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"The Intentional Fallacy" and the Logic of Literary CriticismAuthor(s): Rosemarie MaierSource: College English, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Nov., 1970), pp. 135-145Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/374640Accessed: 29/10/2010 10:24

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ROSEMARIE MAIER

The Intentional Fallacy and the Logicof Literary Criticism

WHETHER OR NOT A POET'S ntention hasany direct relevance to the criticism ofhis poem has been, for the past thirtyyears, one of the most disputed questionsfacing the literary critic. One answer,simply and forcefully in the negative,was supplied by W. K. Wimsatt andM. C. Beardsley in their article, TheIntentional Fallacy. ' The publication ofthis article in 1946, and its reappearancein The Verbal Icon in 1954, have solid-ified, generally, the anti-intentionalistNew-Critical position on the question;before this position was formally articu-lated and, indeed, since its promulgationtwenty-five years ago, the controversyabout intention has continued. If the

question were simply an isolated questionabout critical methodology, it would bemost sensible to abandon it at its presentstate of irresolution; the problem of in-tention, however, is one with far-reach-

ing implications: its solution-or at least

resolution-requires nothing less than aredefinition of the aims and functions of

literary criticism.

Literary criticism, at least through the

first two decades of this century, was acatchall term for any of various ap-proaches to literature: the textual schol-

ar, the literary historian, the poet's biog-rapher, and the careful reader of liter-ature might all be classed as critics.With the beginnings of New Criticism-with the publication of Richards' Prin-ciples of Literary Criticism in 1925, for

example-there came a new emphasis:while scholarly and historical studies re-mained valid occupations for the scholarand historian, the actual critic forsook

peripheral matters to concentrate solelyupon the novel or poem he was criticiz-

ing. This atmosphere of compartmental-ized study occasioned the controversyabout the personal heresy, a contro-

versy which The Intentional Fallacyattempted, later, to resolve. According toC. S. Lewis, who initiated the dispute,the central question was whether [the]perception of the poet's character is partof [the] direct experience of the poem, orwhether it is simply one of those laterand unpoetical results. 2 Lewis argued-with typically involved and nearly ir-refutable logic-that the experience ofthe poet is not the experience of the

poem; that what the poet knew, or felt,or intended, if it is not part of the poem

Mrs. Maier began her graduate studies in En-glish at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in1966. She is presently writing her dissertationon Melville's use of persona in M oby-Dick.

1W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beards-ley, The Intentional Fallacy, Sewanee Review,LIV (1946), 468-488.

2C. S. Lewis in E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S.Lewis, The Personal Heresy (London, 1939),p. 5.

135



136 COLLEGE ENGLISH

itself, is irrelevant to criticism of the

poem; and that the introduction of bio-

graphical materials-or anything else notin the poem-in order to explain the po-em is an operation that is heretical.

The use of the word heresy was atonce a shortcut to a resolution of the

controversy and a most important rea-son why that resolution has never beenattained. Lewis called his opponents her-etics, but he never defined clearlyenough the orthodoxy against which

theysinned. For this reason,

perhaps,The Intentional Fallacy appeared, andseemed, at last superficially, to describethe rationale of literary criticism in a

way that would resolve, or at least clar-

ify, the controversial issues.In his argument, Lewis employed a

careful logic, but one which tended to-ward obfuscation as more and more dis-tinctions and clarifications were made; in

The IntentionalFallacy,

Wimsatt and

Beardsley were careful to avoid over-

complexity, and presented their argu-ment in simple-perhaps too simple-terms. The apparent clarity of The In-tentional Fallacy is misleading: wherea sentence stands supposedly self-evident,there is implied (but not stated) a num-ber of assumptions upon which the sen-tence depends. Because these assump-

tions were not made perfectly clear, itis impossible to refute or to defend satis-

factorily the argument of The Inten-tional Fallacy ; because no attempts havebeen made to infer and make explicitthese assumptions, the controversy re-mains in very nearly the same conditionas it did in 1946.

