Authority

I have never believed in the authority of the author, or the relevance of the author's intention. I'm not sure why anyone would. There can be no gulf between what is meant and what is said. What is said is all there is. It's all we ever have.

And this is obvious, really. This is a bit of wisdom we all pick up from ordinary experience, from people arguing over what they meant and what they actually said. I think I was always aware of the gulf that opens up between these things. I certainly didn't need to read Wimsatt or hear about the intentional fallacy

This is true of speech, although in conversation where we can directly inquire if we feel the need as to whether they might be any difference between what was said and what was intended.

It is even more true of writing, which is in essence abandoned speech. Obviously, the anonymous masters, from Homer to Shakespeare, absolutely decline to assist us in making anything of their texts (which we approach as written documents, although we should always remember that neither Homer's poems nor Shakespeare's plays enter the world as texts but as performances.) But what applies to them applies to everyone. Writing is abandoned speech. It says what it says, and only that - but that is quite enough.

So the gulf only opens up if you allow it to. What is said or what is written - that is what is meant. And trying to divine some unspoken but intended meaning is just some weird detour...

But this brings us, as usual, to Swift.

Jonathan Swift, that meddlesome priest, gleefully subverts the whole process. Without the notion of the author's intention, an extremely dubious concept, we run into some very disturbing problems. How are we to cope with "A Modest Proposal," which nowhere pretends to mean anything other than what it says. The idea that this text might mean exactly what it says - that the poor children of Ireland should be fattened, slaughtered, and sold as food to the rich, that this is best solution to the problems of poverty and famine, and the best fate these children could hope for anyway - well, this has proved utterly impossible for anyone to cope with, ever.

And so, from the day it first appeared, we have tamed this wild piece of writing. We have put a frame around it, labelled it irony, and made desperate reference to concepts like Swiftian satire. But there is no license anywhere in what Swift wrote that permits this. It's simply how we cope.