Summit Ministries

By Michael Bauman

If you are a student, please read carefully.

I will explain how you can prevent any teacher who believes that a text means what the reader says it means rather than what the author says it means from marking any of your work wrong ever again, regardless of whether your work is in the form of short answers, essays, or research papers.

The payment I seek for doing so is not primarily financial. Rather than money, my reward is to stifle those literary critics and literary theories that undermine Western tradition, at least those parts of Western tradition preserved for us in language and texts. In other words, the wealth I seek is not monetary. I want to preserve the wisdom, the truth, and the freedom that our forefathers bequeathed to us in our culture's foundational documents.

Put differently, I want to hear the voices of the founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the voices of the activist liberal judges who think that heeding the intentions of the framers is simply to fall slave to the dead hand of the past. I also want to hear the voices of the poets and the sages, who speak to us across the centuries in the greatest works of verbal art ever produced, not the deconstructive ramblings of the self-appointed destroyers of language and literature who seem to occupy so many seats of power and influence in the humanities departments on so many college campuses. Finally, and most importantly, I want to hear the voice of God and the voices of his apostles and prophets in the Bible, not the voices of modernist exegetes who think that the Bible's meaning has nothing to do with the intention of either the God who inspired it or the people who wrote it.

I want to do so, on the one hand, because I value the political, theological, and cultural legacy left me by the people who made the civilized world what it is. I am firmly persuaded that the best of the past deserves--indeed requires--our protection, especially now when the mindless mantra chanted on so many American campuses seems to be "Hey-Hey, Ho-Ho, Western Civ. has got to go!" I do so because I value the patrimony of freedom, of truth and of salvation left for us in the texts that make both civilization and hope possible. I do so because I agree with Confucius that when words lose their meaning, people lose their freedom.

I want to do so, on the other hand, because I value the teaching profession, which without a suitable hermeneutic, becomes impossible, as the following considerations make evident.

I. The Hermeneutics of Pedagogy

Before I keep the promise I made at the outset of this chapter and explain how to insulate yourself from all your professor's criticisms, and before I tell you how to preserve the meaning of the most important and enduring texts in the world, I want to tell you a story.[1]

Some years ago, a good friend of mine was caught in a London downpour. Fighting his way slowly but resolutely along some unfamiliar English side street, and Bitterly longing for the umbrella he somehow had misplaced, my friend turned a fog-shrouded corner and on an overhead shop sign the words "umbrellas recovered." "Ah," my friend thought to himself, "perhaps this man can help me recover mine!"

A moment's reflection, however, revealed the folly. No matter now intensely my friend wished otherwise, "recovered" meant "repaired" or "refurbished," not "retrieved." The meaning of that word was the one intended for it by the shopkeeper who made the sign, not the meaning imagined or desired by the drenched pedestrian who was reading it. This is how shop signs, telephone books, love letters, travel brochures, and--dare we say it?--even novels and epic poems are written and should be read. A text means what its author intends it to mean, not what a reader wants it to mean. In Alexander Pope's words, one ought "to read every work of wit in the same spirit as its author writ." This is the meaning of meaning. If something on an umbrella-shop sign is unclear, perhaps a quick perusal of the information displayed on the shop window will help, or else a glance inside. That is the beauty and functions of context.

I stand over against those literary critics, activist judges, and modernist biblical exegetes who mistakenly insist that a text, whether poetry or prose, has a life of its own, or that what a text means is what it means to the reader and not what its author intended it to mean. That is, I deny the hermeneutical assumption that a text can be rightly understood apart from solid grammatical/historical exegesis. I do so because, methodologically, any interpreter who maintains otherwise must necessarily compromise himself every time he turns away from the text at hand and opens a dictionary in order to trace down a term with which he is unfamiliar. And who among us has not done so? My desire, of course, is not to steer readers away from the Oxford English Dictionary; it is to steer them away from the unfortunate hermeneutical inconsistency that has racked modern literary criticism--the sort of criticism that tells us a great deal more about the presuppositions and worldview of the reader than it does about the great works of writers like Dante, Erasmus, or Milton.

