the persistence of Romanticism, this is it.

In Heidegger’s supremely environmental philosophy, the surrounding ambience created by Tolkien’s narratives is called Umwelt. This is the deep ontological sense in which things are “around”—they may come in handy, but whether they do or not, we have a care for them. It is a thoroughly environmental idea. Things are oriented in relation to other things: “the house has its sunny side and its shady side.” Others (elves, dwarves, men) care for their surroundings differently. The strangeness of Middle-earth, its permeation with others and their worlds, is summed up in the metaphor of the road, which becomes an emblem for narratives. The road comes right up to you front door. To step across it is to cross a threshold between inside and outside. There is a sense that the story, and the world it describes, could go “ever on and on” like the road in Bilbo Baggins’s song. But wherever we go in this world, however strange or threatening our journey, it will always be familiar, insofar as it has all been planned in advance, mapped out , accounted for. This planning is not quite as narrowly rational as a modern factory. Still, the recent film of The Lord of the Rings, with its built-in commentaries on the special edition DVD about the craftsmanship and industrial processes that went into making it, reveals something true about the book. The Umwelt is a function of holistic, total design, total creation: Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk with a how-to booklet thrown in. The holistic world that ‘”goes ever on and on” is exciting and involved, but in the end, it is just a gigantic version of the ready-made commodity. This is ironic, since one of the themes of the work is the resistance to industrialism and specifically to commodity fetishism, in the form of the hypnotic ring itself. [98]
This is interesting stuff, although Morton evidently feels rather condescendingly about the book itself: ‘what gets lost in this elaborate attempt to craft a piece of kitsch that could assuage the ravages of industrialism?’ he asks, answering ‘hesitation, irony, ambiguity’, glossing the middle term via Schlegel. I can see the ‘kitsch’ part, although it doesn’t strike me as a necessarily bad thing (on the contrary). But something is missing from this analysis; precisely the unexpected thing (the unexpected party) that Morton claims the novel erases. Since this is particularly true of the book’s engagement with ‘environmental aesthetics’, it’s a shame Morton doesn’t discuss it. Take: Tom Bombadil. It’s true he was smoothed over and erased by the more commodified film version of the tale; but he’s a crucial figure in Fellowship of the Ring (in some senses the crucial figure). He does not represent, but literally embodies, the irreducibility of ‘nature’ as something other than the ‘human’ world. Of course, he embodies this through a metaphysical logic of incarnation that is crucial to (Catholic) Tolkien’s world-view; and it’s possible that Morton has little sympathy with incarnation from an OOO-point of view—I don’t know, but I can imagine that the way the Christian concept prioritises ‘the human form’ over all over objects, to the point where the universe itself, or God, or (in LotR) Nature somehow metaphysically ‘is’ the human form … I can believe that such views are immiscible with OOO. Nonetheless one the things that is so wonderful about Tom Bombadil is precisely the way he doesn’t fit the well-tooled story model, the ‘road’ that the film-makers trod. It is precisely his gnarly peculiarity, his oddity, his naffness (blue coat, yellow boots! Endless fol-de-rol singing!). His non-identity. He represents precision a sort of narrative hesitation -- that's why Jackson and his screenwriters ditched him for their film version.

Sunday 13 November 2016

Fallacious Intentionalities



I read Wimsatt and Beardsley's famous paper 'The Intentional Fallacy' (The Sewanee Review, 1946) as an undergraduate, because I was told to do so by my teachers. I wasn't always so biddable I must say, but on this occasion I did my reading. And Wimsatt and Beardsley's argument persuaded me. Indeed I believe it did more, and softened me up for my journey deeper into the Tarkovskian 'Zona' of Theory as a postgraduate: the author is dead, il n'y a pas de hors-texte, the whole kit and kaboodle. Especially le kaboodle.

Now, Wimsatt and Beardsley persuaded me because the point they make is so sensible (although, actually, the paper itself is surprisingly tortuous and rather archly written). People often do want to judge literary works by what the author intended, or more broadly they want to import biographical considerations into the hermeneutics of interpretation. But when you think about it, that doesn't make much sense. Wimsatt and Beardsley argue that readings based on authorial intention are either irrelevant (because they draw upon extrinsic evidence, and therefore are about those other texts rather than the one under consideration) or else they are circular (when an author’s otherwise unknowable ‘intention’ is intuited from the very text that it’s invoked to explain). Nor do I come to bury W & B; on the contrary I intend to praise them. Ho ho.

