JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #73
October 14, 2021
Pragmatics is a sub-field of Linguistics that studies the way human beings use language to communicate. Consider this famous example: a husband and wife are in their sitting room when the wife observes, "It’s cold." Immediately understanding her intention, the husband steps to the window and closes it. The question for the field of Pragmatics is: how did the wife communicate her request that her husband shut the window?--and how did he manage to decode it? I need to resist running down a name-checking rabbit hole to trace some of the fascinating insights offered by theorists and philosophers in the last century, but the example shows that the husband must be using much more than the literal meaning of his wife’s utterance to decode her communicative intentions. At the very least, the context of her speech act as well as his own prior knowledge of the kind of person she is must come into play, likely alongside other factors. The key, I think, is that there is a distinction between the literal meaning of the utterance and the intended meaning of the person’s act of speaking. Rather than simply decoding the semantics of the utterance (which has its own set of problems), an interlocutor in a communicative situation is being asked to decode the intentions of another human being, effectively asking, "What did she mean to convey when she said that?"
This is also the guiding question for literary critics: "What did the author mean to convey when she wrote this?" Although the theoretical underpinnings of criticism have long left behind the author’s intentions as the appropriate locus of critical meaning for any literary work (anyone who has brushed up against post-structuralist literary criticism will undoubtedly have been fed Roland Barthes’s "The Death of the Author"), it is nevertheless still the case that the primary job of critics is to uncover what a literary piece "really" means.
Although the post-structuralist theories of literary meaning largely ignore pragmatics, we should notice that the two are working in parallel. Both must reconstruct the requisite prior knowledge and situational context that generate appropriate interpretations of possible intended meanings. And both must confront the stubborn black box within a speaker or author’s mind from which intentions emerge fully formed and unaccounted. Interpretation can only ever be guesswork, even in ordinary communicative situations. In fact, W. V. O. Quine insisted that it should be impossible for human beings to communicate at all (cf. Wikipedia’s entry on the "Indeterminacy of Translation").
Irrespective of whether or not people can successfully communicate (we do it every day, and I think there’s a parsimonious explanatory framework for this fact that is unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay), literary critics have taken these observations as a carte blanche for the wrenching of meaning out of works of literature. A critic can approach literature as a site of creative "free play" (cf. Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play") for the generation of meaning (even non-post-structuralist approaches opened up interpretation to the creative whims of critics: e.g., Knapp and Michaels, "Against Theory").
I argued in my PhD Thesis that literary criticism as such arises from the unfounded assumption that a literary work is an act of ostensive communication. Instead, literature can be understood as provisions of experience. Although literary works can give us ideas and emotions and perspective, these are not aspects of a superordinate literary meaning that we must reconstruct in order to understand the purpose of the work; rather, these are themselves the experience the work provides us. Although we can apply the experience to make sense of aspects of the world around us, this approach is more closely related to what J. R. R. Tolkien called "applicability," not the "meaning" of the work.
As writers, we’re often nudged to consider what lofty message we might try to convey with our stories and novels. I would suggest that the story is itself the message, in that the experience the story provides is its purpose, and whatever the reader wants to do with that experience is up to them. Like the interpretation of auctorial intentions, predicting applicability for a reader is beyond the scope of our capacities.
Well, this one was supposed to be quick and easy, and instead, here we are. Yikes. If you read this far, treat yourself to some chocolate--you deserve it.