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韦姆萨特《意图谬误》英文版TheIntentionalFallacy

W.K.韦姆萨特和门罗·比尔兹利:意图谬误

The Intentional Fallacy 1

W . K . Wimsatt , Jr .

Monroe Beardsley

I

The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's

judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions,

notably in the debate entitled The Personal Heresy[1939],

between Professor Lewis and Tillyard. But it seems doubtful if this

claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to

any widespread questioning. The present writers, in a short

article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary2 of literary criticism,

raised the issue but were unable to pursue its implications at any

length. We argued that the design or intention of the author is

neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the

success of a work of literary art, and it seems to us that this is a

principle which goes deep into some differences in the history of

critical attitudes. It is a principle which accepted or rejected

points to the polar opposites of classical "imitation" and romantic

expression. It entails many specific truths about inspiration,

authenticity, biography, literary history and scholarship, and

about some trends of contemporary poetry, especially its

allusiveness. There is hardly a problem of literary criticism in

which the critic's approach will not be

qualified by his view of "intention".

"Intention", as we shall use the term, corresponds to what he

intended in a formula which more or less explicitly has had wide

acceptance. "In order to judge the poet's performance, we must

know what he intended." Intention is design or plan in the

author's mind. Intention has obvious affinities for the author's

attitude towards his work, the way he felt, what made him write.

We begin our discussion with a series of propositions

summarized and abstracted to a degree where they seem to us

axiomatic.

1. A poem does not come into existence by accident. The

words of a poem, as Professor Stoll has remarked, come out of a

head, not out of a hat. Yet to insist on the designing intellect as

a cause of a poem is not to grant the design or intention as a

standard by which the critic is to judge the worth of the poet's

performance.

2. One must ask how a critic expects to get an answer to the

question about intention. How is he to find out what the poet

tried to do? If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself

shows what he was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed,

then the poem is not adequate evidence, and the critic must go

outside the poem—for evidence of an intention that did not

become effective in the poem. "Only one caveat must be borne

in mind," says an eminent intentionalist 3 in a moment when his

theory repudiates itself; "the poet's aim must be judged at the

moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the

poem itself".

3. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine.

One demands that it work. It is only because an artifact works

that we infer the intention of an artificer. "A poem should not

mean but be." A poem can be only through its meaning—since

its medium is words—yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have

no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant. Poetry is

a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at

once. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or

implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like

lumps from pudding and "bugs" from machinery. In this respect

poetry differs from practical messages, which are successful if

and only if we correctly infer the intention. They are more

abstract than poetry.

4. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one,

in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul

rather than a physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric

poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how

abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how

universalized ). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes

of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the

author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.

is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better

achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He

intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind,

and now has

done it. But it follows that his former concrete intention was

not his intention, "He's the man we were in search of, that's true,"

says Hardy's rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man we were

in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man

we wanted."

"Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "a judge, who does not

explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's

meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or

the constitution? The poem is not the critic's own." He has

accurately diagnosed two forms of irresponsibility, one of which

he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic's

own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth

and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it

or control it). The poem belongs to the public. It is embodied in

language, the peculiar possession of the public, and it is about

the human being, an object of public knowledge. What is said

about the poem is subject to the same scrutiny as any statement

linguistics or in the general science of psychology.

A critic of our Dictionary article, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,

has argued that there are two kinds of inquiry about a work of

art: (1) whether the artist achieved his intentions; (2) whether the

work of art "ought ever to have been undertaken at all" and so

"whether it is worth preserving". Number (2), Coomaraswamy

maintains, is not "criticism of any work of art qua work of art",

but is rather moral criticism; number (1) is artistic

criticism. But we maintain that (2) need not be moral criticism:

that there is another way of deciding whether works of art are

worth preserving and whether, in a sense, they "ought" to have

been undertaken, and this is the way of objective criticism of

works of art as such, the way which enables us to distinguish

between a skilful murder and a skilful poem. A skilful murder is

an example which Coomaraswamy uses, and in his system the

difference between murder and the poem is simply a "moral" one,

not an "artistic" one, since each if carried out according to plan

is "artistically" successful. We maintain that (2) is an inquiry of

more worth than (1), and since (2) and not (1) is capable of

distinguishing poetry from murder, the name "artistic criticism"

is properly given to (2).

II

It is not so much a historical statement as a definition to say

that the intentional fallacy is a romantic one. When a rhetorician

of the first century A. D. writes: "Sublimity is the echo of a great

soul", or when he tells us that "Homer enters into the sublime

actions of his heroes" and "shares the full inspiration of the

combat", we shall not be surprised to find this rhetorician

considered as a distant harbinger of romanticism and greeted in

the warmest terms by Saintsbury. One may wish to argue whether

Longinus should be called romantic, but there can hardly be a