[Milton-L] Fish and Milton

[James Rovira]

Thanks for the reply, Alan, and thank you Harold for your reply as
well.  It may not hurt to clarify what is meant by "intention."  We
usually mean by intention a hidden psychological event immediately
preceding the act of writing or speaking that is realized in the act
of writing or speaking,  The phrase "actually got said," if I followed
Harold's argument correctly, generally comes down to C:

<<The charitable default assumption - that Estragon meant what he said
- is workable because the mere possibility of getting across to
Vladimir what Estragon means to say presupposes a SYSTEM OF
COMMUNICATION -  a system used by the two of them. Call the system C.
C will have the usual ingredients: (a) a language, (b) a grammar, (c)
a lexicon (meaning assignment to parts of the language), (d) a set of
lore, commonplaces, and assumptions shared by Estragon and Vladimir,
(e) pragmatic and rhetorical rules for replacing the lexicon and for
supplementing the grammar in response to contextual cues. (For present
purposes we will ignore the Kripke-Wittgenstein strictures on the
notion of C - though unlike certain fatuous continentals they actually
have a case to make.)>>

Harold has sufficiently and intelligently (as usual) qualified his
argument, but the "charitable default assumption" is in practice the
assumption we always hold when pursuing authorial intent.  We have to
assume the author is not a blithering idiot unaware of the basic
conventions of language and the social assumptions holding them up,
and when we're dealing with sophisticated literary texts, it's rather
dangerous not to do so.  What this means in the practice of
interpretation is that Estragon, when Estragon is a Milton or
Shakespeare, Always Means What He Says.  There's no difference between
intent and utterance.  From this point it's just a matter of the usual
efforts to recover authorial intent, which tend to focus on (d) and
(e) above -- that which Harold described in his last paragraph as
"doing our homework" to avoid looking like idiots to those in other
disciplines.

If Estragon always means what he says, and if we recover this
"meaning" behind his "saying" through literary-historical research,
then literary-historical research enables us to recover authorial
intent, and the pursuit of intent is equivalent to the practice of C.

Now I choose to look at the whole matter another way.  I also say that
the people pursuing authorial intent are all wrong, but only because
they have misnamed the object of their pursuit.  The object of their
pursuit is not some lost psychological event that produced a text.
What they're really seeking is the author's understanding of his/her
text as a READER of his or her COMPLETED text, not as an author in the
act of writing at the moment of writing. I would argue most author's
don't fully know what they mean as they are writing.  Flannery
O'Connor, for example, said of the ending of one of her stories that
she didn't know what it'd be until shortly before writing it, but once
she did, it made perfect sense -- the story could not end any other
way (it's the story about a Bible salesman who seduces a woman with a
wooden leg into the loft of a barn then steals her leg).  So what
authorial intent people are really doing is reconstructing a reader
who has qualities very much like the author.  And once you've done
that, you've really identified a reading community, unless you're
seeking to interpret an intensely biographical work.

Looking back over what I've just written, I'm starting to feel like
Fish.  Time to take a hot shower.

Jim R