The Intentional Fallacy, in its sim-

plicity, is a reaction to the complexities

of Lewis' argument; it avoids one ex-treme (confusion) only to fall prey tothe other. Besides its lack of explicitness,

Wimsatt's and Beardsley's article has an-other weakness, and this one, it seems,was modelled on the polemical appeal of

Lewis' use of the word heresy. Just asheresy is a strongly pejorative word,

yet one that has meaning only in a clear-

ly defined context of orthodoxy, so toodoes fallacy need to be defined interms of the logic of which it is a dis-

tortionr.These weaknesses have not prevented

critics from answering the challengewhich The Intentional Fallacy pro-vides, but they have prevented these an-swers from making any real progress to-ward the clarification and evaluation ofthe implications of the challenge. An-

swers, whether direct or indirect, to the

question raised by Wimsatt's and Beards-

ley's article have remained insufficient.3On the one hand, the philosophic studyof the role of intention can result only in

philosophicand abstract statements; to

state that the autotelism of art is an im-

possible goal ' may indeed be meaning-

aSome of these answers not cited elsewherein this article can be found in: Patricia M. Ball,

Sincerity: The Rise and Fall of a CriticalTerm, MLR, LIX (1964), 1-11; Ananda K.Coomaraswamy, Intention, American Book-man, I (1944), 41-48; Joseph T. Shipley, ed.,Dictionary of World Literature (New York,1942), pp. 326-29; E. D. Hirsch, ObjectiveInterpretation, PMLA, LXXV (1960), 463-79;Isabel Hungerland, The Concept of Intentionin Art Criticism, JP, LII (1955), 733-42; Wal-lace Jackson, Sincerity: A Postcript on Ante-cedents and Correlatives, MLR, LXI (1966),355-56; Robert Marsh, The 'Fallacy' of Uni-versal Intention, MP, LX (1958), 263-75; A. A.Prins, Unconscious 'Borrowing' and the Prob-lem of Inspiration, ES, XXXVIII (1957), 64-71; Thomas J. Roberts, Is 'The IntentionalFallacy' an Operational Concept? Cairo Studiesin English (1960), 119-37; R. Jack Smith, In-tention in an Organic Theory of Poetry,Sewanee Review, LVI (1948), 625-38; and

George Watson,A Modern

Literary Heresy,Listener, LX (1958), 594-96.4Richard M. Kain, Limits of Literary Inter-

pretation, JAAC, XVII (1958), 215.



The Intentional Fallacy and the Logic of Literary Criticism 137

ful, but its meaning resides in a universal

system that does not account for the par-ticularities of individual poems. Similarly,the philosopher may note that when thecritic turns to the artist's intention heturns away from the artistic intention.An explanation in criticism requires thesecond; it may be able to ignore thefirst. 5 Whatever the value of the state-ment, it is nothing more than an abstract

paraphrase of The words of a poem... come out of a head, not out of a hat.Yet to insist on the designing intellectas a cause of a poem is not to grant the

design or intention as a standard. 6 Onthe other hand, the literary (opposed tothe philosophic or aesthetic) critics' re-

sponses have been too specific; T. M.

Gang, in what is otherwise an excellentarticle, simply fails to state what hemeans by criticism. He writes, and

logically; How very differently the

LyricalBallads will strike the reader who

knows, and the reader who does notknow, that these poems are intended todemonstrate a theory of the imagina-tion. 7 What Gang fails to note is thedistinction between the responses ofthose two readers, and whether one re-

sponse is more truly critical than theother.

If The Intentional Fallacy is not

to be regarded as the spurious standardaround which the New Critics rallied inorder to overthrow the dominance ofthe old scholars -and the obeisance

paid to its argument by contemporaryeclectic and archetypal critics would indi-cate that it is not merely a dated curi-

osity-some attention ought to be given

to the assumptions upon which its argu-ment rests. Once these assumptions areinferred, the significance of the term

fallacy -whether it is merely a timelypejorative, or whether it denotes a real

perversion of critical logic-will become

apparent.The word intention, if it is allowed

to remain as vague as it is in coloquialusage, is practically meaningless: it maydenote a wish, a progress, an attitude, or

merely the presence of consciousnesswith respect to some activity. To specifythe meaning of the word-at least to de-fine its applicability sufficiently for it tofunction as a critical term-is a primarynecessity. In a philosophical frameworkthat is neither extremely idealistic nor

totally materialistic, the distinction canbe made between intention and exten-sion. Extended reality exists extra-men-

tally; that is to say, the book is actuallyon the table, the

poemis

actuallyon the

page. The book and the poem, as ex-tended, remain real whether or not some-one is aware of their existence; I mayforget that this volume contains the po-em, or may not even think about eitherthe volume or the poem, but neverthe-less both the volume and the poem are.In contrast, what is intentional exists

only by virtue of its being known; the

poem-which I mistakenly believe to becontained in the volume-is intended, orhas mental existence. On this level of dis-tinction, then, that which is is extended;that which is known is intended.