As a student and devotee of literature myself, I want to know more about great authors and great books, and not about the predilections and prejudices of people who read them many centuries after the fact. The interpreter's work is to point out and to elucidate the literature at hand, not to foist upon it the interpreter's own peculiar world view or that of the one small segment of contemporary society that interpreter represents.

In other words, I oppose nonintentionalist and nonhistorical exegesis.

Who cannot see the hermeneutical fortress that the nonintentionalist and nonhistorical readers try to build for themselves? By posting on the one hand autonomously existing text, subject neither to time nor place, and by posting on the other a subjective meaning for the text, a meaning unrestrained by either authorial intention or historical milieu, critics who deny authorial intentions insist, in effect, that any text's meaning reduces to whatever they say, though what they say seldom, if ever, accords with what other readers of the same school say. By adopting then autonomous--indeed libertine--hermeneutical subjectivity, modern critics assert both that the text itself is independent (nothing controls it) and so are they (nothing controls them). They no longer need hearken, they think, to Spenser when they read The Faerie Queene, to Shakespeare when they read Romeo and Juliet, to James Madison when they read the Constitution, or even to the apostle Paul himself when they read the epistle to the Romans. The meaning of all texts, new or old, great or small, sacred or secular, is now to be concocted freehand, by anyone so inclined.

But I, for one, ardently oppose this arrogant intrusion into the texts of others. I oppose the shameless hijacking of someone else's words for our own self-seeking ends. The time has come to put both the text and the modern interpreter back under authority. I believe it is more than etymological significance that the word authority derives from author. In short, I am saying that to call authorial intention a fallacy is itself a fallacy.

Yet nearly all the literary critics with whom I have ever spoken say precisely that : Authorial intention is a fallacy.

But if authorial intention is a fallacy, if meaning is the reader's prerogative, then graded instruction of any kind is an injustice because it credits the student with the instructor's insight and holds the student responsible for the instructor's mistaken meanings. If authorial intention is not the measure of meaning, then teachers can no longer count students wrong when the teachers themselves are responsible for what the student's test answers or research papers actually mean. After all, no student ought to get a lower grade simply because the instructor gave the student's answer or essay an incorrect or inappropriate meaning. One could quite as easily give the student's writing the correct meaning so that the student in question, indeed all students, might make the dean's list every semester.

If the professor gives the student's words what the professor deems an incorrect meaning, then the error ought to be charged to the professor, not the student. In that case, teachers who give their students F's are failing their own courses. Under such a method of interpretation, the incorrect meaning of all mistaken answers on all tests is the responsibility of the grader.

Furthermore, because in this system of interpretation meaning is the prerogative of the reader and not the author, no professor can properly prevent any student from giving the professor's course syllabus, the professor's test questions whatever the meanings the student sees fit. On the basis of the professor's own hermeneutical principles, no objection could be effectively raised against such a student practice. Nor could any teacher ever again chide any student for failing to follow instructions, because the teacher's instructions mean not what the teacher intended them to mean but what the student determined they ought to mean.

The professor cannot escape this difficulty by saying that authorial intention applies to syllabi but not to epic poems or to elegies because syllabi are prose and epics and elegies are not. Both this dichotomous view and the double hermeneutic to which it gives rise assume that words mean not only a different thing in a prose passage than in a poetic one, but that words mean in a different way in a prose passage than in a poetic one, neither of which is demonstrable. Such professors argue as if subordinate clauses and indirect objects somehow functioned differently in a line from Keats than they do in a line from Faulkner, which is nonsense.

Put differently, if my professor told me I could be graded down on a test or a paper and that mistaken answers could be attributed to me rather than to him because my answers were in prose, I would simply write all my answers in iambic pentameter (or, more troublesome for the instructor, in free verse). Then, on the instructor's own basis, my errors would revert to the instructor because the instructor's own theory of interpretation states that in poetry meaning is the prerogative of the reader.

And if a professor who holds that prose meaning differs from poetic meaning were unable to say definitively and precisely what exactly poetry is, and if that professor could not objectively or conclusively distinguish what was truly poetry from what was merely poetic--that is, the professor affirmed that whether or not a text was poetry was a matter of private judgment and not absolute fact--then that professor still could not extricate himself from his pedagogical dilemma because identifying a student's answer as prose and not as poetry would be a subjective literary judgment on the part of the professor and would reflect more on that professor than on the student. In such case, the professor would be able to count the student's answer wrong only because that professor had subjectively categorized that student's answer as prose. If the student insists that his answer is poetry, the professor's attribution of error to the student remains self-condemning.

