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This is a truth we are unable to ignore. It is fitness evaluation that therefore makes it impossible to take bad poetry and transform it into good poetry by willy-nilly claiming that the author meant a bad poem ironically. While it is generally a good policy in criticism to find the under which a literary work is seen in the best light, critics have to invoke some notion of a real author. Readers can see meanings in literature that authors themselves may not have realized were for an interpretation involves imputing to a work meanings an author could not possibly have entertained (such as Akenside’s “plastic” meaning “polymer”) or where the ascription of irony simply takes merely incompetent work and transforms it into witty and intelligent art— these cases our awareness of the fitness function requires that we draw In such situations, a correct assessment of the talent of the creators mean more than an illusory “getting more plea sure” from the work. Seeking authorial intentions is therefore no fallacy: it is from an evolutionary standpoint psychologically impossible to ignore the potential craft, talent, or genius revealed in speech and writing. This in turn cannot be achieved without having some idea of authorial intention.

The fitness function of writing explains, incidentally, why “postulated author” or “implied author” theories of literary intention are bound Alexander Nehamas, for example, allows that texts must be understood as the products of human agents, but then takes back what seems to have granted when he says that “just as the author is not identical with a text’s fictional narrator, so he is also distinct from its historical writer. The author is postulated as the agent whose actions account the text’s features; he is a character, a hypothesis which is accepted provisionally, guides interpretation, and is in turn modified in its light. The author, unlike the writer, is not a text’s efficient cause but, so speak, its formal cause, manifested in though not identical with it.” In this view, the intentional fallacy is solved by making the author yet another character for our imaginative delectation.

Unfortunately, postulated-author theory is far too clever for literary reality: the fitness function must in the nature of things pull us back assessing the capacities of a historical writer. For example, I suppose to say that I idolize Anton Chekhov, author of some of the most poignant and profound plays of dramatic history. My idolatry, however, not directed to a formal cause within Chekhov’s texts, whatever might mean, or to some kind of “provisional hypothesis” I accept. No, evolution demands, my feelings are about a certain doctor who tragically young, a man whose bones now lie in Novodevichy Cemetery Moscow. His genius, not the genius of another postulated figure, those plays. There is no getting around the fact that historical works of art we are continuously captivated by the talents of the real people who make them.

III

Han van Meegeren

In 1937, the Boymans Museum in Rotterdam unveiled what it regarded as one of the most spectacular art finds of the twentieth century: Christ the Disciples at Emmaus, an early work by Johannes Vermeer. This discovery stunned connoisseurs and the ordinary public alike. The painting had recently come to light when it was put on the market, apparently an impoverished Italian family that had owned it for generations. Professor Abraham Bredius, reigning historian of Dutch painting, deeply moved by the rediscovery, suggesting that the painting was Vermeer’s greatest work. While its large size and religious theme made it unusual for the Delft artist, it was, Bredius insisted, “every inch Vermeer.” Bredius wrote of the “splendid luminous effect” of the painting’s colors, which he called “magnificent—and characteristic: Christ splendid blue; the disciple on the left whose face is barely visible a grey; the other disciple on the left in yellow—the yellow of the famous Vermeer at Dresden, but subdued