There are, of course, various kindsof intentional reality; the extended book,because I know it, is likewise intended.The simplified schema necessary to liter-

ary criticism need account for only three

kinds of intention; these are as-things-are(the book I see on the table now), as-things-were (the book I think of, but

sRichard Kuhns, Criticism and the Problemof Intention, Journal of Philosophy, LVII

(1960), 15.6 The Intentional Fallacy, p. 469.7T. M. Gang, Intention, EIC, VII (1957),

178.



138 COLLEGE ENGLISH

which I lost in a fire ten years ago), andas-things-are-not. This last category ofintended things includes the objects of

misapprehension ( War and Peace is on thetable, but I think it is The Brothers Kara-mazov) and objects of potential reality.

Objects which are known as-they-areor as-they-were have in common the

quality of being or having been extend-ed. Those known as-they-are-not do notshare extension; what is misapprehendednever was (The Brothers Karamazov wasnot, is not, and never will be War andPeace), and what is known as potentialreality is not yet extended. The potentialkind of reality may be categorized fur-ther: a thing-as-it-is-not can be thoughtof as might-be, as ought-to-be, or as will-be. In discussions of an author's inten-tion, what is generally referred to is oneof the three kinds of potential things-as-are-not. I may decide to write a poem,and

mayconsider its form without com-

ing to a decision: the poem might-be asonnet. After deciding to write a Petrar-chan sonnet, however, I know that its

rhyme scheme ought-to-be abba abbacdecde; if I have confidence in my po-etic abilities, and have come to a decision,I may say the poem will-be a Petrarchansonnet.

These kinds of intentional existence

are sufficient to describe the issues dis-cussed in The Intentional Fallacy. The

poem, after it is written, is extended;the poem, after it is read, is intended as-things-are; and the poem, as it is known

by the poet who has not yet written it,is intended as-things-are-not, potentially.The literary intention-the intentionwhich is at issue in Wimsatt's and Beards-

ley's article-is the author's knowledgeof his potential literary work. What hascontributed to much of the controversyabout intention is the lack of clarityregarding the kind of potential being dis-cussed. What

might-beis

sufficientlyin-

choate as knowledge for it to be disre-garded in this discussion; the distinctionbetween the poem (or novel, or what-ever) as the author thought it ought-to-be and as it would-be is one of the cru-cial distinctions implied by Wimsatt'sand Beardsley's argument. At the risk of

oversimplification, the will-be kind ofintention must be seen as closer to the

poemitself

(as-things-are)than the

ought-to-be intention; this statement as-sumes that the poem in its primary in-tention (as-things-are) is merely the pasttense of the poem in its secondary in-tention (will-be). That is to say, the sec-

ondary intention is not merely the re-flection of the poet's estimate of his fin-ished poem, but is an objective descrip-tion of the causality operating on the

finished poem. Schematically, the poeticand critical processes can be represented:

POET'S SECONDARY INTENTION -- POEM (EXTENDED)(potential, will-be) T

READER'SPRIMARY INTENTION

(as-things-are)

Wimsatt and Beardsley, in The Inten-tional Fallacy, do not deny that the

poet's intention exists as a causative fac-

tor; they argue, however, that the criticalprocess is solely cognitive: that, unlessthe intention is causative-is, in other




words, realized in the extension which isthe poem-it is not, and cannot be, the

object of (cognitive) criticism. The oper-ation described as fallacious, in theseterms, is the operation which reversesthe direction of the double (causative)vector, and inquires into whatever kindsof intention (they would be tertiary and

beyond) may have existed ineffectively.Actual criticism, in these terms, is limitedto cognition indicated by the single vec-tor; it is limited to knowledge of the po-em as extended reality.

Two major points in the argument ofThe Intentional Fallacy are whether

the author's intention (beyond the re-alized secondary intention) should be

sought out as an object for literary criti-cism, and whether this intention is, infact, available to the critic's investiga-tions. To both these questions Wimsattand Beardsley answer strongly in thenegative:

If the poet succeeded in doing it [what-ever he tried to do], then the poem itselfshows what he was trying to do. And ifthe poet did not succeed, then the poemis not adequate evidence, and the criticmust go outside the poem-for evidenceof an intention that did not become ef-fective in the poem.8

What the author was trying to do -

that is, his secondary intention-is al-ready extended in the poem he pro-duced; whether it is called intentionor poem makes no real difference: itis already the object of the critic's cogni-tion, it is the primary intention of thepoem.