Still: 'intention' seems to have real staying-power in the way people (my students, for instance) tend to think about literature. People like the idea of the author and don't wish him/her dead. This has a lot to do with our investment in 'intention' as such. I don't mean, by saying that, to open the door (huge and creaky like an ancient tomb) onto the philosophical discussion of 'intent', 'intensionality' and 'intention': this link gives you a primer, if you're interested, and it gets dense and counterintuitive pretty quickly (which is not, of course, to say the discussion is pointless or wrongheaded). There's a more common-or-garden reason for our attachment to the idea of 'intention'. We know, from our own experience, what it means to intend things, and it seems to us as though having intention and acting on it is integral to who we are as active (rather than passive) agents in the world. To lobotomize someone is to remove precisely their urgency of intention. And since it matters to each of us, we assume its significance in others. When we interact with other people, one of the things we're doing is trying to intuit their intentions.

It's this, I think, that's at the heart of the Turing Test, I'd say (and therefore is the point of shows like HBO's current Westworld). Turing's test argues that if we interact with a machine and believe that it is responding in the ways it intended to, rather than randomly, mechanically, or in a manner that utilizes some clever algorithm, then that machine is actually thinking. Turing doesn't put it in exactly those terms, but that's what it boils down to, I think. One immediate problem that suggests itself; the niggle I've always had about this famous test: mightn't intention itself be faked? How can we tell 'real' intention from 'fake' or 'ersatz' intention? This is one of those questions that can unnerve us, if we think about it too long. Philip K Dick based an entire career upon a variant of it.

And that is one of the ways 'intention' feeds through into my day-to-day as an academic. I teach Literature, but I also teach Creative Writing. Students of the latter sometimes wax jocular, or mock-outraged, by 'the author is dead'. Since they want to be authors and they don't want to be dead this is fair enough. Of course they understand that 'the author is dead' doesn't refer to the physiological status of actual authors, many of whom are manifestly alive. It refers to the status of the novel, published and launched into the world, something from which 'the AUTHOR' needs to disengage his or her claws. And this is a pretty common-sense position, really. Even if you 'believe' that authors' intentions do indeed have a part to play in the way we read and interpret literature, you will be unlikely to grant authorial intention too much power. If we really respected authorial intention, then we'd have to take on board, let's say, Vergil's deathbed intention to destroy the Aeneid, and be obliged to go around the world burning all copies of the finished poem. That's an extreme example of course, but it's there to make a point, viz. that there is a hard limit on one side of the 'intention' debate, That said, the hard limit is quite a long way over, and leaves a lot of territory for people who do not consider it fallacious to include authorial intent in their accounts of literature. If J K Rowling, in an interview, says that she intended Dumbledore to be a gay character, but there's nothing in the novels themselves that specifies Dumbledore's sexual orientation, then how do we 'read' Dumbledore? Is he gay or not? We might answer 'his sexuality is irrelevant to his function in the novels' but that's merely to evade the question.

The Creative Writing angle is an interesting one. W & B address it head on. One measure of falsification, where the supposed primacy of 'author intention' is concerned, is how rarely authors are able to say anything very illuminating or perceptive about their own writings. W & B suggest, without mentioning Freud as such, that this is because intention actually plays a much smaller role in writing than is often assumed. They quote Housman:
Having drunk a pint of beer at luncheon—beer is a sedative to the brain, and my afternoons are the least intellectual portion of my life—I would go out for a walk of two or three hours. As I went along, thinking of nothing in particular, only looking at things around me and following the progress of the seasons, there would flow into my mind, with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza at once [W & B, 475]
Speaking as a writer, I recognise this. Or to be a little more precise: as I tell my CW students, writing is a two-step process. The first thing you must do is get it written. The second thing you must do is get it right. Good advice, especially for writers who are starting out, is: don't try to get it right as you are writing it, for that way lies what they call 'writer's block': finishing a sentence, then looking at it and feeling paralysed by the thought that it's not good enough, and losing momentum in the scrabble to improve it. All that. Better is: push through with your draft and don't worry overmuch about sunspots and infelicities. Which is to say, don't worry about them as you are going on. Worry about them when you come back to revise, and be confident during the writing of your initial draft because you know you will come back to revise it. And as far as the 'intentionality' argument goes, there is much more conscious intention involved in the revision portion of being an author than in the writing portion, at least in my experience. To write I create a space actually designed to minimise the rational, critical, intending mind: I take myself to a coffee shop, I put on headphones and listen to music, I defocus enough to let my fingers start moving over the keyboard. Revising is different: to revise I tend not to listen to music, I need to concentrate and think critically and so on. But that's a separate matter. And, to say one more thing about my writing praxis: the longer I have gone on, as a writer, the more I find my fingers, rather than my conscious brain, doing the thinking. Very often I have to write something out to discover what it is I think about it. I'm doing it right now, in fact.