Thus, if you are a student, pay close attention to what I am about to say . I will ensure that you never again miss another question on any test or receive a poor grade on any essay or any paper from any teacher who denies authorial intention or who says that poetry means subjectively but prose does not.

According to your professor's own rules of interpretation, when you are assigned to write an answer or a paper about a poem, that poem means what you say it means, not what anyone else says it means--not even the poet or our professor. By the professor's own rules, meaning is your prerogative. The text means what you say it means.

If your professor says prose texts mean objectively and poetic texts do not, than write all your answers in poetic form. In that way, all wrong answers are the result of your professor's own interpretation, not your intended meaning. If your professor wants to continue to mark himself or herself wrong, that is up to your professor. But your professor cannot continue to mark you down because of your professor's own mistaken meanings. If your professor wants to grade you, he must deny his own interpretive method and relinquish his hegemony over the meaning of your texts and begin to read everything in a new way.

In short, if authorial intention is wrong, then you are not; only your professor is. If authorial intention is not wrong, then all who have opposed it up until now are wrong, which includes most modern professors of literature.

Some professors try to extricate themselves from this hermeneutical and pedagogical mare's nest by insisting that the meaning of text lies neither with the author nor with the reader, but within the text itself. But this unabashed textual positivism will not do. It conveniently overlooks the obvious fact that a text has a meaning (indeed, a text has existence) only because an author put it there. A text does not somehow create its own meaning. Nor does a text create itself; an author has meaning and creates a text in order to preserve that meaning and to communicate it. Neither texts nor meanings are autonomous. To think otherwise is to apply to textual meaning Satan's error in Paradise Lost, which is to ascribe to something not God that it is "self-begot, self-raise / By [its] own quick'ning power" (Paradise Lost V, 860-1).

Put differently, to assert that a text is autonomous is bad theology because a text is the product of a writer. Because that writer is necessarily subject to the limitations of time, space, and causation, one simply cannot ascribe to any creation of a creature (i.e., one cannot ascribe to the text) the self-sufficiency and independence that reality and theology deny to the creature himself (i.e., the author).

II. The Hermeneutics of Conservatism

You see (to move from theology to economics), Adam Smith was right.

Prosperity follows in the wake of the division of labor. As long as every worker is constrained to satisfy all his needs and desires for himself, his lot in life will be significantly poorer. He cannot raise his own sheep and cotton in order to provide all his own clothes. He cannot extract his own iron ore form the earth and then smelt it and shape it in a steel mill of his own construction and operation in order to make his own automobiles and passenger trains. He cannot grow his own bananas and coconuts so that he will have tasty little morsels to sprinkle on his own cereal or ice cream. He cannot produce, direct, and act in his own television programs and movies, or build and operate his own television sets and movie theaters in order to keep himself entertained. He cannot design, develop, test and deploy his own system of nuclear weapons in order to protect himself from foreign aggression. In order to have a more pleasant, more prosperous, and more secure existence, he needs the things that others can provide for him. Because the division of labor affords a degree of specialization, expertise, and efficiency not available in alternate economic systems, some people are able to do for others what other are not able to do for themselves nearly so well, if at all. As a result, those who engage in the division of labor are far better off than those who do not.

By the same token, I propose that we all are better off, not only pedagogically but in virtually every way, if we employ a division of labor with regard to our fundamental texts, whether literary, political, or sacred. If each of us had to write our own Paradise Lost, or own Canterbury Tales, our own Divine Comedy, our own Reflections on the Revolution in France, or our own psalms, rather then permitting Milton, Chaucer, Dante, Burke, and David to do so for us we would each be immeasurably impoverished. We could never do for ourselves what that collection of great minds and valiant spirits has done for in their world-shaping texts. As it is in economics, so it is in hermeneutics--prosperity follows close upon the division of labor.