To speak of literary intention, then,is to speak of the causation embodied inthe extended work; reduced to extrem-

ity, literary intention is very nearly

identical with the extended work. Thedistinction between primary intentionand extension is, however, more than a

nominal distinction: it is a distinctionwhich designates a critical approach.When a critic discusses a work of liter-ature, he discusses-more or less objec-tively-the poem or novel at hand; whenhe reaches some conclusions about thevalue of the work, he is then makingevaluations about the excellence of theliterature. When, however, the critic re-

gards the novel or poem as producedliterature-when he takes into accountits causality and evaluates the expertnessof its author-he is dealing, quite legiti-mately, with literary intention. Becauseof this difference in approach, there aredifferent sets of criteria with which eval-uations are made. The critic whose ap-proach is defined by the literature as ex-tension quite naturally devotes his dis-cussion to formal attributes of the ex-tended work: to unity, tension, tone,and the like. The critic who approachesthe poem as a product of causality choos-es criteria which relate more directly tothe poet; this critic, legitimately andwithout fallacy, may discuss the variousforms of literary intention.

Literary intention may be practicalor significant. If it is practical, it is pres-ent in the extended work as a characteris-tic that is abstract and objective. Prac-tical intentions include formal and ge-neric ones: if the extended work is TheTempest, then William Shakespeare maybe credited with the intention to write adramatic work, to write it as comedy,and to write parts of it in blank verse. Ifthe intention is what T. M. Gang calls

significant,9 it is a quality that is more inthe work than about it. A weak

signifi-

8 The Intentional Fallacy, p. 469. 9Gang, p. 179.



140 COLLEGE NGLISH

cant intention is one that may be para-phrased: when Trinculo says I canswim like a duck (II.ii), it is legitimateto infer that Shakespeare intended thatcharacter to indicate that he can swimwell. To say flatly swim well is not,however, the same as to use the duck-simile; the strong significant intention isbound up with exact words and their in-ferred meanings. Shakespeare, we mustassume, strongly meant like a duck,and any other way of stating the sense ofthose words is but a weak reflection of

his strong intention. The critic whochooses to evaluate the author's perfor-mance is, then, closely bound to the ex-tended work, and it is only as he re-

gards that work as the product of causal-

ity that he differs in approach from thecritic who concentrates on the caused

product.If a critic should speak of an author's

failure to realize his intention, thecritic is, actually, no longer criticizingthe (extended) poem. He may cite theauthor's conversation or correspondence,and claim on the basis of that evidencethat the poem is not the expression ofwhat the poet said he wanted to do. Thiscritic's evaluation of the poem would in-dicate that the poem had not succeededbecause it had not embodied some (ter-tiary) intention.

Accordingto The In-

tentional Fallacy, this critic's procedureis basically misdirected: he is confusingseveral kinds of intention and is directinghis inquiry toward a non-existent object.He is neither criticizing a poem nor, ac-

tually, practicing literary criticism.Whether this intentionalist critic's pro-cedures are misdirected or whether theyare fallacious depends mainly on the ter-

minologyused to describe and evaluate

them. If, following the example of Wim-satt and Beardsley, one should look upon

the recourse to the author's intention asfallacious, one would be implying-al-though only negatively-that there does

exist a logic of literary criticism. An ex-amination of the intentionalist proce-dures as fallacious provides material fromwhich the logic implicit in The Inten-tionalist Fallacy may be inferred.

According to Wimsatt and Beardsley,discussion of any intention which is notevident in the poem under scrutiny,when this discussion claims to be criti-cism of the poem, is fallacious. In theterms of the kinds of intention outlinedabove, the literary critic must concen-trate on the extended poem; because thepoem is the work of a poet, it is justifi-able to claim that the poem is the resultof some causality. To criticize the poemas caused-that is, to evaluate the expert-ness of the poet-is merely to admit theexistence of the poet's secondary inten-tion; this secondary intention inheres in-or even as-the poem, and although it

may be distinguished from the critic's

knowledge (primary intention) of the

poem, it is not, basically, a different kindof thing. The use of intention, then,is nothing more than the means used tosay this poem is well written ratherthan to say this is a good poem.