Where does that leave 'authorial intention'? Not in a golden throne seated in the middle of my skull, that's for sure. But neither am I (of course) a mere robot, producing my works by a process of automatic writing. It does not feel true to me to say, as I have heard some other writers say, 'it writes in me' rather than 'I write'. It's conceivable, of course, that I'm fooling myself; and there's a sense that putting those two in opposition like that misrepresents matters: the 'I' in 'I write' has already been written by a thousand overlapping discourses and texts and so on. But 'it writes in me' seems too passive to me; almost an abdication of responsibility.

Enough generalised chatter (too much generalised chatter! I hear you cry). Some specific examples. Let's take the second of W & B's two intentional fallacies first: the circular one. The example they give is Homer. Longinus considered great poetry the sublime outpouring of a great soul; Homer's epic verse is great poetry; ergo Homer had a great soul. Now that we've established that, we can talk about how it is Homer's greatness of soul that is responsible for the majesty of the Iliad. W & B call this attitude 'Romantic', which is fair enough (Coleridge insists that asking 'what is poetry?' is essentially to ask 'what is a poet?') but it is, of course, perfectly vacuous when considered under the aegis of analysis. This mode of circularity thrives in situations, as a fortiori with Homer, when we know little or nothing about the author, because then we can inscribe whatever values we like upon the blank sheet of the author in question. By the same token, it tends to be falsified when we encounter the situation of great art being having been created by nasty people. Pope was a marvelous poet and an unpleasant human being; Schopenhauer a great philosopher but a shit; Thomas Malory, author of the Morte D'Arthur, was a convicted rapist, Pound and Wyndham Lewis were fascists and Heidegger a Nazi; Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper (he probably wasn't, but he was certainly violent towards women and generally not very nice). It needn't be examples as extreme as these. Henry James's short story 'The Private Life' (1892) came about because James was so profoundly baffled that Robert Browning, whose poetry seemed to him as rich and complex and full of eddies and depths, was in person, when James met him, such a bland and conventional human being. The story 'solves' this problem by imagining a kind of cloned pairing of Brownings ('Vawdrey' is the name of the character in the story): one who babbles on pleasantly at dinner parties and another who hides away writing the great literature. Absent such The Prestige-style contortions, we're led to a simpler conclusion: shabby people sometimes create great art. Indeed, I'd suggest that nowadays something the reverse of the old Longinus attitude prevails. The success of Shaffer's Amadeus, especially in its film version, speaks to a now-widespread idea precisely of a disconnect between character and greatness in art. Mozart is a foul-mouth gibbering child-man who also just happens to be able to write Mozartian masterpieces. Lots of rock stars and artists have been like that. So it goes.

What about the first of W & B's two objections to reading via authorial intention? Some examples. Michael Stipe has said, in interview, that when he wrote the lyrics for REM's 'Losing My Religion' he did not mean religion in the sense of God, church and faith; rather the phrase is a Georgia idiom for a secular sense of anger or disappointment (as in: 'I used to like The Walking Dead but lately I've been really losing my religion with that show'). Does that fact prevent us from reading that song as being about (say) Christianity and doubt? Surely not. When I first heard that song, that's how I read it, and that's still how it works for me, and works powerfully. What are you going to do: lock me up?

Another example, of a slightly different sort: what difference might it make to our reading of The Satanic Verses if we say either 'Rushdie had no intention of insulting the prophet', or 'Rushdie fully intended to insult the prophet'? If it doesn't make a difference to (say) our free-speech defence of the right of the novel to be published, then how can it to any other aspect of our interpretation? Or again: let's say we can read Animal Farm as a satirical critique of right-wing authoritarian governments like Fascism and Nazism or we can read Animal Farm as a critique of left-wing authoritarian government like Stalinism. Does Orwell's own left-wing political affiliation operate as, in effect, the casting vote when weighing the two? ('Orwell wrote to Yvonne Davet that the novel was 'un conte satirique contre Staline' and this means that we can only read Boxer the horse as Trotsky, and so on).

