How to Interpret a Text, Part 1: E.D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation

two theories (or anti-theories) of reading

Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

—Walt Whitman

(Well, yes, Walt. I have.)

Introduction

These days, most writers and literary critics will argue that literary texts have no fixed meaning. Authors will frequently note that they write a novel or poem and send it out into the world, not knowing what it will end up meaning. After all, every text has many meanings, many possible valid interpretations—and who’s to say that one interpretation is any more valid than another? There are many possible “readings,” accessible by applying many different theoretical or interpretive “lenses” to a literary text, and this plurality of potential interpretations allows everyone to have their own ideas about what a text means.

This is nice because it allows great creative freedom for the interpreter and it allows us to interpret texts however we please without pedants breathing down our necks and telling us that we are interpreting incorrectly. But it also means that literary critics don’t really produce knowledge the way that other academic disciplines are supposed to. If any interpretation might be valid, literary criticism could get too relativistic and loosey-goosey, with no standards and no canons of judgment. The dominant critical sensibility of the age might boil down simply to what seems most interesting. Tzvetan Todorov writes: “Would anyone dare require historians to give up concern for truth, and only try to be interesting? Would anyone allow interest to be the single guiding principle for the discourse of a judge or a politician? And yet no one is upset about an irresponsible opinion so long as it merely applies to that amusement park known as literature.” If we want literary interpretation to be a quest for truth that’s guided by reason, we need some kind of standard, some way to evaluate one interpretation as more true than another. (Then again, if we’re OK with literature being an amusement park, there is no need to fret over these questions. I am not as hostile to this view as this paragraph might make you think.)

A poem with a life of its own, bopping around and producing meaning without regard for the intentions of its author

So, which is it? Are some interpretations of literature right and others wrong? Are all interpretations equally valid? Or is there some middle position between these two? Before I try to muddle my way through these questions, it’s a good idea to hear what others have written on the subject, so in this post and the next two posts, I’m going to discuss some of the most prominent 20th century writings on the topic. Please do chime in with your thoughts on the matter or suggestions for further reading; I’m hoping that this post will spur on a conversation, and that that conversation will help me to develop my own position on this question. (I have a hunch about how I think, but I always learn a lot from comments, so fire away.) In the fourth and final post in the series, I’ll plan on writing own thoughts on this question, which I’m hoping will get more thoughtful as I read. I hope to develop my own ideas through conversation and further reading with all of you.

To begin the history of conversations on this question, let’s go back to 1946, to one of the true classics of academic American literary criticism, William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy.” After that, I’ll spend much more time discussing E.D. Hirsch’s response to the vision of interpretation suggested by Wimsatt and Beardsley.

Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946)

In the 20th century, most people talked about literary meaning by asking: Does a poem mean what its author intended it to mean, or can it mean something else? In 1946, William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe Beardsley published “The Intentional Fallacy,” the most famous rejoinder to this commonsense idea. It claims 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.”

Most relevant is the idea that the intention of the author is unavailable. How are we to know, for certain, what the author’s intention was? We can’t, argue W&B; we can only interpret the poem itself. We can only focus on what’s on the page. We can infer the thoughts and intentions of a “dramatic speaker”—i.e. the imagined person who speaks in a lyric poem, or narrates a novel—but that isn’t the same as inferring the thoughts and intentions of the author, since the narrator is in the poem and the author is outside of it. (Surely, if you’ve taken a college English class, you’ve heard your professor stress that “we” should only talk about the “speaker” or “narrator,” never the author. Well, here’s where that idea was popularized!)

Once a poet writes a poem, argue W&B, it takes on a life of its own; it becomes a kind of self-contained machine. The job of the interpreter of a poem is to try and produce “objective” and “impersonal” readings of texts that rely on how this self-contained machine functions. In other words, the only way to produce a valid interpretation is to focus on the text itself—to perform, as the New Critics (a loose group of midcentury critics with whom W&B are often associated) called it, a “close reading” of the text. W&B don’t, however, offer a method for arriving at these interpretations; their purpose is instead to argue against the use of intent as the determining factor for interpretations.

In my experience, most modern critics accept W&B’s argument that one cannot know, for sure, the intentions of a particular author. It’s pretty self-evidently true. But they balk at the idea that we can only judge a poem based on what’s on the page—primarily because most critics now believe that we need to know the culture and history surrounding a text in order to really understand it, which strikes me as an entirely reasonable objection.

This is what I have always imagined Wimsatt and Beardsley to look like. No, I have never and will never look up a photo

Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (1967)

In his 1967 book Validity in Interpretation, E.D. Hirsch says, contra W&B, that literary texts mean what their authors intended them to mean. The more you understand what an author intended (and you can learn about this by learning about things like biography, history, and so on), the more you have uncovered the meaning of their work. This is important, Hirsch writes, because “the activity of interpretation can lay claim to intellectual respectability only if its results can lay claim to validity.” In other words, if you can’t verify whether a claim about the meaning of a poem is true, you’re just making wild guesses—you’re not producing knowledge about the text.

Key to Hirsch’s argument is a distinction between meaning and significance, two different ideas that he believes many literary theorists mix up. “Meaning,” he writes, “is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable.” Meaning is fixed, unchangeable, objective, discoverable, and falsifiable, and it’s always intended by the author. Significance is fluid and even relativistic; it changes from person to person and from era to era, and might encompass things like an emotional reaction to a text or, as I’ll discuss in a moment, readings that attempt to uncover subconscious or unintended meanings.