When a critic cites the correspondenceof a

poetin order to

pointtoward some

intention that was not realized in the

poem, the critic, if he claims that thisunrealized intention (a tertiary, ought-to-be intention) has relevance to the criti-cism of the realized poem, is committinga logical fallacy. The fallacy, in standardAristotelian logic, may be either an in-formal fallacy of post hoc or an informalfallacy of ignorantio elenchi. Recourse tothe schematized intentions relevant to lit-erary criticism indicates clearly the exis-tence of these fallacies.




POET'S SECONDARY(will-be) EXTENDED

INTENTION POEM

POET'S TERTIARY EXTENDED(ought-to-be) -- LETTER OR

INTENTION CONVERSATION

READER'S READER'SPRIMARY PRIMARY

INTENTION INTENTION

Traditionally, a post hoc fallacy is theconfusion of temporal proximity withcausal relation; the fallacious argumentmay be paraphrased Since A occurredafter B, A occurred as a result of B. Inthe context of literary criticism, this fal-

lacy could take the form Because the

poet thought two weeks ago that thepoem ought to be iambic pentameter, the

poem (finished yesterday) is thereforeiambic pentameter. Recourse to the po-et's tertiary intention as a means of ex-

plicating or evaluating the extended po-em is fallacious because it assumes that

any intention prior to the completion ofthe poem has a causal relationship withthe completed, extended poem. If the

poem itself is the object of criticism, thenit (the extended poem) must contain theeffects of whatever causation the criticcan validly discuss; if the poem is notthe effect of the causation under discus-sion, the causation was not effective, andineffective causation, besides being a con-tradiction in itself, can be ascertained

only by invalid reasoning.The fallacy of ignorantio elenchi usu-

ally takes the form of misunderstanding-whether purposely or not-an argument,and then disproving or refuting the argu-

ment as it is misunderstood; this proce-dure fallaciously implies that the argu-ment itself has been refuted, when ac-

tually what has been refuted is themisunderstood form of the original ar-

gument. In a literary context, an inten-tionalist critic might argue that a poem

is not a good poem because it is comic,and because the poet had written that hehad intended it to be tragic. If the ex-tended poem is comic, then somehow itwas caused to be comic; the discussionof a tragic intention is not a discussionrelated to the extended poem at all, buta discussion of another extension caused

by the poet (in this case, the poet's let-ter). The poem itself is the argument

which the critic must confront; if thecritic confuses the extended poem withthe (extended) letter of the poet, he is

misunderstanding what the poem is, andis ignoring the difference between two

separate extensions. If the critic claims,on the basis of the letter, to be able betterto evaluate the poem, his logic is invalid,for he is not, actually, evaluating the

poem at all: he is only comparing two

extensions produced by the same man.This explanation of the invalidity of

the logic underlying certain critical pro-



142 COLLEGE NGLISH

cedures only points to the invalidity ofintentionalist criticism; it is not, in itself,an explanation of the logic which must

underlie actual, valid literary criticism,nor is it any kind of definition of whatcriticism-if it is to meet the criteria of

The Intentional Fallacy -must be.From the nature of the fallacies discussedabove, it is possible to infer certain cri-teria which a positive logic of literarycriticism must meet. What Wimsatt and

Beardsley imply by their prohibition on

inquiry into tertiary intention is that

literary criticism-as distinguished fromliterary scholarship or literary biography-must concern itself with cognition. Theextended work of literature exists pri-marily as an object: an object of thecritic's knowledge (primary intention)about it. The critic's concern oughttherefore to focus upon the poem itself,and if the critic seeks to know anythingabout the

poetfrom the evidence

sup-plied by the poem, all that he may valid-

ly know is that the poet is the agent bywhom the poem was produced. This isnot to say, however, that the criticism

required by Wimsatt and Beardsley is anihilistic occupation; the critic is notleft to repeat futilely a poem is a poemis a poem, nor must he satisfy himselfwith endless recitals of the vocabulary

( InXanadu did Kubla

Khan... )which

the poem contains. The function of criti-cism as it is outlined by implication in

