W.K.韦姆萨特和门罗·比尔兹利：意图谬误
berryThe Intentional Fallacy 1
国际贸易专业W . K . Wimsatt , Jr .
Monroe Beardsley
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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 ems doubtful if this claim and most of its romantic corollaries are as yet subject to any widespread questioning. The prent writers, in a short article entitled "Intention" for a Dictionary2 of literary criticism, raid 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 ems 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 en
北京新东方雅思培训tails 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 u 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 ries of propositions summarized and abstracted to a degree where they em 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. Y et to insist on the designing intellect as a cau 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.
adornment2. 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 itlf 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 itlf; "the poet's aim must be judged at the
moment of the creative act, that is to say, by the art of the poem itlf".
3. Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. It is only becau 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 n that we have no excu 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 becau 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.
darktube>father的含义4. The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the n that a poem express a personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the respon 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.
5.There is a n in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract n. 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 arch of, that's true," says Hardy's rustic constable, "and yet he's not the man we were in arch of. For the man we were in arch of was not the man we wanted."devotion
"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 diagnod two forms of irresponsibility, one of which he prefers. Our view is yet different. The poem is not the critic's own an
d 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 posssion 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 prerving". 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整饬
criticism. But we maintain that (2) need not be moral criticism: that there is another way of deciding whether works of art are worth prerving and whether, in a n, 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 us, 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" successfu
l. 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 surprid 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