We so often fail to make this distinction when we talk about literature that it’s sometimes difficult to even conceptualize, because we are accustomed to saying things like: “Well, what the text means to me is…” Hirsch says that if we insist that texts have multiple meanings because different people react to them differently, we’ll get all muddled—they really just have different significances to different people. People react differently to meaning, but their reactions are not the same as the meaning of the text. Hirsch similarly distinguishes between verbal meaning (the kind of meaning I’ve been talking about) and symptomatic meaning (involuntary, perhaps subconscious meanings not necessarily intended by the writer, which is itself a kind of significance). And so on: anything besides the intent of the author is dismissed as not really meaning. There’s a sort of circularity to his argument—because meaning is defined as what the author intended, any time a text brings about a thought or reaction in a reader that is different from what the author intended, the reader is simply generating significance rather than meaning.

The hideous golem on the left sees 6; the hideous golem on the right sees 9; but Mr. Right holds a paintbrush because he’s the author of this text. Who’s correct?

But what Hirsch calls significance is often way more interesting than what he calls meaning! Significance refers to most of the interesting thinking and arguing about texts that literary critics actually do. Hirsch acknowledges this with a perfect example: “When Blake said that Milton wrote in fetters when he spoke of angels and at liberty when he spoke of devils, because he was of the devil’s party without knowing it, his entirely legitimate critical comment was not necessarily a comment on the verbal meaning of Paradise Lost…[this comment] a kind of critical judgment that no one would want to exorcise from literary criticism…symptomatic, involuntary meaning is part of a text’s significance, just as its value or its present relevance is. But significance is the proper object of criticism, not of interpretation, whose exclusive object is verbal meaning.” But then how do we distinguish between legitimate or illegitimate critical comments? How do we know if we’re doing criticism well or poorly? In short, according to Hirsch, there’s no way! “The possibilities of legitimate criticism are boundless,” he writes (my emphasis), and later, “significance is by nature limitless.” What I am most interested in—what most people are, I think—is how to distinguish between degrees of validity in terms of what Hirsch calls significance; Hirsch, for all his insistence on single, stable meanings, does not seem to believe in any principle that could help us make these kinds of distinctions. If you want to do criticism, by which he means argue about a text’s significance, you can kind of say whatever you want—it’s the Wild West, and there is no limit to what a text’s significance can be. If you want to do interpretation, by which he means argue about a text’s meaning, you should follow certain principles. But then how do we know whether Blake was right about Milton? Is there simply no way to tell? Do we accept his reading merely because it jibes with our sensibilities?

This is particularly frustrating because Hirsch knows that criticism and interpretation aren’t really separable in practice: “we cannot artificially isolate the act of construing verbal meaning from all those other acts, perceptions, associations, and judgments which accompany that act and which are instrumental in leading us to perform it.” And he’s very aware of the importance and interest of criticism. He just does not appear to believe that criticism can possibly have a method. He insists that literary criticism can “qualify as objective knowledge and objective valuation.” But there is no method for achieving this objectivity.

Hirsch has his druthers about how critics should proceed: they must demonstrate knowledge of the author’s intended meaning, and show both how well the author realizes their intentions and whether those intentions are worthwhile; otherwise, the critic is simply stating their personal preferences or tastes, which is fine, but doesn’t rise to the level of “objective criticism.”

But then how do we figure out whether an author’s intentions are worthwhile? We can’t answer this unless we have shared values, some sense of what literature is good for, why it’s worth our time, what it does to us, and how it fits into a life well lived. And how can such values be determined and validated? Well, they can’t. And, although I’m far from an expert on this, it seems to me that moral philosophy is just as methodologically uncertain as literary criticism is. If interpretation can be intellectually respectable only when its results are verifiable, then literary criticism is not quite intellectually respectable, at least not according to Hirsch’s standard, even though he insists that it can be a form of objective knowledge. But there can be no objective taste, for Hirsch, even if one can base one’s sense of taste on objectively validated interpretations of texts.

So how does one arrive at the author’s meaning, which Hirsch believes can be verified and can be the subject of objective knowledge? First, the interpreter must read the text make an intelligent guess at what it means. But then one must figure out whether their intelligent guess is correct by “adjudicating the issue in light of all that is known.” You must compare your intelligent guess to everyone else’s, and see which ones are most compatible with the sum of human knowledge. Hirsch gives credit to W&B’s skeptical argument that we can’t know the intentions of the author with absolute certainty. (After all, we can’t know anything—even scientific or historical claims—with absolute certainty, and surely interpretations of literature are slipperier than science.) But we can get closer to the true interpretation of a text, even if we can’t know it for sure. We compare guesses about meaning, see which ones comport best with our knowledge (about the text, its genre, history, and so on), and pick the likeliest one—or at least figure out which interpretations are most likely, even if we can’t come to a final conclusion. Hirsch calls his method a “fundamentally sound” way to judge the interpretation of a text—it’s not just making stuff up or turning the text into what we want it to be. If a literary text has many possible meanings, Hirsch’s method, he believes, allows us to sort of mentally rank those possible meanings and select the most probable one.

On to Part 2

Earlier, I wrote that the question of how to conduct literary criticism always seems to hinge on ethical questions about the value of literature and its relation to other elements of the human experience. To know whether a piece of literature is good, it seems that you must know what literature in general is good for, and thus questions about literary value are always necessarily questions about the good, broadly conceived. Or, to interpret and evaluate the relationship between literature and culture, you must have a theory of history or culture. Literary criticism, construed as Hirsch construes it, then, always relies to some extent on moral and political claims.

So, next time, I want to focus on an important work discussing the moral and political dimensions of interpretation: Judith Fetterley’s The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (1977). Fetterley dives into the political and moral dimensions of literary criticism. I’m excited to see what she has to offer this conversation!