The Intentional Fallacy is similar tothe function of any serious study: like

any science or liberal art, criticism seeksto increase the knowledge about the ob-ject of its scrutiny. The prohibitionsplaced upon the literary critic by TheIntentional Fallacy define the role of the

critic as the careful and serious investiga-tion of how-not why-poems and novelsand other literary works are what they

are. By limiting the critic's inquiry tothe poem itself, the positive logic ofWimsatt's and Beardsley's article sug-gests that the current proliferation ofknowledge about things related to liter-

ature-knowledge of the correct text, ofthe various editions, of the details of theauthor's life, and even of his probableneuroses-has so broadened the scope of

literary studies that the primary objectsof those studies are in danger of beingignored. It is perhaps easier, and certain-

ly more spectacular, to read a poem ornovel in the light of some secret incidentof the author's life than it is to examineand describe the manner in which the

poem or novel holds its parts togetherin aesthetic dynamism. And while theintentionalist kind of inquiry is interest-

ing, it does not, as Wimsatt states,

carry us very far in our cogitation aboutthe nature and value of literature. It isnot a very mature form of cognitive dis-course. And the critic will hold that cogi-tation about the nature of literature isitself an activity of intellect that is worthwhile.10

If knowledge about the nature of liter-ature is the end of literary criticism, it isevident that this kind of knowledge mustbe sought in concrete literary works.Not only does the logic of The Inten-tional Fallacy define a positive functionfor literary criticism-a function distinctfrom that of other kinds of literary study-but it deflects the critic's curiosity fromthe ever dangerous (because ultimatelyunanswerable) questions why.

The value of what is implied by TheIntentional Fallacy does not decrease assoon as the logic is applied outside theNew Critical environment from which it

loW. K. Wimsatt, Jr., Horses of Wrath:Recent Critical Lessons, EIC, XII (1962), 15.




arose. While it is true that the positivelogic most strongly supports the formal-ist concept of the poem as autonomous

object-of the poem itself as the onlyobject of valid literary criticism-the log-ic is equally important to more contem-

porary critical approaches. For the ar-

chetypal critic, adherence to the logicimplied by Wimsatt and Beardsley will

separate the poem from its mythic en-vironment, and so emphasize myth and

archetype as essentially poetic elements.For the modern eclectic literary critic,the logic will help to indicate the pri-macy of truly critical concern, and pre-vent his criticism from overemphasizingmatters which are actually subordinateto the criticism of literature. For anyoneconcerned with serious literary study,the logic implied in The Intentional

Fallacy is a decided help toward clear-

sighted analysis of almost any literaryproblem.

The application of this logic of lit-erary criticism in itself offers no solu-tions to problems of any kind; it helpsmerely to define the proper methodologyfor the solution of a given literary prob-lem. The logic of The Intentional Fal-

lacy is primarily a help to the literarycritic: it defines for him the area properto his critical inquiry, and prevents hiscriticism from being

hopelesslyconfused

by attention to what are actually extra-critical concerns. The problem of de-

fining an author's intention, if one doesnot dismiss the problem as irrelevant tocriticism, is one of enormous complexity;if a modern critic seeks to discuss andevaluate a poem by bringing to bearupon it various eclectic approaches, it is

likely that he will all but ignore the

poemitself if once he should

tryto dis-

cern the author's tertiary intention. Oneof the primary problems facing the critic

whose methodology is eclectic is the

necessity to retain an emphasis in hisdiscussions proportional to the impor-tance of what he is discussing. An aware-ness of the fallacy of intentionalism, evenif it does not prevent the critic fromfalling prey to that fallacy, ought to

help him keep his comments on theauthor's intention well subordinated tohis central critical comments about the

poem itself.The problem of intention becomes

almost hopelessly complex once it is ad-mitted into the context of archetypalcriticism. The archetypal critic looksupon the work of literature as the em-bodiment of one or several mythic pat-terns; the problem of intentionalism en-ters his criticism once he seeks to deter-mine the source of the myth. If thecritic sees the myth as the product of theauthor's causality, he is left with twoalternatives: he

may tryto decide wheth-

er the inclusion of the myth is the re-sult of a conscious intention of the au-thor, or whether it is the result of someunconscious process; or, faced with the

presence of mythic elements in the workof literature he is criticizing, the arche-

typal critic may view them simply ascaused (results of secondary intention)elements which are part of the structureof the

literarywork.

Should the criticattempt to decide whether or not the

mythic elements were consciously in-cluded, he runs the risk of permittinghis criticism to become either psycho-logical inquiry or comparative anthro-

pology, and neither psychology nor

anthropology will afford him any valu-able literary information. Should he,however, avoid the temptation to in-

quire about the author's intention, hiscriticism is far more likely to acountfor the mythic elements as parts of the



144 COLLEGE ENGLISH

literary work, and although he may seethe structure of the work largely interms of its mythic constituents, his

view will nonetheless be oriented towardthe literature itself.