In hermeneutics, the division of labor runs like this: The author had in mind something he thinks is true or beneficial and which he desires to communicate. He selects language and a genre that he deems appropriate for his message, which he then writes down. A reader, interested in what he imagines this text will say, picks it up and begins to read. If the author has formed his mental concepts clearly and cohesively; if he has selected his terms and his genre with careful precision; and if the reader has expended the effort needed to understand the text form the author's point of view (that is, if the reader has properly discerned the author's intended meaning): genuine communication occurs. In such a case, the notions received by the reader from the text will closely approximate the intentions built into it by the writer.

But if the author's ideas were not clearly defined in his own mind; or if the author has chosen terms and a genre ill-suited to his purpose; or if the reader has been careless in his work as an interpreter; of if he feels it his prerogative to ignore the intentions of the writer altogether; a failure of communication results. In such cases, what the reader claims to get from the text is not gotten from the text at all. It is simply manufactured ad hoc in the reader's own mind. That failure to communicate results from a breakdown in the division of labor within the literary enterprise. It results, on the other, from readers abandoning their proper task of consuming meaning in favor of usurping a role not truly their own--that of producing meaning. That wrongheaded method of procedure does not work well in the marketplace, where buyer and sellers freely exchange goods and services; it does not work well in the classroom, where students study Wordsworth and Shakespeare; it does not work well in the judge's chambers, where judges interpret the Constitution and its attendant amendments; and it doesn't work well in the pulpit, where preachers interpret and expound the Word of God.

As long as we require the reader to do the job of the writer, and as long a we continue to confuse the role of the interpreter with that of the author, we will remain culturally, politically, and spiritually poorer because this backwards-working hermeneutics lays upon every one of us the tremendous burden of reinventing our entire cultural heritage anew. It lays upon us the necessity of reinventing the meaning not only of your foundational texts, but of all texts whatsoever, because (according to this theory of reading) no text has a meaning until the reader gives it one. The Bible means nothing; the constitution means nothing; Hamlet means nothing; traffic signs mean nothing; marriage vows mean nothing; even the perverse scrawls on the rest room walls mean nothing until the reader gives them meaning--a meaning quite cut off from, perhaps even antithetical to, the author's intention.

To consign the manufacture of meaning to the reader requires the reader to create the meaning of all texts de novo, to reinvent the literary wheel, the legal wheel, and the theological wheel each time he picks up a text. To insist that texts mean what their readers say they mean and not what their authors intended them to mean effectively strips the reader of his entire cultural patrimony. It forces him to create for himself what the apostles, the prophets, the sages, and the farmers have made for him already but (according to this view) foolishly preserving it for him in verbal form they have actually sequestered that patrimony from him forever and sentenced him to remake the great works of the Western world all over again, freehand.

If this hermeneutic is correct, no messages are possible. No sentence you ever heard, no statement you ever read, had any meaning until you gave it one. Although perhaps you thought otherwise, if this method of interpretation is correct, Plato has never spoken to you in the Republic, nor Thomas in the Summa, nor God in Christ. Your wife, your husband, and your Lord have never really whispered, "I love you." It was only your own voice all along. You simply did not recognize it. You have never really talked to anyone; you talked only to yourself using someone else's words. If this hermeneutic is correct, all conversations, despite their appearance, are monologues.

If this hermeneutic is correct, you are surrounded by a world of empty texts waiting for you not simply to discover their meaning, but to invent it.

If this hermeneutic is correct, no text has been, or ever could be, misconstrued. If this hermeneutic is correct, no author and no speaker can raise any complaint about being misunderstood or misrepresented. The meaning of their words, according to this theory, is simply not their prerogative. Over the meaning of their own words, they exercise no claim.

According to this theory of interpretation, the position I advocate in these pages--the idea that authorial intention, not the reader's interpretation, is the true measure of meaning--is fundamentally and expansively wrong.

According to the misguided theory of interpretation, you can tell me, now that I am finished with this chapter, just what I meant by it, but did not realize or intend. I invite you to do so.

Tell me what this essay really means.

Then I'll tell you what your interpretation really means--and it will surprise you.

I guarantee it.

I know you won't mind.

Notes

1. This story appears in slightly modified form in Michael Bauman, Milton's Arianism (Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 1987), 341.

Copyright © 2000 Michael Bauman. All rights reserved. Used by permission.