Tennyson's In Memoriam is a powerfully moving elegy for his dead friend Arthur Hallam. What makes it so affecting is that Tennyson clearly loved Hallam, and there is real tenderness and physicality in the expression of loss. When it was anonymously published in 1851, one reviewer speculated that it was 'the outpouring of a widow, perhaps a sailor's wife, for the death of her husband'. Many critics have explored the erotic power of the poem; but Tennyson himself firmly repudiated any implication of improper intimacy, and therefore any such reading: as he said to James Knowles: 'If anybody thinks I ever called him dearest in his life they are much mistaken, for I never called him dear.' Does this render Queer readings of In Memoriam illegitimate? Of course, it's also possible Tennyson was in denial about his feelings for Hallam; that his comment to Knowles is a small example of the idiom of the closet. But that's just to say that we don't always understand our own intentions.

This example, though, leads us into the marshy ground of speculating about something to which we don't have access (Tennyson's actual state of mind, behind the things he publicly wrote and said about his state of mind). A universal obstacle, of course. So perhaps a better example would be one in which a reading of a poem relates to something that we know the author cannot possibly have had in his or her mind, as with the reading of Merchant of Venice as being in some sense about the Holocaust, the notion that the young Socrates took dictation from Plato (as per Derrida's Post Card), that Shakespeare was thinking of Freud when he wrote the scene with Hamlet and Gertrude in the latter's bedroom. The jink here would be to think something like 'whilst, obviously, Shakespeare was perfectly unaware of Freud's theories, both men tapped into an underlying and broader existential truth about sons and mothers ...' It's not immediately clear to me what advantages this approach has over saying: 'it is irrelevant what Shakespeare knew or didn't know; what matters is what Hamlet says.'

Or, to pick up something I've talked about before on this blog: 'is Paradise Lost about association football?' By any criterion of authorial intention, we can be confident in saying: no, for Milton cannot possibly have had any such thing in his head when he wrote his epic poem. The question is, if we discard authorial intention as our prophylactic, then what can we use to prevent any and all such outlandish interpretive gestures? To quote myself:
Is Paradise Lost about football? The nay camp might point to the fact that Milton's epic was written centuries before the rules of football were codified in 1863; that it makes no reference to spherical balls being kicked into goals, or the offside rule or anything else related to that game. Ah, say the yea side, nodding knowingly, but consider Book 6. Think of The War in Heaven. The first great battle between God, or his general Christ, and the army of angels, pitted against the army of devils lead by Satan. If you're concerned about the anachronism of using football as a lens for reading Milton's epic, then consider the way anachronism itself becomes the focus of this war, with the devils inventing gunpowder and cannons to bombard the angelic army. And consider too the way Milton represents these immortals attacking, being attacked, wounding and being wounded. Michael hacks Satan with a sword, and cuts him right down the middle: 'in half cut sheer; nor staid,/But with swift wheel reverse, deep entering, sheared/All his right side'). But Satan being immortal can't be killed, so: 'But the ethereal substance closed,/Not long divisible'. (Pope makes fun of this bit of the poem in Rape of the Lock). In other words, this battle is a mode of war in which the combatants can't be killed. That is to say, it is a sport. This in turn opens up all sorts of critical avenues: to talk about the way football figures, culturally and socially, as a defanged mortality-free version of war; to discuss what is at stake in a battle if life cannot be forfeited—Milton might say, a huge amount, more than mere physical mortality (compare the celebrated Bill Shankly quotation 'football is not a matter of life and death; it is much more important than that'). And off we go, yomping through the thickets of interpretive glory, leaving far behind the nay-sayers, who are booing and calling after us 'but all that ignores the fact that Paradise Lost is not about football'.
Authorial intention protects us against all this. What else might? Then again, perhaps we don't want to be thuswise protected:
Claiming that Milton's epic poem is about football is not to make a literalist assertion about the content of the poem; it's a way of getting 'at' the truth of that text, viz., the truth of the way it elevates playfulness to epic dignity. We could put it this way: claiming Milton's poem is about football doesn't denigrate the epic so much as it dignifies the sport.
Maybe this is why I continue to consider the idea of authorial intention fallacious. I don't want, as a writer, to be restricted by my intentions. But maybe that's just me.

As for the image at the head of this post, I just liked it, is all. I think it's a lovely photo. I had no other conscious intention when putting it up there. I suppose there's some point in putting a too-all-intents-and-purposes random image at the head of a post about intention and meaning. But my pointed unintentionality here was not intentional. If you can believe that. Then again, why would you?