For the formalist critic, one who main-tains generally emphasis upon the auton-

omy of the work of literature, the prob-lem of the author's intention is most

likely to arise in the determination of thestandard text of some literary work.

If there exist several versions of the poemin question, one of them-according to

an intentionalist rationale-will be closerto the author's intention, and that ver-sion ought naturally to be the standardone. This problem-especially if ap-proached from an intentionalist view-

point-is indeed a complex one, but it is

extremely unlikely that the determina-tion of a text to criticize is actually liter-

ary criticism; textual decisions, unless

they are the result of criticism of eachversion as an individual poem, are ac-tually pre-critical decisions. That is, theformalist critic, in accordance with the

logic of The Intentional Fallacy, willconcentrate his efforts at criticizingpoems, and will see the decision aboutstandard texts to be the more scholarlybusiness of textual study.

The application of this logic of crit-icism can scarcely

promiseanswers to

questions raised in all fields of literarystudy. From one point of view, indeed,it merely shifts the question from crit-icism to another kind of literary re-search; from another point of view, how-ever, this shifting is not so much ir-

responsible as indicative of an awarenessof the specialization and interdependenceof the various kinds of knowledge thatresult from the study of literature. Thelogic implied in The Intentional Fal-lacy does in a sense dismiss certain

problems from the attention of the critic,but these problems are dismissed so that

they may be studied in their own right.If a critic were to pursue the problemsof tertiary intention and the relationshipof this intention to poems that onlymight have been written, it is likely thathe would learn much of value about a

body of potential literature. It is also

likely that-in pursuing questions about

poems that were never written-hewould not learn too much about the

poetry he set out to criticize. If the

critic attends to the poem before him,and leaves the biographer and psycholo-gist to ponder the secrets of the poet'ssoul, the criticism-as well as the biog-raphy and psychology-that results will

ultimately be more valuable. The In-tentional Fallacy does not imply that

literary history or biography is totallyirrelevant to knowledge about literature;it only implies-and quite reasonably, too-that if the critic focuses, in his crit-icism, on the concrete poem, and if thehistorian and biographer concentrate ontheir proper subjects, then greater pro-gress will be made toward a systematicknowledge of literature.

The pursuit of the logical implicationsof Wimsatt's and Beardsley's article pro-vides a methodology for literary studythat can

clarifyits ends and ultimately

broaden the relevance of its findings. Thecritic, or the textual scholar who in-

quires into critical matters-for The In-tentional Fallacy dictates no rigid oc-

cupational requirements, only procedur-al ones-is able to produce a very con-crete kind of knowledge about individ-ual works. This concrete information isnot only valuable but necessary to thescholar who writes a (post-critical) his-

tory of a literary movement or genre.If literary history is to be a mature in-




ductive study of the temporal relationsof literary works, it is necessary that it

depend, for knowledge of those works,upon valid and concrete criticism.

While the logic is based on the critical

procedures of the formalists, it should beevident, at this point, that it supplies a

procedural orientatiorv valuable to anyapproach that seeks to criticize literature.The knowledge derived from adherenceto this logic is a practical, scientific kindof knowledge; once a certain knowl-

edgeis

gainedabout the relations of

poetic elements within a poetic whole,this knowledge may be employed validlyto extend one's knowledge about the na-ture of concrete literary works or, ifone so wishes, to induce with greatercertainty knowledge about specifickinds of literature.

If the implications of this logic are

carefully pursued, they provide a nar-

row, clearlydefined focus for critical

activity: the critic seeks properly to

learn ever more about the nature of

poetry, to learn how the poetic elementsrelate to one another within a given lit-

erary work. While the critic need not

consciously seek answers to why liter-ature is the thing it is, the specific kindof information supplied by his criticalresearches may provide valid reasons-

yet always based on the concrete data ofthe poems-for the existence of literaturein uniquely literary forms. More im-

portant than this incidental knowledge,however, is the

particularvalue to be

derived from specifically critical study:logical criticism, while it may never pro-vide the universal answers that are the

province of metaphysics and theology,can provide a knowledge that is con-

cretely derived and, within its context,certain. Logical literary criticism maynot be able to provide all the answers,but it can produce quite limited oneswhich

are,within the bounds of their

logical limits, almost certainly correct.

maier 1970_logic of literary critcism

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