The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [78]
Discounting intention does not suggest that all meanings are equally persuasive or valid. When Hamlet says in a letter to the king that he is “set naked on your kingdom” (4.2), he does not mean that he is wearing no clothes but that he has no weapon; when Mercutio and Romeo exchange witticisms about Romeo’s “pump,” they are talking about his shoe style, not about a mechanical device for retrieving water—although as their jesting continues, a wide range of other meanings may attach to this word. So some readings can be “wrong” because of what might be called underreading—not giving enough credit to the historical meanings of modern words. But sometimes even the wrong reading can be right, if defended or presented in a convincing way. Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet makes much erotic sport of the idea of pumping, and even though this seems in part either a resistance to or a failure to understand, the idea of a pump as a kind of shoe (for men as well as for women, in Shakespeare’s time) the scene can be made to work.
The belief in intention belongs to a historicist moment, or to at least two historicist moments: the one against which the New Critics were actively reacting, and the one that inevitably came to react against them. Both historicisms (the second, called “new historicism,” and the other—rather unfairly—dubbed in a species of back-formation “old historicism”) put strong value in biography, context, “the archive,” and a kind of allegorical reading of historical events. But intention—as we will see in relation to questions of biography and truth—can get in the way of close reading, since it forecloses some interpretive options as inappropriate, untimely, unsuitable, not what the author could have meant.
The affective fallacy warned against feeling, or feeling too much, or being carried away by the rightness of a feeling. When W. K. Wimsatt wrote about it in the 1940s, it was a response to the excesses of belletrism and impressionistic criticism. The inevitable bounce-back against the too stringent enforcement of such a fallacy led to reader-response criticism, the idea of interpretive communities, and most recently, an explicitly affective criticism that is all about feelings, whether negative or positive, encompassing the poles of infatuation and disgust. Sometimes, in this era of fact and science, the affective emotions are tied to the hardwiring of the brain, which produces smells, colors, sounds, synesthesia (the blending of the senses), etc. Whatever we may think about affect, I think it is fair to say that it marks a response to the work, rather than a reading of it. However closely affective arguments are tied to language, there is always a hypothetical suture (a word, phrase, or image “makes me feel like” this or that or, less convincingly, “produces the effect of” this or that). As with polling data, there are outliers, responses that don’t seem to fit the prevailing pattern as urged or detected by the critic. But rather than sparking an exciting argument based upon this divergence, such dissent seems to push against the very idea of a community, so that what is occasionally sought is an alternative community that does, or would, or might have, responded in the way that the minority or disaffected reading suggested. In any case, one object of affective criticism (“old” or “new,” impressionistic or scientific) would seem to be an explanation of why the feeling was right for the reader.
Although they have sometimes been dubbed critical fallacies, intention and affect (the intention of the author, the response of the reader) remain central to the curiosity and desire of many scholars, critics, and ordinary readers of literature. What did the author have in mind, and what led him or her to write? How does what I feel when I read a poem or a passage derive from the language and imagery on the page? Do other readers feel the same, and if not, is one of us right and another, wrong? Indeed, the provocation for calling such ideas fallacious was that they were so widespread. Wimsatt and Beardsley